I love the movie "The Name of the Rose". I think Sean Connery's and Christian Slater's and Ron Perlman's performances were excellent. I liked the book by Umberto Eco, too. Many of the interiors scenes were shot at Eberbach Abbey, which is an hour west of Frankfurt. So on our latest trip to the airport in Frankfurt, we stayed overnight an extra day before travel in order to visit the abbey.
The movie was filmed in the winter of 1985/86. This was about 870 years after the first monastic house at the site was founded by the Augustinian monks in around 1116. In 1131, it was handed over to the Benedictines. In 1136, about 875 years ago, the first Cistercian monastery on the east bank of the Rhine was established there by Bernard of Clairvaux.
Legend has it that Bernard and the bishop of Mainz were out looking for a place to build a cloister when they came to a brook. Suddenly, they saw a boar (Eber, in German) jump the brook (Bach in German) three times and begin to root a trench around the priests. They decided to build on that site.
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| A cloister (Kloster) on a boar (Eber) in a brook (Bach) = Kloster Eberbach. |
Fifty years later, the monastery church was consecrated in 1186 by Archbishop Konrad of Mainz with the assistance of the bishops of Worms, Strassburg and Münster.
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| View of nave and Romanesque architecture |
The abbey became very successful, and by the end of the twelfth century had about 100 monks and over 200 lay brothers. In the twelfth century Eberbach had its own scriptorium to produce manuscripts.
The Romanesque building period was completed with the convent building and hospital building in 1220. Then the Gothic east wing of the enclosure was built around 1240 to around 1270.
Relics of St. Bernard from Clairvaux were donated to Eberbach in 1332.
The Steinberg vinyard was founded around 1170 by the monks. Wine production must have been very good in the 15th century. The monastic rooms (fraternei, lay refectory) was converted into wine cellars around 1480. The west wing of the cloister was covered with a half-timbered story to accommodate the library and archive. In 1435, Count John IV of Katzenelnbogen was the first to document the planting of Riesling vines. Count Katzenelnbogen was buried in the abbey church.
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| Tomb of Count Katzenelnbogen |
Today, the monastery's important wine estates stretch over almost 230 hectares (570 acres) in the Rheingau valley and
on the Hessian Bergstrasse.
In the sanctuary is a double tomb cover of arcbishops Adolf II von Nassau (left) and Gerlach von Nassau (right).
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| Tomb covers |
The bishops died in 1475 and 1371, respectively. The older effigy looks more typically Gothic, with its long body and s-shaped stance. The newer one looks like it is on the border of Renaissance with its more realistic stocky figure. Adolf II von Nassau played a role in history by making Johannes Guttenberg a court man in 1465. Every year thereafter, Guttenberg received the clothing of a courtier, 20 Malter Korn (approx. 2,200 litres) and 2 Fuder Wein (approx. 2,000 litres). With this he probably also supplied the employees of his printing workshop. In addition, Gutenberg was exempt from services to the city, taxes and duties. Because Guttenberg lived in nearby Eltville am Rhein, Eltville also claims a roll in the invention of the printing press.
The French Revolution brought an end to the abbey. Napoleon had all monasteries secularized, and the abbey was dissolved on 18 September
1803. Its assets and territory became the property of the local prince. Parts of the monastery were used as a penal institution ("Correction House") and, after 1877, as a penal prison.
The abbey church, a three-aisled Romanesque basilica with transept, containing the tombs of some of the Archbishops of Mainz. The architecture has a surprisingly long reverberation of up to eight seconds. The simplicity of the church was typical of all Cistercian churches. No furnishings or ornaments were to distract the monks from their dialogue with their creator God. Numerous altars were added to the south side, but all the late medieval altarpieces were lost in the Thirty Years' War.
The cloisters, the west side of which is Gothic, the north side partly Gothic and partly Romanesque, and the remainder a 19th-century restoration. After secularisation by Napoleon in 1803, the arcades in the south and west wings of the monastery cloister were gradually completely destroyed; in the north and east wings, the tracery (framing) of the arcade windows was not preserved. One window tracery was redesigned, and the artist Thomas Bayrle designed a stained glass window with a Pietà motif for the cloister. The Pietà motif, (the depiction of Mary with the body of Jesus), is a medieval motif that fits perfectly in a monastery. Bayrle interpreted it in a modern way by creating the image as "pixelated" from many small smartphone motifs.
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| Bayrle window |
The chapter room is a late Gothic square room with a central pillar. Later, a star vault was added to the ceiling. It was restored with ceiling and wall paintings. The chapter house was once the monks' daily meeting room for the morning reading of the Benedictine Rule and the only opportunity for conversing, because the monks were otherwise subject to a vow of silence.
The Fraternei, the "Brothers' Hall", was the room where the monks did their work. In the early days, the Fraternei probably served mainly for the work of copying books by the choir monks. Before the invention of the printing press, dissemination of knowledge in the form of books and other manuscripts rested on such monastic "scriptoria". The Fraternei is an early Gothic room with heavy vaulting. Since the Middle Ages, the windows were covered, and the Fraternei was used as a wine cellar. It is also known as the Cabinetkeller, which is the origin of the use of the term Kabinett as a quality description of German wine.
The Dormitorium (dormitory), an early Gothic room about 70 meters long containing vaulting and short columns with sculptured capitals, and one of the few such rooms of this size and quality remaining in Europe. The monks slept on wooden cots in the unheated hall, dressed only in their habits. They were usually called into the church shortly after midnight for the first choral prayer.
The north wing has the monk's refectory (dining room). It was refurbished in the 18th century with a Baroque stucco ceiling created in 1738 by Daniel Schenk. It replaced the earlier Gothic refectory to the north.
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| stucco by Daniel Schenk |
The west wing with the library is where the abbey museum was set up in 1995. This contains the oldest surviving Cistercian glass window in Germany (from about 1180). It is not colorful, following the strict rules of the order.
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| The Grisaille Window from 1180 |
The original capitals from the cloisters, various sculptures, portraits of Bernard of Clairvaux and Baroque furnishings are also in the museum.
In a separate building to the west of the monastic quarters, the "conversi building" or "lay-brothers' building", containing the lay-brothers' refectory (45 metres long) and the Laiendormitorium (lay-brothers' dormitory). It is over 80 meters long, making it the largest surviving Romanesque secular room in Europe. It is attached to a Romanesque wine-cellar and various small domestic buildings from the 17th century. In the 18th century, the sheathing of the columns and the insertion of additional belt arches in the vaults became necessary for structural reasons due to an increase in the building's height.
Outside of the inner monastic precinct to the east, the hospital, service buildings and 18th and 19th century wine cellars
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| door to library in the movie |
The vineyards of Eberbach Abbey were 740 acres, the largest in medieval Europe. Most of them are now the property of the State of Hesse
