Churches challenge Leaning Tower of Pisa

Churches challenge Leaning Tower of Pisa
By Bojan Pancevski in Vienna, Colin Freeman and Malcolm Moore in Rome, Sunday Telegraph
21/07/2007

It is a row where every side has its own particular slant on the matter. After nine centuries of undisputed fame as the world's most lopsided building, the Leaning Tower of Pisa is facing challenges to its title from two crooked church towers.

The Church in Suurhusen is one of two German buildings bidding for Pisa's crown as the most lopsided building

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The former East German town of Bad Frankenhausen says that the bell tower of its 14th century protestant church of Our Dear Ladies leans even more than its better-known rival in Pisa.

The 184-feet stone edifice has been succumbing to gravity's pull for centuries because of its foundations in porous chalk, to the point where it is now 4.5 degrees off centre, a figure that town officials claim easily beats Pisa's 3.97 degrees.

Guinness World Records - or its German edition, anyway - has backed their case, and all that now stands in their way is the as-yet-unverified bid of another church tower in nearby Suurhusen, which claims to lean 5.07 degrees.

"Good for them, it doesn't matter to us," was the rather lofty response from Pisa Council last week, when asked by The Sunday Telegraph for a reaction to the German bids.

Although nobody imagines that Bad Frankenhausen or Suurhusen will ever draw as many tourists, Italians are thought to be somewhat miffed at the prospect of their place in the record books being nabbed by two provincial German upstarts - neither of which, they reckon, is a patch on Pisa in terms of architecture or history. After all, they point out, gravity might not be known about had the scientist Galileo not done various experiments by dropping cannon balls from the tower's upper echelons in the 15th century.

Nestling in the foothills of the Kyfhäuser mountains, the Bad Frankenhausen bell tower was built with granite stone 625 years ago and has an added baroque-style spire. According to local architects, who are now devising a strategy to save the tower from imminent collapse, it leans more than 14 ft eastwards, and with each passing year the lean increases by more than two inches.

Because of the danger of it tumbling, church services are only held on occasions such as Christmas or Easter. "It is still generally considered safe, but you cannot help worrying whether it is going land on your head," said Bärbl Köller, the head of the association to save the church.

Officials in nearby Suurhusen, meanwhile, say their 13-century tower not only leans more, but is also functional as a church year-round. "Our tower is the most leaning, but in our church we still have regular mass and even weddings," boasted pastor Frank Wessel.

Either way, German victory now seems certain in the view of Olaf Kuchenbecker, of the German edition of Guinness World Records. "The tower in Bad Frankenhausen is definitely more leaning than the one in Pisa, which is quite a revelation, as far as leaning towers go," he said.

"The bell tower of Suurhusen seems to be a sure candidate for a world record. But tests are still in progress and at this stage we can only accept the tower of Bad Frankenhausen as the world's most leaning tower."

But is it? Aware that there might some question mark over his impartiality, Mr Kuchenbecker claims to have checked his facts with the Guinness World Records' office in London. But a long shadow of doubt has been cast on the German case by Prof John Burland, a British structural engineer who oversaw a recent project to stabilise the Leaning Tower of Pisa's tilt.

"Pisa still leans more," he said. "It used to lean by about 5.5 degrees, and now that it has been stabilised, it is still leaning at more than five degrees."

He added: "Of course, the lean of building is hardly important. There is a wall in Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire, where I live, that leans much more than all of these buildings. The thing is that Pisa is a World Heritage site and absolutely beautiful."

Beautiful they may all be, but the row between them now looks like getting ugly.

"It is outrageous for the Italians or anyone else to try to deny scientific facts," fumed Miss Köller, who claims to have got the 3.97 degrees figure for Pisa's tower from the Italian city's officials themselves.

She added: "Our bell tower is just as beautiful and historically significant as the one in Pisa."