Coal company moving 700-year-old church 7 miles to new home

BERLIN (AP) — A 700-year-old church is continuing its slow journey to a new home, moving at just over 1 mph atop a huge flatbed truck as it is transported from an eastern German village being turned over to open-pit coal mining.

The Emmaus Church, first mentioned in historical documents in 1297, reached the edge of its home village of Heuersdorf outside Leipzig Thursday on its way to the town of Borna, some seven miles away. It is expected to arrive by Wednesday, after crossing railroad tracks and the Pleisse and Wyhra rivers. The large building was hauled across the Pleisse river Monday.

The medieval church is built in the Romanesque style of stone with a steeply pitched roof and a small black tower atop the roof line. At 65 feet tall and 48 feet long, it weighs around 750 tons.

The church is to be moved into Martin Luther Square in Borna on Reformation Day, when Lutherans traditionally remember the 16th-century church reformer.

The coal mining company Mibrag is paying $4.2 million to move the church after the regional legislature approved plans to mine some 50 million tons of coal to supply the electrical power station at Lippendorf near Leipzig.

Village authorities fought the destruction of the town for years, but lost in Germany’s Constitutional Court in 2005. Most of the 320 residents have already been resettled.