Stephanskirche (Empires of Liberty)

Stephanskirche (fr. Temple Saint-Étienne) is a protestant church located in Mülhausen, Alsace-Lorraine, in western Germany.

History
Until 1858, the former parish church of St. Stephen stood at the location of the current building. The originally late Romanesque building from the 12th century was expanded at the beginning of the 14th century in the Gothic style. A substantially higher choir was added to the nave. In 1510, the Romanesque bell tower was remodelled in the style of the Renaissance. In 1707, the bell tower was crowned with an onion dome. In 1857, the city council of Mulhouse decided to replace the place of worship, which had come to be looked upon as dilapidated, by a new building. The city architect Schacre, who had already constructed the main synagogue of the city and the Catholic St. Stephen's Church, designed a church in the neo-Gothic style with a simple, rectangular ground plan without a transept and choir. In contrast to the long Catholic church, it was a squat, but very wide building. The bell tower, which is visible from quite a distance away, stands behind the building, in contrast to its model on the Freiburg Minster. The current church was built between 1859 and 1866. Since February 2009 and prospectively until late 2019, the church is subjected to a progressive restoration of all its exterior and interior parts. The work had started with the complete scaffolding of the steeple