Phenomenon of Polish Religious Architecture of the End of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

It is truly difficult to find another European country where over two thousand churches were built over the last thirty years. This boom in religious architecture in our country, which is compared to the times of the very dawn of Christianisation, or to the period between the World War I and II, when Poland regained independence after the period of partitions, should be associated predominantly with the figure of Karol Wojtyła – the Polish Pope. He encouraged crowds of investors and residents of Poland to strive for new religious buildings to be erected in new districts of towns and cities, where for decades’ residents had not been able to obtain political authorities’ permissions for new places of worship. The goal of the research was to determine differences between the style of religious buildings erected at the same time in Western Europe and in our country. Isolation of Central European states in the 1970s and 1980s from access to the most advanced building technologies and materials forced to reach for traditional methods of erecting temples. A considerable role in this respect was also played by economic reasons, as churches were largely built by means of the economic system and were financed by parishioners. Amongst churches that mushroomed in Poland since the end of the 1970s, as well as in the 1980s and 1990s, several stylistic tendencies can be differentiated, characteristic for the contemporary architecture. Not all directions present in the European architecture were represented in the Polish architecture in that period. It seems that the majority of the projects represent the trend of Late Modernism. In the early 1980s, Postmodernism reached Poland, much later than projects implemented in the United States of America and in Western Europe. Religious architecture, inspired by forms of historical temples and monasteries, present for centuries in our landscape and well known to users, was being built according to the principles of these stylistics, too. The significance of the tradition of the place was restored; while searching for neo-nativeness, designers turned to forms well-known and accepted by the faithful. These quests fascinated some architects at the time. The analysis of hundreds of built churches, in terms of their external form, as well as their interiors, points to the acceptance of the quest of references to the past. Simultaneously, it should be emphasised that within the territory of our country, especially in the countryside or in small towns, one can encounter religious buildings which are quite uninteresting and difficult to be assigned to any trends in the contemporary architecture. Parishioners often lost patience and were tired of waiting for decades for permissions to erect new churches; at the same time, they were afraid that the period of fewer restrictions relating to building new temples would soon pass. Today, these projects, often implemented in great haste, wait for subsequent generations of users, architects, and artists to start to restore them for the resources of culture.