The Rochuskapelle is a German pilgrimage chapel to Saint Roch on the Rochusberg southeast of Bingen am Rhein

Bingen am Rhein

Bingen am Rhein is a town in the Mainz-Bingen district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.The settlement’s original name was Bingium, a Celtic word that may have meant “hole in the rock”, a description of the shoal behind the Mäuseturm, known as the Binger Loch. Bingen was the starting point for the...

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History

The first building, dating to the plague year of 1666, was destroyed during the campaigns of 1795 in the French Revolutionary Wars of the Rhine valley. The second was built 1814 in the wake of a typhoid fever

Typhoid fever

Typhoid fever, also known as Typhoid, is a common worldwide bacterial disease, transmitted by the ingestion of food or water contaminated with the feces of an infected person, which contain the bacterium Salmonella enterica, serovar Typhi...

 epidemic brought back by soldiers returning from the Napoleonic Wars

Napoleonic Wars

The Napoleonic Wars were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to...

, with Goethe describing its dedication ceremony. Its flèche

Flèche

A flèche is used in French architecture to refer to a spire and in English to refer to a lead-covered timber spire, or spirelet. These are placed on the ridges of church or cathedral roofs and are usually relatively small...

 was hit by lightning in 1889 and the chapel burned down to the brickwork.

The present building, built in 1893-95, is to Neo Gothic designs by the Freiburg master builder Max Meckel and the Berlin stone-cutters Zeidler & Wimmel. At this time a small Bethlehemskapelle was built under the main chapel's east window, recalling an earlier chapel of that name on the site from the Crusader era. Parts of the earlier Roch chapels' art collections survive, but the only thing to survive the fire was the Baroque statue of the patron saint at the high altar.