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St. Barbara’s Church, Lubawa

Church of St. Barbara in Lubawa

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St. Barbara’s Church, Lubawa

Church of St. Barbara in Lubawa

Lubawa, Lubawa, iławski, Poland

St. Barbara’s Church, Lubawa

Church of St. Barbara in Lubawa

General Information

The Church of St. Barbara is one of the more valuable monuments of wooden sacred architecture in the Lubawa Land. The church was erected in the second half of the eighteenth century on the site of an earlier church and hospital of St. George, which were situated outside the walls of the medieval town. At present, the building belongs to the parish of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Anne.

Location / Geographical Setting

The church is located near the town centre; it is situated at 9 Grunwaldzka Street.

History

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Bishop Mikołaj Chrapicki (d. 1514) founded for the Polish settlers in Lubawa, in the courtyard of the parish Catholic church, a chapel dedicated to St. Barbara. We know this from the foundation document dated 19 June 1505 (other historians give 11 June 1500). On every priest appointed to the Chapel of St. Barbara, the bishop imposed the obligation to preach sermons in Polish for the Poles on Sundays and feast days, because in the parish church sermons were delivered only in German. When the inhabitants of Lubawa became increasingly Polonized and the parish church was assigned to Polish services, the Chapel of St. Barbara was abolished as being considered unnecessary. Unfortunately, the sources do not inform us when this exactly took place.

Only in 1706 do we find in post-visitation documents information about the church at the Hospital of St. George, called the Chapel of St. George and St. Barbara. This was a newly erected chapel in a different place than the courtyard of the parish church. In the local chronicle, under the date 19 August 1770, it was recorded that the Chapel of St. Barbara was erected anew “of thick boards under a straw roof, and was consecrated by the coadjutor of the Bishop of Chełmno, Krzysztof Hilary Szembek.” Józef Śliwiński in his monograph of Lubawa states that the hospital church dedicated to St. Barbara was built in the years 1770-1779. Earlier, on this site there had existed a hospital and church dedicated to St. George. After it burned down, it was rebuilt in 1511 by the Bishop of Chełmno Jan Konopacki (d. 1530), and after another fire in 1616 – by Bishop Jan Kuczborski (c. 1572-1624). During the first Swedish war, this church was destroyed again. It was rebuilt in the years 1672-1676 under the invocation of St. John and St. Barbara. In the nineteenth century (1835) it was rebuilt once again, as recalled by the inscription on the weather vane and tower.

Architecture / Architecture and Spatial Layout

Architecture and Furnishings of the Church

The present church is wooden, Baroque, built on a stone foundation, of log construction, and boarded over. From the east, half embedded in the façade, stands a rectangular tower of log construction, covered with a hipped roof, with an octagonal openwork lantern. On the helmet of the tower, covered with shingles, there is a weather vane with the date 1811. The interior furnishings are uniform Late Baroque, without polychromy, maintained in a darkened colour scheme with minimal gilding. They date from the time of the construction of the church. The décor is counted among the most beautiful Baroque interiors in the Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship. In the church tower there is a historic bell from 1716, cast in Gdańsk. Worthy of note are six eighteenth-century pewter candlesticks and an enormous hand-made padlock.

Bibliography

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#Religious sites#Lubawa