Neunkirch

Neunkirch lies in the Klettgau, about 13 kilometres west of Schaffhausen, and its south-eastern boundary follows the border between Switzerland and Germany. The commune covers 17.92 square kilometres, of which 47.5% is farmland and 45% forest: the town takes up little room in the middle of open country, backed by the wooded ridges of the Randen.

What strikes here is the shape. At the end of the thirteenth century the place was destroyed — by fire or by troops, nobody knows — and then rebuilt to a single plan: a walled rectangle, four straight parallel streets, a ditch partly filled with water in front of the wall. That drawing can still be read in the old core. The town had been founded to serve as a centre, but Schaffhausen denied it the right to hold a market and the right to mint, and its growth stopped there.

The history of the name goes back further. Neunkirch first appears in a deed of gift to Rheinau Abbey, dated a Sunday 21 September in the reign of Louis the German; the year is not given. The 21st of September fell on a Sunday only in 850, 861, 867 and 872, and a commission settled on 850 in 1901 as the official date. The original form, Niuchilchun, means new church in Old High German; the spelling shifted for centuries before settling on Neunkirch, so as not to confuse the town with another Neukirch in the diocese of Constance.

Two reformed churches mark the place: the Stadtkirche, inside the old core, and the Bergkirche, on the height outside the walls. The castle, formerly the episcopal court and later the bailiffs' residence, houses the local museum, where two plague coffins from Siblingen are kept. The town hall dates from 1568. The station, on the High Rhine line between Schaffhausen and Basel, links the town to the rest of the canton.

Why this place is remarkable

The shape does everything. Few Swiss towns keep so clearly the plan they were given after a destruction: a rectangle, four straight streets, a wall doubled by a ditch. Commercial failure paradoxically helped — denied the right to hold a market and the right to mint by Schaffhausen, the town did not grow, and its medieval drawing was never covered over.

History and origin

In 1260 the bishop of Constance, Eberhard II von Waldburg, bought the high and low justice and two large farms from the lords of Krenkingen. In 1525 the heavily indebted bishopric sold the town to Schaffhausen for 8,500 guilders; from then on the city installed its bailiffs in the castle. The Thirty Years' War spared Neunkirch from fighting but not from plague, which carried off 300 people; in October 1633 the town narrowly escaped being plundered. Then came the concessions: the right to hold two markets a year in 1795, and, in February 1799, the meeting in the community house of the delegates of twenty-two Schaffhausen communes, who came to demand equality between town and country.