Alte Pfarrkirche Pankow
Old parish church „Zu den vier Evangelisten“. The church on the east end of the former village meadow of Pankow dates back to the 13th Century. It is named after the Four Evangelists of the New Testament.
On this site as early as 1230, Cistercian monks erected a small village chapel made of granite stone. A church bell is first mentioned in 1475. In 1539 Pankow and its place of worship became Protestant. In 1832 Karl Wilhelm Redtel redesigned the church, in collaboration with Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841). Between 1857 and 1859 Schinkel's student, Friedrich August Stüler (1800-1865), expanded the church on the west side with a nave, aisle and transept in a neo-gothic style and octagonal towers. Stüler’s west facade is no longer visible today. In 1908 the vestibule with the portal was put in front of it. The towers, badly damaged in the battle of Berlin in April 1945, were no longer restored in their original height in 1956.
The four stained-glass windows depicting the evangelists were created in 1959 by artist Inge Pape. The pulpit depicts likenesses of reformers Philipp Melanchthon, Martin Luther, Nikolaus Count of Zinzendorf and John Calvin. It is a replica of the pulpit in Berlin’s St. Bartholomew Church. The interior of the church was renovated several times. The church organ today, the fourth since 1859, was dedicated in 1972. The altar table was created by Wolfgang Heger in 1971. The altar crucifix made of copper and enamel, with a body of bronze, which at the same time depicts the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, was designed in 1972 by Herbert Reinhold, who also made the candelabras and the bible lectern. The Coventry Cross of Nails is a sign of death and forgiveness. It commemorates the destruction of the English city of Coventry by the German Luftwaffe on 14 November 1940. The Cross of Nails is a replica of the much smaller and silver original, which the provost had loaned the community of Pankow in 1962 but had been stolen in the 1960s. The parish priest community of Old Pankow is a member of the association of German Cross of Nails communities, which maintains contacts of reconciliation in other countries.
Following the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship in 1933, the Pankow Evangelical Church community was from 1935 to 1945 a bastion of the Confessing Church, which the National Socialist church policies rejected. On the first Friday of each month there is an active peace group. The peace work began in 1981 during a time when there was nuclear arms build-up in NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The peace group’s motto was „Peace, Justice and Preservation of the Creation“, and the peace group was open for Christians and atheists to participate. As a center of opposition in the GDR, it was subjected to extreme scrutiny by state authorities. Following the changes in the GDR in 1989/90, numerous members assumed political functions in newly founded parties and grass-roots political movements.