#schweidnitz

Can we agree that this pandemic has ruined enough things? Want to help with preventing it from ruining yet another one? The Evangelical Parish of the Augsburg Confession in Świdnica, Poland is currently trying to raise funds for the conservation and restoration of it’s church - one of the two remainig Churches of Peace, a UNESCO world heritage site. The matter is urgent: a local goverment subsidy has been withheld (the reasons are unclear, but I’ll take a gander that it’s due to huge loses of tax revenue that local goverments in Poland have seen as a result of fiscal reform and pandemic-related recession). Without raising the funds on it’s own, the Parish will lose access to EU funding. Since during the pandemic the tourist traffic is much smaller than usual, crowdfunding is pretty much the only option.

Why is this important?

The Church is a memento of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) - the total war before total wars, a conflict that has shaped much of Europe’s modern culture and history. During and after the war the Habsburg emperors tried to forcefully re-catholicize the Protestant territories under their rule. The Churches of Peace were the last foothold of religious freedom in the Habsburg-ruled 17th Century Silesia. As former Protesnant churches in the region were being seized by the Habsburg army and handed over to Catholics, the king of Sweden pushed for the Lutherans to be allowed to build new churches in which they could practice their religion freely. It was one of the conditions of the Peace of Westphalia.

There were, however, many restrictions on what they could actually build. For staters: no masonry. The builders could only use timber, clay, sand and straw - which makes the conservation of such a structure incredibly demanding. The churches could not resamble a traditional Christian temple and they couldn’t have spires or belfries. They had to located outside of the city walls, but within the reach of a cannon shot. Plus, they had to be started and finished within one year.

Photo by Sławomir Milejski at Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 pl (x)

The architect Albrecht von Säbisch went above and beyond the technical possibilities of his era and created Europe’s largest timber-framed religious buildings whilst keeping the strict deadlines. If innovative carpentry is not your thing, the Churches of Peace are also notable for their unique sulptural and pictorial deocration. While Protestant churches tended to be rather austere, especially when it came to religious imagery, wooden and timber-framed structures flipped this tendency on its head. As if to compensate for the inferiority of materials, the walls of the Churches of Peace (and other similar structures, such as the wooden Articular Churches of Slovakia) are covered floor to ceiling with paintings, sculptures and ornaments so rich and detailed as if they were meant to rival the splendors of Papal Rome during the Counter-Reformation. This gives us a rare glimpse at how the Baroque artistic conventions, many of which were invented in order to glorify the Catholic Church, could be modified to represent a different religious dogma. 

Photo by Jar.ciurus at Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 pl (x)

These days the Church in Świdnica is a symbol for international and interreligious reconciliation efforts. The chancelors of Gemany and the prime ministers of Poland prayed for peace together here in 1989 and in 2014. In 2016 Dalai Lama visited the Church to sign the Appeal for Peace, alongside with Poland’s spritual leaders of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism.