Sankt Blasien Abbey in The Black Forest - Dom St Blasius

Dom St Blasius

The abbey church burnt down in 1768, and was rebuilt as a Baroque round church by the architect Pierre Michel d'Ixnard, with an enormous dome 46 metres across and 63 metres high (the third-largest in Europe north of the Alps), during the years up to 1781 under the Prince-Abbot Martin Gerbert. It remains as the Dom St Blasius, or "St Blaise's Cathedral" (so called because of its size and magnificence, not because it is a cathedral in any ecclesiastiacal or administrative sense). The effects of another catastrophic fire in 1874 were only finally remedied in the 1980s.