Walsrode - Kloster Walsrode

There is a legend around the foundation of the Walsrode Monastery by Count Wale. When the count had to leave his nearby castle he got stuck in the swamp with his wagon in the area of today's Walsrode. He saw this as a divine sign to buy the place and to found a canonesses monastery together with his wife Odelinth in the mid of the 10th century. The first abbess was probably their daughter Mechthildis.

The Benedictine Rule was introduced in 1255. Due to a lightning strike the monastery burnt down in 1482

In 1528 Duke Ernst "The Confessor of Brunswick" introduced the Lutheran Reformation, but the convent refused to accept the new confession for a long time. It took up to 1570, before the convent was Lutheran throughout.

In contrast to other monasteries, the monastic positions in Walsrode were reserved for the daughters of the nobility (the first "bourgeois" abbess was introduced in 1980).

In 1812 Napoleon´s soldiers occupied the convent, expelled the convent ladies and sold furniture and art objects. After a year, the ladies returned to the looted convent.

Today, women who have a professional and family life behind them live here as convent ladies. Prerequisites for admission to the convent are active membership in a Protestant church, the status "single" also in the sense of widowed or divorced, an own supply of food, the willingness to fit into a community and the interest in bringing the convent and its art treasures closer to the visitors.
The chapel´s stained-glass windows were produced in Lueneburg in 1483.