Churches of Protest

katowice_-_os._tysiaclecia._kosciol_pks.jpg, default, Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross and Our Lady of Cures in Katowice, photo: Marek Mróz / Wikimedia.org

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Since 1945, over 3 thousand churches have emerged in Poland, the majority of which were built in the 1980s. In 1988 alone, more than 950 religious buildings were being constructed. The phenomenon was a political, social, as well as architectural one.

The development of sacral architecture in Poland in the years 1945-1989 was something truly unprecedented. In a system that presupposed the secular nature of the state, and in which the authorities officially stood in opposition to the institution of the Catholic Church, a record number of religious buildings (also on the European scale) was raised. But it was not just the scale of these investments that was unique. The architectural forms of the newly built churches also differed starkly from the aesthetics prescribed and popular at the time. This phenomenon is worth viewing in the broader context of complicated relations between the Church and the state, the construction investment system, as well as the public sentiments of the period.

Outside the system

Church architecture was pretty much the only kind of architecture exempted from the state system of construction management (single-family housing in the countryside was slightly outside these rules, too). At the time of the People’s Republic of Poland, the entire process of building construction was centralised, from the design stage through the investment system to the building materials production. It was pretty much impossible to build anything outside state structures. Cutting church architecture off from the network of state-owned studios and enterprises was naturally meant to inhibit the investments which the authorities viewed unfavourably. Still, the relations between the party policymakers and the parishes wishing to build churches did not work the same way throughout the entire post-war half-century. This was tied to the periodically occurring social unrest, crises, and strikes.

This evolution is visible in the statistics. Between the end of World War Two and the early 1970s, approximately 470 new churches were raised in Poland (not including the restoration of historic ones). Meanwhile, in the decade from 1971 to 1981 alone, 1075 permits were issued to raise religious objects; in the following one, from 1982 to 1992, almost 1500 chapels and churches emerged. It is difficult to provide final statistics, since in the People’s Republic of Poland, churches were usually raised using so-called household methods, i.e. funded by the religious community, oftentimes even built with their hands out of materials obtained in a multitude of ways. For this reason, construction work would take years. In some Polish cities, churches took as long as several decades to build.

In the face of conflict

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Our Lady of the Rosary church in Gdańsk, photo: Kamil Gozdań / AW

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Where did such an increase in the number of investments come from during the last two decades of the Polish People’s Republic? The 1950s and 1960s hardly abounded in social movements and riots, which only started to proliferate with the crisis of the 1970s. And it was these tensions that the authorities aimed to break by issuing permits to build churches, an undertaking which tended to involve large groups of people, including entire local communities. Clear proof of this is the record number of 331 building permits issued in 1981, when the increasing social tension resulted in the introduction of martial law. The state policy towards the Church was strongly influenced by the election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope in 1978 and his first pilgrimages to the country, but also by practical matters: large housing estates emerging all across Poland suffered from a dramatic shortage of churches, and the pressure exerted by the faithful to raise them eventually had to bring some results.

The constantly shifting relations between the possibility to raise churches and the social situation were focused, like in a lens, in the fate of Our Lady of the Rosary church, built for the needs of the Przymorze estate in Gdańsk according to a design by Leopold Taraszkiewicz. The parish undertook the first attempts at the church investment on the wave of the political thaw in 1957 – unsuccessfully. The authorities only allowed for the construction of a church – as long as it was without a tower – in the face of the dramatic events of December ‘70. A soaring bell tower could only be added to the mass of the church in 1979, with yet another liberalisation of the state’s attitude to the Church after the election of Pope John Paul II.

