St. Georg

St. Georg, the wheelchair-accessible Evangelical Lutheran parish church, stands in the heart of Nördlingen. The council of the imperial city resolved to build on 17 October 1427. Masons raised the late Gothic church largely from suevite, finishing the choir in 1451, the tower in 1490 and the vaulting in 1505. The tower Daniel dominates the cityscape and reaches out over the landscape of the Ries crater.

The ninety-three-metre nave rises more than twenty metres and makes the church one of the largest hall churches in southern Germany. Twelve central columns carry the twelve-bay hall, beside a three-aisled choir. Johann Michael Ehinger gave the high altar its baroque form in 1683 around carvings by Niclas Gerhaert van Leyden. Saint George with the dragon at his feet stands among them. The restoration of 1971 to 1973 uncovered Friedrich Herlin's signed shrine of 1462 beneath the baroque cladding. Its painted Passion scenes now face the room from the north wall. Four bells hang in the tower, and the Osanna, cast in Augsburg in 1496, is the oldest.

The climb to the gallery costs 350 steps and ends 70.3 metres up. The view runs over the old roofs, the city wall and the villages to the edge of the Ries. You can count ninety-nine church towers from here. Below the platform, at 66.4 metres, a tower keeper mans the tower room around the clock. He calls the watchman's cry "So G'sell So!" over the roofs. The words reach back to 1440, when Count Hans von Oettingen-Wallerstein bribed gatekeepers to leave the Löpsinger Gate open on Epiphany eve. A runaway sow rubbing at the gate caught the eye of the cloth weaver's wife, out fetching beer. Her shout drove off the sow, woke the guards and cost the traitors their lives. The heart of the legend is this: a sow saved the city.