Sankt Petri Kirke

Sankt Petri Kirke stands in Copenhagen's Latin Quarter, a short walk from the cathedral. It is the oldest church building in the inner city, reaching back to the mid-fifteenth century, and its late Gothic architecture still shows the medieval forms of that era. It sits along one of the old main thoroughfares, a line drawn by the city's earliest parish divisions.

In 1585 King Frederik II handed the church to his German-speaking subjects, and it has anchored that community ever since. Growth forced expansion: King Christian IV added two transepts, and King Christian V extended the northern one by three vaulted bays. Builders added baroque burial chapels between 1648 and 1740, and a copper spire followed in 1757. It is a royal foundation with a royal patron, and it sees itself as a bridge between Danes and Germans. In 1994 the state took over responsibility, and architect Hans Munk Hansen led a restoration that ran until 1999. A congregation still holds regular services there, alongside concerts and tours, and the building is wheelchair accessible.

The crypt beneath the chapels keeps one of the strangest stories in the city. Johan Friedrich Struensee, the German doctor who served King Christian VII as personal physician, died on the scaffold in 1772. Bones believed to be his surfaced in 1885, dug up on ground once belonging to Vestre Kirkegård. Examinations in 1927 and 1944 found axe marks on bones from a man in his forties, matching Struensee's age at death. Those bones rest in a small coffin in the crypt. Nearby lie Henrik Stampe, who sat on the commission that sentenced him, and Johan Boye Junge, the carpenter who built the scaffold.