Thumbnail — The Church of Our Lady the Queen of Poland (The Ark of the Lord), Kraków, photo: Wojciech Pacewicz / Forum

A much more dramatic turn of events resulted from the efforts to raise the first church in Nowa Huta, a model socialist city ‘without God.’ A parish was established there as early as 1952, but the first attempts to build a temple could only be undertaken after the political thaw. In 1957, it seemed that the investment would be possible, since the local authorities in Kraków allocated land, and an architectural tender took place. Not long after, however, the authorities changed their plans and the land was taken back for the construction of a school. This fact led to demonstrations and riots, pacified brutally by force in 1960. Still, the inhabitants of Nowa Huta and Church hierarchs persevered in their attempts to raise a place of worship. In 1965, several months after Karol Wojtyła became the Archbishop and Metropolitan of Kraków, another plot of land was successfully obtained, after which the construction of a church designed by Wojciech Pietrzyk began. Built on almost-oval plan, with characteristic facades covered with small pebbles, the Church of Our Lady the Queen of Poland is often compared to the Notre Dame du Haut chapel in Ronchamp, France, designed by Le Corbusier a decade earlier.

Simplicity or expression

While the Church of Our Lady the Queen of Poland in Nowa Huta, Kraków is characterised by an expressive, sculptural form, in Tychy – yet another large investment under the banner of socialism – the first temple was endowed with raw, modernist forms, a reference to the character of the houses being raised in the city. It emerged quite early, as early as 1958, in fields located away from urban developments (placing religious buildings on the outskirts, far from housing estates, also constituted a political choice); the church was designed by Zbigniew Weber. The geometrical, simple mass of a trapezoid cross-section narrowing down towards the top, with a graphic pattern on the side facades as the only ornament, was not met with a warm reaction of the faithful. The chunky mass, the raw appearance, and the toned-down colour scheme were meant to constitute a tribute to the industrial architecture of the region, but the parishioners expected a temple with more ornamental forms. The parish priest, who had successfully fought for the building permit, was harshly criticised.

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St John the Baptist’s Church in Tychy, photo: Marcin Tomalka / AW

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There were many reasons why in the post-war half-century, especially in the 1970s and the 1980s, churches were endowed not just with highly original, almost spectacular forms but also with great sizes. As the example of the church in Tychy proved, it was the parishioners themselves who expected such impressive forms. But that’s not the whole story. Church architecture was the only kind exempted from state regulations and norms, hence it was only when designing a church that architects could implement truly unique ideas, original forms or design solutions. The effects of this were not always good. As the architect Janusz Kazubiński noticed on the pages of the Architektura (Architecture) magazine in 1980:

When a designer, frustrated by Plattenbau, gets his hands on a topic where ‘everything is allowed,’ he loses all restraint. All of what he could not put into the pre-fabricated housing estate, he would like to fit into a small church. And he does. The tragedy is further exacerbated by his skills.

The unprecedented and unique abundance of forms often coincided with the significant scale of the newly raised buildings. The churches were larger than necessary, since it could not be predicted when the neighbouring precinct would obtain a permit to have their own church built. Moreover, the authorities could withdraw their approval at any moment. Moreover, the lack of funds resulted in the highly popular model of a two-storey church. First, the so-called lower church was built, where services could be held before the funds for the upper part of the building were raised.

By the estate

Still, both architects and investors – parish priests emphasise one more important reason the extraordinary forms of the churches. The goal was to oppose not only the monotonous rhythm of modernist blocks but also the state authorities, who enforced urban design so regular you could fit a ruler to it, locking people in simple blocks. The mass of the church was supposed to dominate, to stand out from the surroundings in a spectacular way, strike one with a form completely unlike the mass housing of the time. Its role was to clearly signal the building’s special nature and importance. Maria Ewa Rosier-Siedlecka, a scholar of post-war church architecture in Poland, noticed in her book Posoborowa Architektura Sakralna (Postconciliar Sacral Architecture):

Since, unfortunately, it rarely happens that the church is designed alongside the estate or precinct for which it is raised, the task of the designer is usually to reshape the existing landscape by inserting a new element: the parish church. Taking the existing state of things into consideration is a matter of great import, especially that a church, due to the functions performed in it, tends to be of a character and visual impact different from that of the housing development it normally grows into.

