The church's patron saint was St. Nicholas. At the beginning of the 15th century the church was enlarged on the south side by adding chapels between the buttresses. It was a brick building without a choir, with small turrets at the eastern corners housing spiral staircases, and with porches on the north and south.
The altar of the Old Altstadt Church was moved to the new Altstadt Church, built in the Burgfreiheit north-west of the castle in the first half of the 19th century.
Architectural plan of the Old Altstadt Church.
The tower was built in 1556. Its cupola was rebuilt in 1710.
The tower built in the mid-16th century (left) was radically renewed at the beginning of the 18th century (centre), and when the Altstadt Church was demolished in the mid-19th century and then rebuilt on a new site, the old silhouette of the church tower was reproduced almost simultaneously on the modernised main tower of the castle (right).
Figured organ columns from the Old Altstadt Church in the Königsberg Museum of Decorative and Applied Arts.
On the ridge of the roof stood a small turret with a weathervane. Inside, the church had three naves divided by columns of different shapes, with beautiful vaulted ceilings. It was here that the Protestant monk Johann Amandus preached his first sermons in 1523. The last sermon in the church was preached in 1824. Subsidence had caused many dangerous cracks to appear in the church walls. In 1826–1828 the church was dismantled.
Photo: Bildarchiv Ostpreußen bildarchiv-ostpreussen.de, collage by Mikhail Ogorodnikov
Translated from Russian with the help of AI (Claude, Anthropic), October 2026.
