Open AccessStudies on reconstruction of the Holy Cross wooden church in Wodzisław Śląski
Author(s) -
Jerzy Pocisk-Dobrowolski
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
iop conference series. materials science and engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1757-899X
pISSN - 1757-8981
DOI - 10.1088/1757-899x/603/4/042020
Subject(s) - situated , patriotism , object (grammar) , panorama , population , archaeology , history , altar , geography , ancient history , art , sociology , visual arts , law , political science , demography , philosophy , politics , artificial intelligence , computer science , linguistics
Wooden churches used to commonly appear in Silesia through the past centuries. Their location was the result of local people’s needs and the accessibility of materials necessary to construct them. The form and the nature of those churches were the fruit of intermingling influences of various national cultures of the inhabitants of those areas, craftsmanship experience of various structure builders and depended on the extent of wealth of the cities, towns and villages they were erected in. Wodzisław Śląski was among the places with wooden sacred objects, in the 19 th century, it was a small town with population consisting mainly of Poles, Germans and Jews.The Holy Cross wooden church was a hospital object. The church itself was situated on top of a low hill with a brook flowing in its direct vicinity. In the periods of heavy rainfalls, the rapid stream used to wash out the hill, thus, affecting the church foundations, directly contributing to deterioration of the structure’s technical condition. The critically bad condition of the church structure was the main reason for the decision to pull it down after 1826. Throughout the recent years, the growth of the local patriotism induced the interest in the town’s history and its historical panorama. Relatively few pieces of information on the church and no drawings thereof have been preserved. The archeological and architectural research revealed a lot of interesting facts related to the church and concerning its structure and its supposed non-typical form. A realistic method to satisfy the curiosity how the church looked like in the period of its splendor was the construction of its model based on the research and studies carried out, the very construction of the miniature model in progress being a test site verifying some suppositions about the church’s appearance. The model built was added to the exhibits of the Wodzisław Śląski Museum, becoming a contribution to the discussion on methods of the dissemination of information on the historical view of the town and including the research results in the papers concerning the future form and the panorama of modern Wodzisław Śląski.