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Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross and Our Lady of Cures in Katowice, photo: Marek Mróz / Wikimedia.org

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A good example of this is the Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross and Our Lady of Cures in Katowice, built on the edge of the Tysiąclecia (Millenium) District. The parish kept applying for a building permit for a dozen or so years. Finally, in 1977, the construction started. The church was designed by Henryk Buszko and Aleksander Franta, the designers of the district, but it was endowed with a completely different shape. The architects made good use of the political decision to locate the church far from the blocks, since the land on the outskirts allowed them to better highlight the sculptural forms of the abundantly fragmented, complex brick mass, full of curves, cylinders, and arches. The lower part of the church was consecrated in 1981, the upper one was completed ten years later.

A symbol of hope

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Church of St. Queen Jadwiga in Kraków, photo: Zygmunt Put

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The ‘block’ context of the Krowodrza, Górka, and Azory districts constituted a point of reference for Romuald Loegler, who in 1978 designed (in cooperation with Jacek Czekaj) the Church of St. Queen Jadwiga in Kraków. The architect himself said that he reached for modes of expression characteristic for large block estates, which he nevertheless reshaped. Hence the chunky, raw, concrete structure, dominated, however, by curves and sharp angles instead of right angles. The expressive form of the Church of Our Lady Queen of the World in Radom, really standing out from the surroundings, was meant to constitute a symbol of hope commonly felt in the early 1980s, when the Solidarity movement took off, as the architect of the church, Wojciech Gęsiak, recollects. The Radom church, which resembles a flower to some, while others associate it with the arches of the Sydney Opera, was designed in 1981. Wojciech Jarząbek, who in the early 1980s designed the Church of Our Lady Queen of Peace in the Popowice district in Wrocław, followed a similar trail of thought. 'The design of the church in Popowice was meant to showcase a thousand years of the history of the Church in Poland: a Romanesque portal, a Gothic mass, a Baroque interior and a futuristic tower. These were the times of Solidarity, while the block estate in Popowice symbolised communism,’ stated the architect directly.

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Church of Our Lady Queen of Peace in Wrocław, photo: Anna Cymer

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Just as the architects, by designing the spectacular masses of churches, made the effort to communicate the buildings’ meaning and their own opposition to the system, the authorities attempted to ‘manipulate’ the popular sentiment through issuing decisions that permitted the building of churches, either in cities or in the countryside. Especially that the construction of even a small church was hugely involving for the parishioners. The fundraising itself was a significant challenge – after all, the parish couldn’t count on any help from the state. Obtaining building materials and construction equipment required no less effort. Most of the sacral buildings emerged thanks to the active involvement of the parishioners, who would often simply build the churches with their own hands.

Stanisław Niemczyk, an extraordinary figure in the firmament of Polish architecture, mentioned the enormous value of the cooperation with parishioners numerous times (while not every architect took active part in the construction of the building their designed, Niemczyk would do that every time). He believed the communal effort reinforced community ties, and during the works, the architect had the opportunity to talk to the future users of the building, explain to them the symbolism contained in the edifice, and discuss the significance of architecture. Local communities were integrated even more strongly by the construction of a church when said construction was… illegal. In Poland’s post-war history, many such cases can be found, in which parishioners, who had awaited an official permit to no avail, would secretly raise a church building. This, of course, was the case mostly with small-scale countryside buildings. In one of the villages, inside a legally existing wooden building of a community centre, a small church was built and remained there after the centre was pulled down. In another village, corn was planted all over a field to hide the construction work. The Church of St. Maximilian Kolbe in Cisiec near Żywiec is commonly called ‘a church of one day and one night,’ as this was the time the local community needed to build a place of worship for themselves.

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Church of St Maximilian Kolbe, Cisiec, photo: Paweł Sowa / AW

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The post-war half-century was a time when sacral architecture truly flourished. While controversial, cerebral, and sometimes failed, it constitutes an expression of strong emotions and well thought-out political action. One shouldn’t judge it without first understanding the context of its emergence, since it is the context that has the strongest influence on this form of architecture, which has not appeared again ever since.

Translated by Anna Potoczny

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