Inside a 350 year-old wooden church

[leftstreet]

14. It's just as beautiful on the outside

Churches of Peace in Jawor and Świdnica

The Churches of Peace are outstanding testimony to an exceptional act of tolerance on the part of the Catholic Habsburg Emperor towards Protestant communities in Silesia in the period following the Thirty Years' War in Europe. As a result of conditions imposed by the emperor, the Churches of Peace required the builders to implement pioneering constructional and architectural solutions of a scale and complexity unknown in wooden architecture. The success may be judged by their survival to the present day.

The Thirty Years' War in Europe ended with the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which upheld the principle of cuius regio eius religio , i.e. the faith professed by the ruler was obligatory for his subjects. At that time Silesia was part of the Catholic Habsburg monarchy. In most of the province Protestants were persecuted and deprived of the right and possibility to practise their faith. Through the agency of the Lutheran king of Sweden, the emperor finally allowed (1651-52) the erection of three churches, henceforth known as the Churches of Peace, in Silesian principalities under direct Habsburg rule - in Głogów, which ceased to exist in the 18th century, Jawor, and Swidnica in the south-west part of present-day Poland.

Unlike the Baroque Roman Catholic churches of Silesia, the Churches of Peace do not represent a self-confident mission-oriented religion, triumphant in its victory over heretics, but rather they embody a place of refuge for an oppressed religious minority that wanted to assert its faith, to remain conscious of its individuality, and to preserve the communal cult of its traditions and practices. Stability and durability were achieved by means of an efficient structural system and careful use of traditional techniques in handling the materials and in connecting the individual timbers with one another. The Churches of Peace are among the latest examples of an architecture that combines post-and-beam construction (building with one-piece wall-high posts) with the use of halved joints; the structural framework of regularly placed uprights and horizontal connecting rails is reinforced by means of diagonal crossed struts that are inserted in the posts and rails in a way that makes shifting of the structural framework impossible. As post-and-beam buildings, the Churches of Peace are part of a European tradition that goes back to the 12th century and continued into the 18th century. The churches in Jawor and Swidnica differ in the character of their floor plans. Both have three aisles, both terminated in a polygonal east end, but whereas in Jawor the eastern end is still a true chancel, in Swidnica it is only the formal remembrance of such: its function has become that of a sacristy.

http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1054