The Chapel of St. Roch is a German pilgrimage chapel, dedicated to Saint Roch, on the Rochusberg southeast of Bingen am Rhein.
History
The first building, dating to the plague year of 1666, was destroyed during the campaigns of 1795 in the French Revolutionary Wars of the Rhine valley. The second was built 1814 in the wake of a typhoid fever epidemic brought back by soldiers returning from the Napoleonic Wars, with Goethe describing its dedication ceremony. Its flèche was hit by lightning in 1889 and the chapel burned down to the brickwork.
The present building, built in 1893-95, is to Neo Gothic designs by the Freiburg master builder Max Meckel and the Berlin stone-cutters Zeidler & Wimmel. At this time a small Bethlehemskapelle was built under the main chapel's east window, recalling an earlier chapel of that name on the site from the Crusader era. Parts of the earlier Roch chapels' art collections survive, but the only thing to survive the fire was the Baroque statue of the patron saint at the high altar.
