Mor Jakob von Sarug, Warburg

The Dominican Order was located in Warburg for over 700 years with interruptions.

The mendicant order of the Dominicans - Ordo Praedicatorum, "Order of Preachers" - founded in 1215 was called to Warburg by Bishop Otto von Rietberg in 1281. On the feast day of St. John the Baptist, June 24, 1281, they moved into an episcopal house in the neighborhood of the old town church. The settlement was confirmed as a convent by the General Chapter of the Order. Right at the beginning of their stay, there was opposition to the settlement due to envy and competitiveness. This dispute was aggravated by the fact that the bishop signed over the old town church of St. Mary in vinea to the Dominicans, dissolved the old town parish and united the old town parishioners with the new town parish. This led to a conflict between the Old Town parishioners and the bishop. The conflict was defused when the Dominicans built a new building on the hilltop and abandoned the Old Town parish. A convent school was established on the new Dominican premises, which later developed into the Gymnasium Marianum.

In 1810, the order was legally suppressed by a decree of King Jérôme Bonaparte, and the subsequent Prussian occupation dissolved the monastery and school in 1824. The property was confiscated by the state, the buildings nationalized. The school was reopened in 1826 as the ''Königliches Progymnasium zu Warburg''.

At the end of the 19th century, the Dominicans returned to Warburg. They needed a training center for their junior staff. In 1908, they moved into the new building that had been erected from 1903 on the newly created Klosterstraße. In 1993, following reorganizations in the Province of the Order, this monastery was abandoned in favor of the Convent of St. Paul in Worms. The last prior of the monastery in Warburg was Father Burkhard Runne.

The town of Warburg received the copy of Hans Grüninger's Bible from 1485 from the Dominicans' monastery library as a permanent memento for the town museum Museum im Stern.

The monastery building was purchased by the Syrian Orthodox Church of Germany in 1996. It is still the seat of the Syrian Orthodox Archbishop of Germany and is used as the Syrian Orthodox Monastery of St. Jacob of Sarug.