St. Elisabeth-Kirche

St. Elisabeth-Kirche stands on Invalidenstraße in Berlin-Mitte, the largest of four suburban churches Karl Friedrich Schinkel designed in the 1830s. King Friedrich Wilhelm III asked Schinkel for simple, inexpensive churches without towers or elaborate facades. What you find is a single-nave plaster building in his antique Greek style, two storeys high and 28 by 18 metres. Six Doric columns carry the street-facing portico, which bears the inscription Des Herrn Wort bleibt in Ewigkeit. Two semicircular annexes of 1860, the sacristy and the baptismal chapel, flank the choir with its recessed apse.

The church is named after the biblical Elisabeth, and Crown Princess Elisabeth attended its inauguration on 28 June 1835. Schinkel gave it room for twelve hundred worshippers. A two-storey wooden gallery ran around three sides of the interior, and the first organ came from Carl August Buchholz. In March 1945 incendiary bombs from an allied air raid burned out the building, destroying gallery, coffered ceiling and organ. The shell stood as a ruin for decades while plans for a simplified rebuild came to nothing. Restoration after Berlin's reunification ran from 1990 to 2001 and took in the church and the surrounding park.

Since the restoration the Sophiengemeinde and the Senate's cultural administration have run the hall for culture rather than worship. Its programme spans early and contemporary music, theatre, art exhibitions and experiments that cross genres. Wheelchair users have step-free access to the hall. The park around it is itself a historical monument and a quiet place to pause. No bell tower rises above the roof, yet a three-part chime of cast steel bells arrived in the late nineteenth century.