Castle Chapel of St Nicholas and the Blessed Virgin Mary

The Burgkapelle St. Nikolaus und Hl. Jungfrau Maria stands on the eastern side of the castle ruins at Altenstein. The roofless walls look fragmentary at first, yet the ground plan stays easy to read. You can trace a rectangular nave, an eastern choir and a tall two-storey annex beside it. Building started in 1438 for a practical reason. The old chapel had become the village parish church, leaving the castle community without a place of worship. The new building honoured Saint Nicholas and the Virgin Mary.

Every wall rises from Rhaetian sandstone quarried on the castle hill. Some blocks still carry the holes where masons' clamps gripped them. A Gothic net vault once covered the choir. The vault has fallen, but the beginnings of its ribs remain in the masonry, with shield-shaped fittings beneath them. A shaped chancel arch separates choir from nave. Outside, stepped buttresses brace the choir walls between pointed-arch windows. The eastern window keeps its original tracery, worked into the fish-bladder pattern of late Gothic craftsmanship.

The nave rests on the barrel vault of the former southern gate passage: prayer built above an older route through the defences. South of the choir stands the two-storey annex, its wall divided by two projecting stone bands. A high doorway in its eastern wall opened onto the older defensive wall. Beneath the chancel, a crypt probably held the burials of the castle lords. Tombstone fragments in the floor were last visible around 1980, and have since been removed or lost. The hillside works against the ruin because its sandstone cap slides slowly over softer rock. That movement tilted the choir walls until extensive conservation after 2000 secured the building. Pointed windows stand beside heavy defensive walls: a place of prayer that never stopped belonging to a fortress.