Romanische St. Dionysiuskirche

According to legend, the Saxon Duke Widukind was baptized in this church after his defeat against the Franks. His godfather was Charlemagne himself.
The village center of Belm is located on a hill on the old military road between Minden and Osnabrück. The original chapel was part of a farm (curtis) that belonged to the Osnabrück church and is the nucleus of today's parish.
The new church building in the 11th/12th century may be connected to the transfer of the rights to appoint priests to the church to the monastery in Corvey, whose abbot at the end of the 11th century was the Bishop of Osnabrück. However, it could also simply be an expression of the new importance of St. Dionysius as a parish church and be due to the greater space requirements associated with this.
The massive, unstructured Romanesque tower of this building has survived the ages, while the nave was renovated in the 13th century. A Gothic sandstone baptismal font depicting scenes of Widukind's baptism also dates from this time. Legend also has it that Widukind's wife, Geva, is buried here.


History:

• The beginnings of the parish are largely shrouded in mystery. One of the first parishes in the diocese of Osnabrück was founded in the 9th century. The oldest documented mention of the church was around 1150.
  
• The church remained Catholic after the Thirty Years' War despite a Protestant majority of parishioners (approx. 90%). Afterwards, there were ongoing disputes about the denominational settlement.
  
• The final separation of the denominations came with the construction of a Protestant church in 1815. The cemeteries were also separated.
• The church was part of the great land survey in the 19th century.

• Belm:Wittekind is said to have been baptized in Belm. Just as Christ was born in Bethlehem, the Saxon duke was reborn to a new life there, which is why the name Belm was derived from Bethlehem.
  
• Geva: According to legend, Geva, the wife of the Saxon duke Wittekind, was baptized and buried in Belm. To commemorate her, the master of the baptismal font depicted her as the woman with the crown and the book on the font.
  
• Hausgenossentür: For several centuries, the agricultural workers of Belm used the Hausgenossentür on the south side of the church, which is now walled up. The farm workers did not farm on their own land, but on that of their sovereign, the Prince-Bishop of Osnabrück. Jacob Grimm described the rights of these so-called "Hausgenossen" in Belm: their privileges in the church were their own pews at the front with their names still engraved on them, their own side altar and the aforementioned door. It is not known how long this right existed. In the middle of the 19th century, numerous reforms led to the householders becoming independent and being allowed to purchase land ("peasant liberation"). Preferences were thus abolished and the door was bricked up in 1896.
  
• 7 vault figures: dragon: "principle of evil" / devil as adversary and tempter of Christ in the desert, here with a kind of eye protection against the divine light, behind the organ probably a sun lizard, which, like a snake, rejuvenates itself by shedding its skin, view of Christ as the "rising sun of righteousness";
  
• monkey: with claws in the role of the devil; mythical creature: Upper body man/human, lower body animal, represents the Pharisee (Jewish hat)
  
• Beardless young man / bearded older man : young old / transience; stooped young manin shoes and hooded cloak: appears to be carrying the whole world and with his gaze refers the churchgoer to access to heaven after his death.
  
• Measuring point: On the west side of the tower is a round metal bolt with the inscription "KÖNIGL(ich) PREUSS(ische) LANDESAUFNAHME a surveying point from the 19th century. In 1866, the Kingdom of Hanover (Belm) was annexed by Prussia.
  
• A new, more accurate cadastre was needed to calculate property taxes. For this purpose, the triangular points of the Gauss network were used, which the mathematician and geodesist C. Fr. Gauss created between 1821 and 1844. These triangular points were mostly clearly visible church towers that had been assigned fixed coordinates. In Belm, the zero point of the so-called partial system no. 22 "Bellm" (districts of Osnabrück, Iburg, Wittlage, Melle, city of Osnabrück) was located at the tower of the Protestant church. In surveying terms, the tower of the parish church also played a role as a so-called 3rd order trigonometric point, as well as for height measurement (83.87 m above sea level).
  
• So did the height mark at the old sexton's office (today Rüters 84.939 m above sea level), which was used to check the dam height at the Belm mill. With the introduction of the Gauss Krüger system (orientation to the equator), the points lost their significance.