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Churches & monasteries
Koszęcin
Koszęcin parish took out a loan to build this church and could not pay it back for well over a decade. Hyperinflation finally came to the rescue: in 1923 the rest of the debt was settled for the equivalent of eight loaves of bread. The bri…
Churches & monasteries
Świerklaniec
The brick church in Nakło Śląskie looks as if someone had combined a Romanesque Revival church with a Byzantine dome. It was founded by Count Lazarus IV Henckel von Donnersmarck, who paid about 90% of the building costs and had a family ma…
Churches & monasteries
Żary
The Żary parish church, the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, is the oldest and most important church in Żary – a brick Gothic hall with a Romanesque core, a stepped west gable and the Baroque chapel of the town's lords, the Promnitz fa…
Churches & monasteries
Pyzdry
Looking at Pyzdry from the bridge over the Warta, your eye is drawn to a tall brick tower with battlements. It looks like part of a castle, but it is the tower of the parish church – the Gothic Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin…
Churches & monasteries
Czchów
From the market square in Czchów you see a stepped brick gable above a stone church – one of the oldest churches along the Dunajec river. Its chancel was built before 1360, probably funded by King Casimir the Great, and its east wall conta…
Churches & monasteries
Inwałd
The painting on the high altar of the church in Inwałd has an unusual nickname: Our Lady of the Robbers. According to legend it was brought here by brigands, and their leader handed it over to the villagers after his conversion. The church…
Churches & monasteries
Zielonki
From the street you first see a modernist entrance of 1966 crowned by an openwork steel tripod with a cross. Behind it, though, is a late Gothic 16th-century church with Renaissance details carved by stonemasons then working in Kraków. The…
Churches & monasteries
Złotoryja
Złotoryja holds the oldest town charter in Poland, granted in 1211 by Duke Henry the Bearded, and its parish church is only a little younger. The Church of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary is one of only about twenty town parish churches in…
Churches & monasteries
Miasteczko Śląskie
The parishioners of Żyglin waited almost 40 years for permission to build this church. They applied in 1801, and approval from Berlin only came in 1838. The church, built of local limestone, went up in 1840–1842. It is an example of the ro…
Churches & monasteries
Sucha Beskidzka
In Sucha Beskidzka, two churches linked by a corridor share the dedication to the Visitation of the Virgin Mary: an intimate stone "old church" of 1613–1614 and Teodor Talowski's monumental parish church with a 54-metre tower. The first ho…
Churches & monasteries
Ujazd
On the eastern edge of Ujazd, on the road to Pyskowice, stands a Gothic Revival church that locals have long called Studzionka, "the little well". The name comes from a spring beside which a wooden chapel stood in the 18th century; German-…
Churches & monasteries
Zwardoń
At first glance it looks like two buildings joined together: a small brick chapel with a turret and a soaring structure with triangular gables clad in red metal. That is how the church in Zwardoń tells the story of a village that grew up a…
Churches & monasteries
Busko-Zdrój
The Church of the Immaculate Conception is the oldest church in Busko-Zdrój and a remnant of the Norbertine convent that stood here for more than six centuries. The first church on the site was founded around 1166 by the knight Dzierżko, a…
Churches & monasteries
Stolec
The Gothic church in Stolec, the largest village in the Ząbkowice Śląskie municipality, has two towers and, on its high altar, a painting by the Baroque master Michael Willmann. The church was first recorded in 1251, and its present form d…
Churches & monasteries
Czorsztyn
From the outside it is a modest 1980s church with a steep roof and a small bell turret. Inside, though, it keeps mementoes of a world that vanished under water: furnishings from the church of Stare Maniowy, flooded when Lake Czorsztyn was…
Churches & monasteries
Świebodzin
The slender brick tower by Chopin Park is the tallest landmark of Świebodzin's old town, even though the church is several centuries younger than the parish church. It was built at the turn of the 20th century as a Lutheran church, and Emp…
Churches & monasteries
Boronów
On the grille of a side chapel hangs a crucifix that, people in Boronów say, is slowly closing its eyes – and will shut them completely on the day the world ends. The Church of Our Lady Queen of the Holy Rosary in Boronów is a wooden churc…
Churches & monasteries
Czerwińsk nad Wisłą
High above the Vistula, the granite basilica of a former abbey of the Canons Regular has stood for more than 850 years – one of the best-preserved Romanesque churches in Poland. Its walls are built of glacial boulders in shades from graphi…
Churches & monasteries
Olesno
The pine trunk behind glass by the high altar bears a plaque dated "July 1444": under this tree, legend says, a girl was saved from robbers through the intercession of St Anne. A wooden church grew up around the pine, and in the 17th centu…
Churches & monasteries
Pietrowice Wielkie
On the edge of Pietrowice Wielkie, on the road to Gródczanki, a small wooden church of the Holy Cross sits at the bottom of a ravine. It has drawn pilgrims for more than three centuries, and right beside it a spring rises in a Gothic Reviv…
Churches & monasteries
Praszka
In Wierzbie, a village in the Praszka municipality on national road 45 between Wieluń and Opole, stands a wooden church whose log structure is dated to around 1522. It is a late Gothic church of the Wieluń type – a reminder that this north…
Churches & monasteries
Pawłowiczki
In the fields outside Gościęcin, next to a spring long believed to cure eye ailments, stands the wooden pilgrimage church of St Brice, built in 1661. Locals simply call the area with the church, the former hermitage and the chapels Bryksy.…
Churches & monasteries
Gogolin
The rood beam of the wooden church in Malnia still bears the German words "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott" ("A mighty fortress is our God"), the opening line of Martin Luther's famous hymn. It is a reminder that the church was built for a P…
Churches & monasteries
Prostki
In 1656, Tatar troops returning with their plunder from the battle of Prostki burned Ostrykół to the ground, together with its church and library, and carried off 1,326 people from the parish into captivity. The village was rebuilt, and a…