Stone cross

Stone crosses (German: Steinkreuze) in Central Europe are usually bulky Christian monuments, some 80 to 120 centimetres high and 40 to 60 centimetres wide, that were almost always hewn from a single block of stone, usually granite, sandstone, limestone or basalt. They are amongst the oldest open-air monuments. A larger variant of the stone cross, with elements of a wayside shrine is called a shaft cross (Schaftkreuz).

These small monuments are found along old routes and crossroads, by trees and forest edges, on hilltops or on old municipal and territorial boundaries. They are especially common in the Upper Palatinate region of Bavaria and in Central Germany, whereas basalt crosses occur almost exclusively in the Eifel region.

Unfortunately, many of these stone witnesses to a bygone era have disappeared due to carelessness, ignorance or deliberate destruction. As Rainer H. Schmeissner writes in his 1977 monograph, Stone Crosses in the Upper Palatinate, there are still about 300 such monuments in the Upper Palatinate alone. Four hundred examples of them were still around the turn of the century, which is almost twice as many as in Lower and Upper Bavaria combined. In 1977-1980, the National Museum of Prehistory at Dresden issued inventories for Saxony that included a list of 436 stone crosses and cross slabs.

A large number of these coarsely hewn crosses have already been heavily weathered. On many, a picture has been carved; only rarely do they carry an inscription.

Apart from damage caused by weathering, willful or negligent acts, some damage to stone crosses also arose from popular belief. An old stone spell says that by cutting off a piece of a stone cross and throwing it into running water, sorcery and misfortune will be averted. In addition, it was sometimes believed that magical power was attached to the so-called "flour" obtained by scraping stone crosses.

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Wikipedia