Erzgebirge candle arch

Most tourist pages say the first arch was forged in metal in Johanngeorgenstadt in 1740. That arch exists, and its date turned up only in 2003 under a later coat of paint; historians had read it as 1778 until then. It shows Adam and Eve in the garden, which looks little like the miners and angels on a modern arch. An older trace comes from Scheibenberg, where a church invoice of 1716 pays for an arch set up for the Christmas service.

Igor Jenzen, who directed Dresden's Museum für Sächsische Volkskunst until 2021, proposed in 2019 that the arch and the pyramid borrowed from the Saturn festival the Saxon court staged in 1719. The reading you hear in the mountains is that the lights stand for miners longing for daylight after a winter underground, and some add that a lit window guided them home. The German Wikipedia flags the claim that the arch copies the mouth of a mine adit as often repeated and seldom sourced.

The design most people picture comes from 1937. For the Feierohmd exhibition in Schwarzenberg that year, the manufacturer Friedrich Emil Krauß ran a competition for an arch for everyone, and the Leipzig illustrator Paula Jordan won it. Her design puts two miners holding the Saxon arms between a woodcarver and a lace-maker, and those were the trades that fed Erzgebirge families in the 18th and 19th centuries. Max Adler and Curt Teller built it 7 by 4 metres and it stayed in Johanngeorgenstadt, while Krauß registered the motif as a trademark. The exhibition took place under the Nazi regime, and Jörg Brückner's 2024 study looks at the arch's history in those years.

Metal stayed the usual material well into the 20th century, and wood took over after the Second World War. In the GDR years demand ran ahead of supply, so many families cut their own copies of existing designs with a fretsaw. Most arches in windows now run on electric candles. Johanngeorgenstadt put up a freestanding arch 25 metres across in 2012, according to the town.