wooden church Wooden church

The church of the Holy Trinity, known as the wooden articular church in Kežmarok, is a sacral building from 1717 in Kežmarok in Prešov region. Since 2008 it has been listed in the UNESCO World Heritage List. The monument is registered The monument office of the Slovak Republic under the number ÚZPF 2582 as a wooden church.

The history of the building dates back to 1682, when the Imperial Commission determined the place of construction of the church in the suburbs behind the city walls, behind the High Gate at the stone inn from 1593. The construction was based on articules from the Vienna dream from 1681 which allowed evangelicals to build churches outside the city walls under specific conditions and limitations. In a letter dated 24 May 1687 the captain of Upper Hungary ordered Count Štefan Csáky Kežmarčany to immediately start building a prayer room. Since the ground-floor building of the original church was not enough evangelics from the city and its surroundings, in 1688 Paul Vitalis and John Michaelides were sent to collect funds from the Protestant north of Europe. After returning in 1690, however, only 274 Hungarian gold were left of the money collected after deduction, which was not enough to build. In the spring of 1717, demolition work and preparation for the reconstruction began, while the services were held in replacement rooms in the widow's estate after James Kray. On 1 June 1717 a contract was signed with Poprad builder Juraj Müttermann and the second contract with woodcarver Ján Lerch. Cities of Kristian Rochlitz, Daniel Cornides, and Ján Toppertzer were appointed to run the construction. With financial and material assistance from rich families such as Baron Imrich Lužinský of Lendak, the reconstruction went quickly and already on 15 August 1717 the church was consecrated in German and Slovak language. In 1892 the church was classified as a monument protected by the State and was declared a national cultural monument in 1985. The church put it in the Kežmarok Museum's report in 1967, subject to repair, but this did not happen, and the church was not returned until 1991, when the repairs lasting until 1996 began.

The church has a ground plan of an isosceles Greek cross with a length of 34.68 metres, a width of 30.31 metres and a height of 20.60 metres. Late-Renaissance baptistery from 1690 and stone epitaphs from 1688 were preserved from the original church. The building originally stood on brick foundations, but on the foundations of beams made of yew wood, which were replaced by bricks at the last repair. The temples of the building are made of red spruce and no metal material was used during the construction, only wooden nails, wedges and skoby. The only stone part of the church is sacristy. The arms of the building are encircled by a wide walled vault, which rests on four spinning support pillars and on the perimeter walls. Four small extensions in the corners strengthen the construction. The facade of the church is made of clay lubricant with chaffs, attached to wooden pegs. 35 000 oak pins were used in the reconstruction and were replaced in a traditional manual way. The saddle shingle roof is divided by shields and masonry. Lighting is provided by 15 round glass windows, 6 six-piece windows with whiskers and 1 square window, although the original 18th-century stains were lost during the general repair. There are six wooden chores in the building: a youth chorus on the north side with excerpts from the Old Testament, a girl's choir on the south side with woodryzabs in the shape of angelic heads, a later transition apprenticeship choir and other choirs. On the ground floor and chores fit a total of 1541 sitting persons.

The Baroque interior complements the image of the Holy Trinity above the altar and the ceiling painting, which began in 1717. Ceiling painting depicts the blue sky with clouds, twelve apostles, and four evangelizers, and its work is attributed to the Lion painters Kramer. The original pavement of trampled clay was later covered with wooden floors with stone grave epitaphs from the 17th to 19th centuries. During the last repair, the floor was paved under the benches with stone cubes, with about a hundred metal coins found in the earth from the 15th to 20th centuries. The main altar from 1718 is the work of woodcarver John Lerch. In 1727, Joachim Augustine Weiss and his wife, Marta Varada-Szakmáry, had him gilded and repainted. The central motif of altar polychrome woodcarving is Calvary with painted background, the figures of Our Lady, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, the Old Testament characters Moses and Aaron and the Trinity sculpture in the superstructure.

In 1893 the tower was removed for static reasons on the roof, which was reconstructed in 1798. Around the church there was a wall that was demolished because of bad condition in 1900. In 1985 the church was declared a national cultural monument and in 2008 it was registered as a UNESCO World Heritage List.

The wooden articular church documents religious conditions and construction art of the past centuries without the use of metal joints.