SANKT PAUL IM LAVANTTAL. – Benedictine abbey in the diocese of Gurk, in Carinthia.
On a hill overlooking the broad valley of the Lavant, at the end of the 10th century there stood the castle of Lavant, with a small church of S. Egidio. Count Engelberto I of Sponheim, carrying out the wishes of his mother, Countess Riccarda, who had already built a church of S. Paolo there, summoned a group of Benedictine monks from Hirsau in 1091 to found a new abbey there; the church was dedicated in 1093. The present Romanesque Basilica is of the Hirsau architectural type, a rare example that escaped the usual subsequent stylistic transformations; after the fire of 1347, the vaults were rebuilt and it was rededicated in 1375: it has three naves with a transept, three apses, and a crypt (walled up for centuries). The later Gothic vaults were frescoed by the masters M. and F. Pacher (1470–80). The present furnishings are largely Baroque. Recently, valuable frescoes from the 13th–15th centuries were discovered beneath layers of whitewash. Around the church, still atop the hill, the monastic buildings are grouped together; some are medieval, but they were remodeled in the Baroque period. Giuseppe II suppressed the monastery in 1782.
When the celebrated abbey of Sankt Blasien in the Black Forest was also suppressed in 1805, Francesco I offered the abbey of S. P. as a new seat; in fact, in 1809 Abbot Beda Rotter moved there with the monks and with almost all of Sankt Blasien’s cultural and artistic treasures. A gymnasium was established at S. P. in 1810, with a boarding school and incomparable collections of books and manuscripts (a codex of the works of s. Ambrogio, from the 5th century; the Reichenau Sacramentary, from the 10th century), archival treasures, many unpublished works by the monks of Sankt Blasien, and priceless sacred and profane relics.