The church consists of a tower, the main building and the chancel. The tower is of unplastered brick in Gothic bond, divided into three storeys, and is 32 m high. On the west side there is a pointed entrance. As early as 1454 the church was old and dilapidated. Renovation of the building began in 1492. It was rebuilt only at the end of the 15th century.
The main building is of fieldstone. Diagonal buttresses stand at its western corners. The chancel is almost square and of fieldstone, closed by a handsome gable. On the north side of the building there is a porch with a Baroque gable. North of the chancel is the sacristy, also with a Baroque gable, built in 1623.
Inside, the nave has a wooden ceiling painted with ornament. Between the nave and the chancel there is a pointed arch with beams.
On the south side the windows are pointed; on the north there is one window each in the nave and the chancel. The interior furnishings were rich. The altar composition of 1693–1695 was made by the carver Isaak Riga. The pulpit, already the third, dates from 1695. The organ was made in 1754. Three bells were cast in Königsberg in 1793 and 1794.
Portrait of Martin Luther by Lucas Cranach the Younger.
Among the paintings, the portraits of Martin Luther and of his daughter Margarete von Kunheim, who was buried in Mühlhausen church, stood out.
Portrait of Margarete von Kunheim, Martin Luther's daughter. Lucas Cranach the Elder.
The war ended well for the church in Mühlhausen. As of 1990 it was considered one of the best-preserved churches in the region, even though it was in a dangerous condition. The sacristy housed a mill for grinding compound feed. The nave and chancel served as a storehouse. The tower was also put to some use.
All the roofs, on the tower, nave and chancel, had damaged tiles and all of them leaked, so that the rafters rotted and the walls crumbled. The porch and sacristy were still intact, but a huge hole had been knocked in the porch and the top of its gable broken off. All the buttresses were crumbling. A square door had been knocked through the south wall of the nave for vehicles to drive in. All the windows were bricked up. Practically nothing was left inside the nave. Through the thick flour dust the ceiling paintings could be made out in places. The cemetery has not survived.
Since the German Evangelical Lutheran congregation was formed in 1991, the church in Mühlhausen has been looked after by its representatives.
In 1993, in the complete absence of specialists, an exterior repair of the church began under the direction of I. A. Odintsov, "finished" by 1999. The work was done extremely unprofessionally. The roof began leaking at once. As a result, the work had to be started all over again. From 2000, under the direction of the architect Yu. I. Zabuga, a systematic restoration of the church, outside and inside, began. The roof was redone from scratch, and the medieval paintings inside were restored.
Photos on this page: Bildarchiv Ostpreußen, bildarchiv-ostpreussen.de and Mikhail Ogorodnikov (2021)
Church website: kirche-muehlhausen.org
Translated from Russian with the help of AI (Claude, Anthropic), October 2026.
