Polskie kościoły drewniane : straty wojenne - straty pokojowe : Wołyń i wieluńskie

• Authors: Brykowski Ryszard

Title variants

EN

Polish Wooden Churches. Wartime and Peacetime Losses. Volhynia and the Wieluń Region

• Languages of publication: PL EN

Abstracts

EN

Vohynia and the Wieluń region were two parts of the former Commonwealth. The Wieluń region „always” constituted the western borderland and Volhynia was situated in the center of the Commonwealth — the Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania — and only in 1920 did it become the eastern borderland. During the Russian partition, Volhynia witnessed a particulaly harsh restriction of the organization of the Catholic Church and the destruction of its sacral buildings. On 1 September 1939 armoured Wehrmacht divisions made their way towards Warsaw across the Wieluń region and the Soviet army appeared in Volhynia on 17 September of that year. The Yalta agreement decided that this seized land should be never returned to Poland. The different fate of the two regions was reflected in the size and state of the preserved historical monuments including wooden church architecture, especially closely connected with Polish culture. In September 1939 there were 25 wooden churches in the Wieluń region. None of them were damaged during the war campaign and the five years of the German occupation. The most valuable of these wooden objects comes from the sixteenth century. Unfortunately, today only a single such edifice stands unchanged while the rest have been either rebuilt or subjected to transformations which obliterated their original character and stylistic features. The most difficult period for the survival of those monuments in an unaltered form were the years of the post-war consolidation of the Polish state (1921-1925 and 1948-1949) and, predominantly, periods of great socio-political upheavals and tension: the taking over of power by Edward Gierek (1970), the emergence of „Solidarity” and the years of martial law (1978-1984). Successive rulers of the „people’s democracy” required domestic order and, at the very least, the neutrality of the clergy; for this reason, activity contrary to the law about the protection of cultural property was simply „unnoticed”. In September 1939 there were 39 wooden churches in Volhynia. Here also none was destroyed during direct wartime hostilities. Subsequently, however, the German- Soviet front moved twice across the area, and Volhynia was the site of warring Polish, Ukrainian and Soviet partisan movements. Only as regards some of the churches do we have information about the time and manner of their destruction and about the perpetrators of arson. The church in Tomaszgrod was burnt down by Soviet partisans in 1943. In the same year, the Germans and the Ukrainian police killed the population of the Polish village of Myszkowka, setting fire to all the buildings. The Germans or members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army burnt down the church in Wojkiewicze, together with the residents of the village who were trapped inside the building. The same crime was committed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in Choloniewicze; in the village of Dermanka it killed all the Poles and set fire to the buildings. When on 18 July 1943 the Polish self-defense managed to flee Huta Stepańska, surrounded by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the village and the church were burnt and razed to the ground. Only a single ruin of a wooden church (from 1771) has been preserved in Wiszenki. In Volhynia the war against Polishness — Poles and Polish culture — lasted from September 1939 for the next 52 years, up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. After 1947 and the resettlement of Poles from annexed Volhynia to the new Polish state, surviving churches were pulled down and used for construction material or fuel; others became kollhoz storehouses or, totally ruined, they were abandoned as was the case in Wiszenki. It would be extremely difficult to estimate the losses and we can only cite the number of the damaged churches in Volhynia; in seven instances we have at our disposal modest iconographie material. Losses which Polish culture suffered in Volhynia are even more painful considering that for all practical purposes we know nothing about the outfitting of these examples of wooden sacral architecture.

Keywords

PL

kościoły drewniane; budownictwo drewniane; Wołyń; Wieluńskie; drewniane budownictwo sakralne

• Publisher: Narodowy Instytut Dziedzictwa
• Journal: Ochrona Zabytków
• Year: 1994
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 158-167

Dates

published

1994

Contributors

author

Brykowski Ryszard

References

• Elenchus ecclesiarum et cleri saecularis et regularis dioecesis Luccoviensis pro anno domini 1937, Łuck 1937;
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• Inwentarz drewnianej architektury sakralnej w Polsce, red. R. Brykowski, zesz. 4b. Kościoły w Wielkopolsce XVI w. (Dzietrzniki, Gaszyn, Grębień, Jaworzno, Kadłub, Łaszew, Łyskornia, Ochędzyn, Popowice, Wierzbie, Wiktorow), oprac. R. Brykowski (Łaszew, Wiktorow) i G. Ruszczyk (pozostałe miejscowości), Warszawa 1993;
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• B. Wolff-Łozińska, Malowidła stropow polskich 1 połowy XVI w. Dekoracje roślinne i kasetonowe, Warszawa 1971.

Identifiers

ISSN

0029-8247