Schulpforte - Zisterzienserabtei Pforte

After Bishop Udo I of Naumburg who belonged to the House of the Ludowingers, had met Bernard of Clairvaux at the Imperial Diet in Liège in 1131, the Cistercian monastery founded a few years earlier in Schmölln was moved to the Saale River in 1137 and given the name "Claustrum apud Portam". The monks farmed the land around the monastery and made it one of the richest monasteries in East Thuringia.

The monastery church was built in 1150 as a Romanesque basilica and rebuilt from 1251 to 1320 to become today's Gothic monastery church.

After the monastery was secularized in 1540, the Saxon Duke Moritz founded one of the three Saxon princely schools here in 1543, in whose tradition the school "Landesschule Pforta", which is still housed in the former monastery buildings, stands


After the monastery had become a school, the students obviously felt free to carve names and dates not only into the choir stalls but as well into the hard stones of the former cloister.