Old Bible

The popular name of Bernburg's town park "Old Bible" refers to the many Bible verses on the gravestones of the former civic and residential cemetery and current town park of Bernburg, a district town in the middle of Saxony-Anhalt.

Once a gift from Prince Wolfgang to the town, the site was used for burials from 1552 to supplement the inner-city cemetery at the castle church. The baroque cemetery chapel, built in 1743, is still a reminder of the park's former purpose, as are some preserved graves from the period up to 1886. The use of the area was then changed - in several stages - to a park.

The Bernburg city park is a protected monument due to its historical and cultural-artistic significance. Typologically, it goes back to the archaic basic principle of the "Hortus Conclusus", the closed garden, an immanent pictorial motif of the visual arts. The original, Old High German term "Frithof" describes the place as an enclosed courtyard, a garden of peace. The city park, which is enclosed by a wall and a steep embankment and only accessible at certain points, thus corresponds to the classic archetype of the primeval garden, the "Frithof".

In its winning design, which emerged from a competition in 2015, POLA has created a monument to the history of the location and the city on several levels. On the one hand, the mysticism that has always flowed through the park is a conceptual component of the new park design. At the same time, the illuminated benches designed as crystals are reminiscent of Bernburg's potash mining industry and also enhance the atmospheric effect of the park in the evening hours.

Through delicate, almost poetic interactions, the "Old Bible" now presents itself as a new Garden of Eden.