Saint Peter's Church (German: Hauptkirche St. Petri, German coll.: Petrikirche) in Hamburg, Germany stands on the site of many former cathedrals. Built by order of Pope Leo X, it has been a Protestant cathedral since the Reformation and its congregation forms part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Northern Germany. History It is believed that the church is near the original Hammaburg area and that a previous church or cathedral existed on the site. St. Peter's was probably built in early 1189; it was first documented in 1195 as a market church or ecclesia forensis. About 1310 it was rebuilt in a Gothic style and was completed around 1418. The bronze lion-head door handles, the oldest work of art of Hamburg, date from the foundation of the tower in 1342. The tower, topped with a new copper-covered spire in 1516, at 127.5 m towered above even that of the neighbouring Hamburg Cathedral, but was surpassed itself already in 1518 by the tower of St. Nicholas Church at initially 135 m. Decay and political tensions caused the cathedral to be torn down between 1804 and 1807. Under the subsequent French occupation St. Peter's along with most of the other main churches in 1813 was commandeered by Napoleonic soldiers to be used as a horse stable. Only a few decades later it fell victim to the great fire that swept Hamburg in May 1842. Most works of art, such as the lion-head door handles, were saved. The St. Peter's portal gateway was heavily damaged in the fire but was saved and ended up being built into the Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte (established in 1922 and called Hamburg Museum since 2005), and the doorway itself was restored again in 1995. Only seven years after the great fire, the Gothic church was rebuilt by architects Alexis de Chateauneuf and Hermann Felsenfest in its previous location. In 1878, the 132 meter high church tower — its copper spire designed years earlier by — was finished. In the first half of the 20th century, the parish lost many members, as residential neighborhoods were torn down to develop banks and department stores in the city center. The church got through the Second World War relatively intact. In 1962, as a nearby community center was being built, the foundations of a medieval tower, the Bischofsturm ("Bishop's Tower") were discovered. In 1979, nuclear power protesters, including the late pastor