Jelenia Góra Town Trail · the short route

Church of Grace (Elevation of the Holy Cross)

This church stands where it does because of a lost war. In 1707 Emperor Joseph I had to permit the building of six churches for Silesian Protestants, but he set a condition: outside the town walls and no nearer than a cannon shot. The distance between the Wojanowska Gate and this church is precisely the range of the artillery of the day. The Jelenia Góra Church of Grace was built to hold the town’s entire Protestant community: over four thousand seats and as many standing places, some eight thousand people in all. It is reckoned the largest of the six.

Why it exists at all

On 1 September 1707, at Altranstädt Castle in Saxony, the Lutheran king of Sweden Charles XII met the Catholic emperor Joseph I Habsburg. The emperor was the losing party in the Great Northern War and had to accept the terms: to return a hundred and twenty-one churches previously taken from Silesian Protestants, and to allow six entirely new ones. Those six were called Churches of Grace – the name says everything about how the right to a church of one’s own was then understood.

For Jelenia Góra it meant the end of half a century without a place of worship. The Protestants lost the parish church in 1654, when the Catholics took it over along with Jesuits brought into the town. For more than fifty years after that they had nowhere to gather.

A cannon shot from the gate

The emperor’s consent came with a condition still visible in the topography of the town: Churches of Grace could be built only outside the walls, at a distance no less than the range of a cannon shot. The point was to stop a church of another confession becoming a strongpoint for troops.

So the church went up in the former Wojanowska suburb, east of the centre. Walk from the Wojanowska Gate to the church and you cover exactly the distance set by seventeenth-century artillery – one of the few cases where you can take a stroll across a political decision.

Stockholm in Jelenia Góra

The church was designed and built between 1709 and 1718 by Martin Frantz. The model was St Catherine’s in Stockholm – no accident, since it was to the Swedish king that the Protestants owed the possibility of building at all. By copying the Stockholm church they thanked him in a way legible to anyone who followed the politics of the day.

The building stands on a Greek-cross plan, on a high stone plinth. Between the arms of the cross are tower-like additions housing staircases – square below, octagonal above. Over the crossing rises an octagonal dome crowned with a lantern. In parallel with the church, in 1709–1711, a pastors’ house was built.

The man who had seen Stockholm

Martin Frantz was born in 1679 in Reval, today’s Tallinn, and was baptised there in the Lutheran rite. His father, also Martin, came from Dresden and was the town master mason in Reval; after his death the mother married the town builder Georg Winkler, with whom the boy was apprenticed from 1691. He passed his journeyman’s examination in 1697 and then, as custom had it, set off on his travelling years.

And here is what matters most for this church: he probably spent some of that time in Stockholm. The choice of the Stockholm model was therefore not merely a political courtesy towards Charles XII – Frantz most likely knew that church at first hand.

By 1704 he was working in Legnica on the Jesuit college, to a design by Johann Georg Knoll. When Knoll died in November of that year, completing the building was entrusted to Frantz. A year later he bought civic rights and the title of master in Legnica. He began with a Catholic college, and it was two Protestant churches – in Jelenia Góra and Kamienna Góra – that made his name, both built simultaneously from 1709. Both used the cross plan after the Stockholm model, reworked by the insertion of galleries.

Later his style changed: he adapted to the ceremonious Bohemian Baroque of the Dientzenhofers, which took root in Silesia with the building of the Legnica Jesuit church in 1714–1720. In Jelenia Góra he also left the Baumgarten house (1710–1715), and in Cieplice a presbytery of 1712. He died in Legnica on 6 November 1742.

Eight thousand people under one roof

The interior was designed to hold a crowd, and you can see it from the doorway. Along the walls run two tiers of wooden galleries carried on twenty-six composite columns, with a third, much shallower tier above them. The arrangement is typically Protestant: what mattered was that as many people as possible should see and hear the preacher, not that a processional vista be created.

The painting of the vault and walls was carried out between 1734 and 1751 by Felix Anton Scheffler and Johann Franz Hoffman. The high altar of 1727–1729 is combined with the organ – another Protestant solution, gathering eye and ear in one place. It was carved by the local woodcarver David Hielscher, and the figural sculpture is attributed to Johann Georg Urbansky.

