Herrnhut is World Heritage

Thursday, August 8, 2024

On Friday, 26 July, Herrnhut became a UNESCO World Heritage Site! To be more precise, the settlements of the Moravian church in Herrnhut were added to UNESCO’s World Heritage list: Christiansfeld in Denmark has been on the list since 2015, and now Gracehill in Northern Ireland, Bethlehem in Pennsylvania, and Herrnhut in Saxony since 26 July 2024. The settlements were planned according to the same principles and they bear a strong resemblance to each other despite local differences. Herrnhut also has a characteristic appearance with its meeting room in transverse orientation, large communal buildings (known as “Chorhäuser”), and a cemetery (called “Gottesacker”).

The Unity Archive is located on the outskirts of Herrnhut. Documents relating to community life, including music, have been collected since 1764. A separate building was built in 1890 to store them, which is the oldest purpose-built archive in Saxony and is a designated monument. In 2000/2002 a new storage building was added. Today the valuable music collection is housed there, which is described in RISM (RISM library siglum: D-HER - RISM Catalog | RISM Online): 9,722 records for music manuscripts, 404 printed music editions). And just as Herrnhut architecture can be found in the new communities, so is their shared tradition also recognizable in the musical sources from these places - see the collections from DK-Ch (Christiansfeld, Brødremenigheden) and US-BETm (Bethlehem, PA, Moravian Music Foundation) in the RISM database.

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