Jelenia Góra Town Trail · the long route · Sobieszów

Church of the Sacred Heart

When the Protestants of Sobieszów began building their church in 1744, the parish council took a decision that says more about those times than many a textbook: the church was to be built so that if need be it could be turned into a department store or a residential building. Hence the rectangular plan, the small windows in two rows and the mansard roof. A church that looks like a solid town house, because it had to be able to become one.

Permission that came with a new state

For a hundred years after the Thirty Years' War, Silesian Protestants had a very hard time building churches. That changed when Silesia passed from Habsburg into Prussian hands: on 13 October 1741 the Lutheran congregation in Sobieszów received permission to build a church.

The decision came quickly, but the caution remained. A congregation that remembered how easily such permissions were withdrawn secured itself in the only way available – through the design. The building was to be convertible into something secular, should politics turn again.

Three waves of Protestant churches in Silesia

This church is part of a sequence that explains the whole religious map of the region – and that can be walked along these trails.

The first wave were the churches of peace, forced on the emperor at the Peace of Westphalia: three for all Silesia, outside the town walls, of wood and clay, without towers. The second were the churches of grace, six of them, to which Emperor Joseph I agreed after the Convention of Altranstädt of 1 September 1707. One of them stands in Jelenia Góra and is a point on the short route.

The third wave came with the change of state. After Prussia took Silesia, permissions stopped being a favour wrung from an emperor and became an ordinary administrative decision. The Sobieszów congregation received theirs on 13 October 1741 – less than a year after Prussian troops marched in.

You can see the difference in the buildings. The church of grace in Jelenia Góra is a mighty cruciform church, built with the sweep of people who had waited sixty years for it. The Sobieszów church is modest and discreet – because it went up in haste, on the money of a small village congregation, and with the thought that it might one day have to be given over to a shop.

Sobieszów got there before Cieplice

A detail you will not find in descriptions of single buildings: the Protestants of Sobieszów had their permission before those of Cieplice. Theirs is dated 13 October 1741, while the Lutherans of Cieplice sent their petition to Frederick II only in December and received consent on 29 December 1741.

After that the paths diverged. Cieplice first put up a wooden church, consecrated as early as the beginning of 1742, and waited for the brick Church of the Saviour until 1774–1777. Sobieszów did the opposite: it built in brick at once, only small – and finished in a year and a half.

1744–1745: a year and a half of work

The foundation stone was laid on 12 June 1744. The masonry was directed by master Georg Porrmann, the carpentry by Gottfried Mattern of Zachełmie. On 19 December 1745 the church was consecrated and the first service held.

For the time that was express speed: eighteen months from foundation stone to first mass. But they also built simply – no tower, no elaborate massing, with a timber interior structure resting on larch columns.

A vault that had to wait thirty years

The most interesting thing in this church was made long after its consecration. The vault was completed only in 1777 and was then covered with illusionist painting – painting that imitates architecture and opens the ceiling towards the sky.

There are three scenes: music-making angels above the gallery, the apotheosis of Christ in the central part and the adoration of the Holy Cross. The painting has one surprising feature: nobody knows who made it. The sources agree on “an unknown painter”, even though it is the most striking element of the interior.

In the second half of the nineteenth century the painting was overpainted – the stylistic features show it. Since 1945 no conservation work has been done on it, and yet it is holding up quite well.

Galleries, a stained-glass window and the rest of the furnishing

The Protestant congregation went on extending the interior throughout the nineteenth century. In 1817 the church received galleries – a basic feature in a Protestant church, because they fit more of the faithful closer to the pulpit. From 1861 an ornament has been a small stained-glass window, the “Crucifixion”, set between the columns.

1946: two churches swap roles

This is the moment that explains today's Sobieszów. In 1946 the former Protestant church was taken over by the Roman Catholic parish – the same one that had for centuries looked after the church of Saint Martin, standing a few hundred metres away. The new acquisition was dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Since then there has been an arrangement that often confuses visitors: the parish is named after Saint Martin, but the main church is the Sacred Heart. The medieval church, the most important in the village for six hundred years, became the second one.

What was done after the war

Successive parish priests took the building on in turn. Father Antoni Kamiński led works in the 1960s and 1970s, Father Kazimierz Medyka renewed the interior in the early 1970s, and in 1976 the rebuilding of the chancel was completed. In 1993 the roof turret was restored, and a new cross of stainless steel was made by Stefan Stefanowicz.

What you can see

From outside you see at once what the whole history of this place is about: the building does not look like a church. A rectangle, two rows of smallish windows, a mansard roof – were it not for the roof turret, it could be taken for a manor or a large town house. That is not a failure of imagination on the architect's part but the caution of a congregation written into the walls: they did not believe the permission of 1741 was forever.

Inside it is worth looking up: the vault of 1777 is the thing to come in for. The interior is a working parish church, so it is visited outside services.