History

According to the local tradition, the parish was first founded back in the times of St Adalbert. The first actual mention of the local parish in written sources dates back to 1570, when the parish remained under Evangelical control. The church itself was first referred to in documents produced during the inspection conducted by ecclesiastical officials. In 1654, the church was returned to the Catholic community. The current church was built in the years 1672-78 to replace an earlier, wooden church from which some of the fixtures and fittings have been moved to the new structure.

The church underwent renovation works on numerous occasions, most notable of which were in 1820 (when the tower was renovated and received a new, bulbous cupola), in 1951 (roof truss restoration), 1965, 1969, 1975, 1979 and 1992 (replacement of floorboards in the nave and chancel, replacement of wooden window joinery with new, metal windows, replacement of sacristy weatherboard cladding, reconstruction of the damaged structure of the cloister-like walkways [soboty], replacement of wood shingle roof cladding with new, machine-made wood shingles. Subsequent renovation works followed in the years 2008-2011.

Description

The church is located in the centre of the village, on the levelled summit of a hill the steep, artificially formed slopes of which serve as the boundaries for the church cemetery.

The church is oriented towards the east. It is a wooden log structure with saddle-notch corner joints, its tower being a post-and-beam structure. The walls of the church are clad with weatherboards, while its roofs - including the tower cupola - are covered with wood shingles. The rectangular nave is adjoined by a narrower, rectangular chancel with a semi-hexagonal end section. A rectangular sacristy adjoins the northern side of the chancel, while the nave is adjoined by a porch to the south and a quadrangular tower to the west, both of them positioned on the respective axes of symmetry of the nave. The ground floor section of the tower serves as a second porch. The entire main body of the church is surrounded by low cloister-like walkways supported by pillars reinforced with braces. The date “1672”, separated by the letters I, H and S, can still be seen on the lintel beam of the southern portal. Inside, the church features a number of fixtures and fittings from the Early Baroque era, mostly originating from the earlier church that had once occupied this very site. The fixtures and fittings have been reassembled in 1678 and supplemented with a number of new items, including altarpiece paintings from the 19th and 20th century. The pipe organ casing dating back to 1724 was created by Michael Engler the younger.

In the church cemetery, visitors can still admire a Classicist tomb of Anna Róża Hoffman née Müller, who died in 1778.

The church can only be viewed from the outside. For more information, please visit the archdiocese website: http://www.archidiecezja.wroc.pl

compiled by Grzegorz Grajewski, Regional Branch of the National Heritage Board of Poland in Wrocław, 21-10-2014.

Bibliography

• Katalog zabytków sztuki w Polsce. Seria Nowa, vol. IV, issue 3. Województwo wrocławskie, J. Pokora and M. Zlat (eds.). Milicz, Żmigród, Twardogóra i okolice, original compilation by J. Wrabec. Warsaw 1997, pp. 85-88.
• Zabytki sztuki w Polsce. Śląsk, Warsaw 2006, p. 881.
• Pilch J., Leksykon zabytków architektury Dolnego Śląska. Warsaw 2005, pp. 364-365.