The history of Dalheim Abbey goes back a long way. There is said to have been a small village church here on the western edge of the Eggegebirge mountains as early as 800. A replica initially served as the convent church of a women's convent before the Augustinian canons settled in Dalheim in the middle of the 15th century and turned the monastery into the spiritual and economic center of the southern Paderborn region. Today, the almost completely preserved complex houses the only state museum for monastic cultural history in Germany.
Ora et labora, pray and work. Life in the monastery has always been characterized by renunciation and silence. Or so it is believed. But visitors to the monastery complex in Dalheim will be surprised. As they walk through the award-winning permanent exhibition, they will discover that music and theater, food and drink, important art treasures, architecture, books and garden art also had - and still have - their place in the life of the monks.
Dalheim Monastery impressively presents its own eventful history, which experienced its greatest heyday in the Baroque period. Even today, the representative courtyard of honor, spacious farm buildings and magnificent gardens characterize the appearance of the complex, which is embedded in a landscape of dense forests and wide fields. In the apse of the monastery church, a ceiling painting was uncovered that dates back to the construction period around 1470/80. Visitors can marvel at them in the late Gothic core complex.
In eleven rooms around the historic cloister, from the church to the storage cellar, visitors can trace everyday life in the monastery. Modern productions bring history into the present and shed light on the cultural background of life behind monastery walls. Which, by the way, did not only take place behind closed doors. The Dalheim monastery gardens take up a good quarter of the 7.5-hectare site and bear witness to the broad spectrum of monastic horticulture in the Middle Ages and the Baroque period. The abundance of ornamental, useful and medicinal plants still delights visitors today when they stroll through the terraced convent garden or the representative garden of the prior. The monastery complex also forms the impressive backdrop for the Dalheim Summer cultural festival, the open-air Summer Night Songs festival and the largest monastery market in Europe, where monks and nuns from around 40 abbeys, convents and monasteries sell their wares on the last weekend in August.
