Kloster Chorin

Dehio called the church the most significant and the noblest work of early Gothic in North German brick, and the judgement has held. The Ascanian margraves Johann I and Otto III founded the Cistercian house in 1258, first on an island in the Parsteiner See and, by 1273, on the site it still occupies; the elaborately articulated west front is the thing visitors remember. Secularisation came in 1542, three years after the Reformation reached Brandenburg, and had more to do with the Elector's finances than with doctrine. From 1817 Karl Friedrich Schinkel directed the securing of the ruins and their partial rebuilding, while Peter Joseph Lenné laid out the grounds around them — an early and unusually intelligent piece of monument care. Since 1964 the Choriner Musiksommer has filled the abbey buildings with concerts each summer, the roofless nave doing what no purpose-built hall can.