Doberan

Doberan grew beside a Cistercian monastery in Mecklenburg. Monks first settled nearby in 1171, but their house was destroyed in a Slavic uprising and refounded at Doberan in 1186. After a fire in 1291, a great Gothic abbey church replaced the earlier Romanesque building; it was consecrated in 1368. The wealthy abbey owned extensive lands and shaped the life of the neighbouring village until its dissolution in 1552.

Doberan suffered in the Thirty Years' War. In the eighteenth century the dukes of Mecklenburg-Schwerin made it a place of recreation. In 1793 Duke Frederick Francis I bathed at nearby Heiligendamm on his physician's advice, beginning a seaside resort on the Baltic coast. Visitors stayed in Doberan, where dancing, gaming and horse races became part of courtly life.