Marienbrunn Abbey


Marienbrunn Abbey also called Fons Mariae and Triumphus Marie was a double convent for women and men of the order of the Bridgettines, situated in Gdańsk between 1391 and 1833. It was the first convent of the order founded outside of Sweden, and the second convent of the order altogether.

History

In 1373, the relics of Saint Bridget was brought home to Sweden from Rome by way of Gdańsk, after which the mother convent Vadstena Abbey was founded in Sweden. In 1391, there was a community of monks of the Bridgettine order in Gdańsk, and in 1397, the Marienbrunn Abbey was formally founded. It was the first founded after the mother convent in Sweden, and one of two in Poland.
The Marienbrunn Abbey was a double monastery with both monks and nuns. The monks where the original founders, and the female members where initially reformed prostitutes, who entered the convent in a wish to leave their old life, a fact which initially gave the convent a bad name. In 1429, when complains were made that female prostitutes where allowed to visit the abbey as guests, the abbess founded a separate guest house specially for women prostitutes.
In 1595, Vadstena Abbey was finally closed in Sweden, over half a century after the Swedish Reformation, and in the spring of 1596, the last nuns from the mother convent emigrated to Marienbrunn Abbey lead by their abbess, Katarina Olofsdotter. Katarina Olofsdotter died here in 1625, and the last of the Swedish nuns, Anna Larsdotter, died in 1638.
Marienbrunn Abbey, as well as Gdańsk, became a part of the Kingdom of Prussia after the Partition of Poland in the 18th-century. In 1833, the abbey was ordered closed down by the Prussian authorities.