History
Despite the physical and political constraints, three of the churches became the biggest timber-framed religious buildings in Europe due to pioneering constructional and architectural solutions.
The church in Jawor, under the invocation of the Holy Ghost is 43.5-metre (143 ft) long, 14-metre (46 ft) wide and 15.7-metre (52 ft) high and has capacity of 5,500. It was constructed by architect Albrecht von Saebisch (1610–1688) from Wroclaw (then German Breslau) and was finished a year later in 1655. The 200 paintings inside by were done by Georg Flegel in 1671–1681. The altar, by Martin Schneider, dates to 1672, the original organ of J. Hoferichter from Legnica (then German Liegnitz) of 1664 was replaced in 1855–1856 by Adolf Alexander Lummert.
By that time, the town had been part of the Lutheran Kingdom of Prussia for about a century. Another 100 years later, in 1945, the town became part of Poland, as a result of the Potsdam Agreement.
The similar church, erected in Głogów (then German Glogau) burned down in 1758, but the one in Świdnica, under the invocation of the Holy Trinity, survived like the one in Jawor. Both were restored by a Polish–German cooperation, and recognized by UNESCO in 2001.
Read more about this topic: Churches Of Peace
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“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)