Place of worship · Old Town
Trinity Church
Built for Augustinian canonesses in 1737, taken by the state in 1817 for Prussian garrison troops, and Protestant ever since. A crypt of 125 nuns lies under the floor.
A chapel stood on this spot around 1313. The Dominicans built a monastery round it in 1602, then moved down to the Fish Market when the Jesuits arrived next door, and in 1628 sold the whole thing to an order of Augustinian canonesses who taught girls. Luxembourgers still call them the Sophie-Schwësteren.
Louis XIV's guns flattened it during the siege of 1684. The cornerstone of the church you are looking at was laid in 1737, modelled closely on Saint Paulinus in Trier, and it was the first large Baroque building in the city. It was consecrated to the Holy Trinity in 1745.
Underneath you, in two stacked rows like the Roman catacombs, are thirty-two graves holding a hundred and twenty-five canonesses. The crypt was walled up and forgotten until 1939, when workmen renovating the church broke through and found an inscription on the wall: Sanguis Eius Super Nos.
Then the French Revolution, during which the church served as a hay store, a theatre and a temple of reason.
The turn came on the 20th of October 1817. William I, newly Grand Duke, had the building rebuilt by the state as a garrison church for the Protestants among the Prussian troops — and a civilian Protestant congregation grew around them. In 1890 it became the church of the ruling dynasty, and Grand Duke Adolphe paid for the windows, the altar, the pulpit and the royal box you can still see.