The organ case itself was built by Johann Michael Roeder. At its centre is a stained-glass gloria bearing the name of Jahweh, of 1727. The organ was enlarged twice, in 1732 and 1830, and in 1905 overhauled by the well-known Świdnica firm Schlag und Sohn. From the same period as the first organ come the sandstone pulpit and the marble font – both of 1717.

A fire after which the dome changed shape

On 16 October 1806 a fire damaged the dome and the tops of the stair towers. Rebuilding lasted until 1810, but it was done with simplifications and Classicist detail – in the spirit of the age that had just arrived. The Baroque forms of the dome lantern were restored only during a renovation in 1925.

Further work followed in 1908 and after the war: in 1959, 1963, 1973 and 1975–1978.

Nineteen chapels around a park

The most remarkable thing here, though, is what stands around it. The church is surrounded by a former cemetery, today a public park, and along its wall survive nineteen funerary chapels of Jelenia Góra patricians, from 1716–1770. They have elaborate architectural forms and rich sculptural decoration, and a collection of gravestones is displayed between them.

That is rare on this scale: a continuous wreath of Baroque funerary architecture, put up by the merchant families of a single town within a single half-century. Some studies attribute several of the earliest chapels to Martin Frantz himself, the church’s architect – I have found no confirmation of that in the heritage record, so it stays a supposition rather than a fact.

Walking round the park is a visit in itself and does not require going into the church.

Not just a church but a complex

Beside the church stands the pastors’ house joined to a grammar school – a three-storey building on a U-shaped plan. South of the church, on ul. 1 Maja, survives the cantors’ house of 1737, with barrel vaults and lunettes preserved on the ground floor. Together they form a complex that was for the Protestants of Jelenia Góra not only a place of prayer but also a school and its facilities.

1945: a change of congregation

The church was Protestant for over two hundred years. After the war and the expulsion of the German inhabitants the state took it over and handed it to the Catholic Church. Today it is a Roman Catholic parish of the Elevation of the Holy Cross, serving at the same time as a garrison church.

That is worth saying plainly, because the whole history of this place is Protestant – from the Treaty of Altranstädt to the galleries built for preaching – and anyone who walks in will see a Catholic church.

A hundred metres away the same story has its other half. In the Orthodox church pray the descendants of people brought here in 1947 under Operation Vistula. Two neighbouring stops on this route tell one story: that after 1945 the population was exchanged and the buildings stayed.

What else is nearby

From the Wojanowska Gate it is exactly the distance laid down in 1707. Towards the old town the route leads to the basilica – the church the Protestants lost – and ends at the Karkonosze Museum. The figurines along the way are on the list of stags.

Eighty metres from the church stands the stag Rockman.

Frequently asked questions

What are the Churches of Grace? Six churches which Emperor Joseph I allowed to be built after the Treaty of Altranstädt of 1 September 1707, forced on him by King Charles XII of Sweden. The one in Jelenia Góra is the largest.

Why does the church stand outside the old centre? Because that was the condition: Churches of Grace could be built only outside the town walls, at a distance no less than a cannon shot.

How many people does it hold? Over four thousand seated and as many standing. By number of seats it is the largest of the six Churches of Grace; the Church of Jesus in Cieszyn has fewer, though it is sometimes given as larger in total capacity.

Whose church is it today? Roman Catholic. Lutherans built it, but after 1945, when the German inhabitants were expelled, it was handed to the Catholic Church. Today it is the parish of the Elevation of the Holy Cross, also serving as a garrison church.

Who built it? Martin Frantz, between 1709 and 1718, modelling it on St Catherine’s church in Stockholm.

What is worth seeing inside? Two tiers of wooden galleries on twenty-six columns, the painting of 1734–1751, the altar combined with the organ and its stained-glass gloria of 1727, and the pulpit and font of 1717.

What are the chapels around the church? Nineteen Baroque funerary chapels of Jelenia Góra patricians, from 1716–1770, standing along the wall of the former cemetery, now a park.