Saturday, October 27, 2007

Church rolls into its next 700 years


A 700-YEAR-OLD church began its slow journey to a new home at 2 km/h, on a huge flatbed trailer, leaving behind an eastern German village being turned over to open-pit coal mining.

The Emmaus Church, first mentioned in historical documents in 1297, only reached the edge of its home village of Heuersdorf outside Leipzig by Thursday on its way to Borna, 12 kilometres away. It is expected to get there by next Wednesday, after crossing railway lines and the rivers Pleisse and Wyhra.

The stone building is a village church from the Middle Ages in Romanesque style, with a steeply pitched roof and a small black tower atop the roofline. At 19.6 metres tall and 14.5 metres long, it weighs around 750 tonnes. It is scheduled to reach Borna's Martin Luther Square on Reformation Day, when Lutherans traditionally remember the 16th century reformer.

Coal mining company Mibrag is paying €3 million ($A4.75 million) to move the church after the regional legislature in 2004 approved plans to dig up the village to mine 50 million tonnes of brown coal. Most of the 320 residents have already left.


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