When Berliners Piet and Ulrike Jonas travel abroad, they head into local churches to gawk at stained glass windows, ponder over ornate altar pieces, and discern the meaning of devotional art.
“It is a way for us to get to know the place,” said Piet, “to begin to understand its history and the people who lived there.”
With church visits featuring so prominently in their vacations, Piet and Ulrike wondered if they might start doing the same in their home city.
And so, one-by-one, they began to look in on Berlin’s churches. What started as a hobby quickly turned into a goal-oriented project: to visit every church in Berlin.
Alle Kirchen Berlins was born.
According to their website, their project is simple. “We want to see all the churches in Berlin from the inside,” they wrote. According to their count, that means visiting some 450 locations. As of January 2022, they were at number 381.
The project, however, is not explicitly religious in nature. Nor is it specifically historical, architectural, or social. Instead, Piet and Ulrike said it’s about getting to know Berlin.
Along the way, they are encountering the city’s diversity and development, it’s eclecticism and surprising spiritual effervescence.
“One would not think that Berlin is an especially religious city,” said Ulrike, “and yet we are finding out just how important religion has been and still is.
More than showcasing some of the most remarkable, interesting, or site-seeable places of worship, Alle Kirchen Berlins provides insight into how we understand and negotiate what counts as religion. Moreover, the project highlights how our encounter with religion is part of the way in which contemporary societies — and cities — organize and understand themselves.
Specifically, Piet and Ulrike’s project highlights how city dwellers determine what counts as sacred and secular, how immigration has long been a part of shaping urban religious expressions, and how the notion of religion and the notion of a city are entangled with one another, the one shaping the other and vice versa.