The “Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre” Centre in Lublin is a local government cultural institution. It works towards the preservation of cultural heritage and education. Its function is tied to the symbolic and historical meaning of the Centre’s location in the Grodzka Gate, which used to divide Lublin into its respective Christian and Jewish quarters, as well as to Lublin as a meeting place of cultures, traditions and religions.

Part of the Centre are the House of Words and the Lublin Underground Trail.

The “Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre” Centre in Lublin is a local government cultural institution. It works towards the preservation of cultural heritage and education. Its function is tied to the symbolic and historical meaning of the Centre’s location in the Grodzka Gate, which used to divide Lublin into its respective Christian and Jewish quarters, as well as to Lublin as a meeting place of cultures, traditions and religions.

Part of the Centre are the House of Words and the Lublin Underground Trail.

Church of the Holy Cross in Lublin (university church of the Catholic University of Lublin)

Church of the Holy Cross - the facadeThe church of the Holy Cross was built in the first half of the fifteenth century, by the route connecting Lublin and Kraków. Initially, it was a wooden church. Before 1623, that building was replaced with a brick one. The years 1934-1935 brought a thorough makeover carried out by Warsaw architect Marian Lalewicz.

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The church is situated on the northern side of Radziszewskiego Street. It is adjacent to the edifice of the Catholic University of Lublin (Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski, KUL).

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University church of the Catholic University of Lublin.

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The first mentions of the wooden church of the Holy Cross come from a legend written down, among others, by father Paweł Ruszel (quoted by J.A. Wadowski). In 1434, a merchant from Gdańsk called Henryk, while alone in the Lublin Dominican church, decided to steal the relics of The True Cross that were displayed on the altar, and take them to his home town. He managed to snatch the relics and leave the town but, having travelled a few stayas [the staya was an old Polish measure of distance, varying in actual length – ed.], his horses stopped and would not go any further. Frightened, Henryk revealed the crime that he had committed, returned the stolen relics, and funded a church at the spot where the hoses had stopped, to commemorate that miraculous event.

Attempts were made to link the construction of the church of the Holy Cross with the municipal gallows, which had been located nearby at least from 1408. The location of the church could have been related with the need to provide last offices and a burial in consecrated ground outside the city limits for the convicts. Such interpretation, although partly correct, is not exhaustive. The fact that convicts received religious offices is indisputable, in the light of the written sources: the record of a visitation from 1603 mentions the obligation of every prebendary at the church to [...] celebrate one Low Mass of the Passion of Christ a week [...], administer the holy sacraments to prisoners and convicted to death, accompany them to the execution site, and give them advice that leads to salvation [excerpt translated into Polish by Fr. Wadowski, pp. 497-498]. The excerpt quoted above implies that the obligation to administer offices to the convicts was not the most important one, as the duty of saying one Passion Mass every week was mentioned first, being the principal obligation. This is wholly coherent with the dedication of the church.

The rise of the Passion-related devotion in the late Middle Ages, together with the difficulties in travelling to Jerusalem that surged after the fall of the Crusader states in the Holy Land, led to the emergence of a singular form of religious life. People started erecting various sacred structures: crucifixes, sculptures, shrines, chapels, and small churches with dedications related to the Passion of Christ on hilltops, usually located close to human settlements. The faithful would visit those places in order to contemplate the Passion of Christ. Their location was meant to provide a symbolic link with the Golgotha.

The location of the Lublin church of the Holy Cross and the nearby Passion shrine – on top of a noticeable hill outside the town – is in perfect accordance with that current of devotion. Apart from the dedication of the church, the shrine – the so-called Passion of God (Boża Męka) – is the principal proof of the Passion-related character of the entire hill. In the late Middle Ages and the Early modern period, the name itself, like the names “fall” and “station”, referred to crucifixes, posts or sculptures that marked the stages of the Passion services.
For quite a long time the church received no endowment. Prebend was not assigned to it until 1549. The record of the visitation by bishop Maciejowski in 1603 is the last source to describe the church as a wooden building. It is also the only one that contains a more detailed description of the church. Together with the etching made in the same period by Hogenberg and Braun, it allows to reconstruct the appearance of the late-Gothic temple rather accurately.
It was a small timber church with a single nave on a roughly square plan, with smaller and lower chancel closed with a straight wall. Inside, there were two stone altars – the high altar supported a triptych with a statue of The Blessed Virgin Mary at the centre and paintings depicting the history of the foundation of the church on the sidepieces. The church was surrounded by cemetery enclosed by wooden fence. An ossuary was located in the northern part of the cemetery.
In 1598, the burghers of Lublin bought the church plot from Bridgettine nuns, and before 1623, the timber church was replaced with a brick one, funded by the new owners. The burghers wanted to establish a parish at the new church, since, after three centuries of town’s development, the old parish church of St. Michael proved too small to meet its needs. Those plans were eventually abandoned, and instead more clergymen were appointed at the church of St. Michael.

From 1697, the church was taken care of by reformed Dominican friars, who built a monastery at its northern side. They resided there until 1800, when the order was cassated and the buildings confiscated by the Austrian army. At that time the cemetery was closed. Troops – initially Austrian, after 1809 Polish, and from 1831 Russian – used the monastery and the church (which was turned into a warehouse) until 1921, when the buildings were leased to the newly established University of Lublin (today’s KUL).

Immediately after they were leased, repair works started, to the design of architect Marian Lalewicz, who also supervised them directly. The remodelling carried out by Lalewicz was of a very large scale. What was left of the old church were the lower sections of the walls, which determined the layout of the reconstructed building. The university acquired ownership of the buildings only in 1997.

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1408 – the first mention of the municipal gallows located by the Kraków route;

1434 – the legendary date of the foundation of the church of the Holy Cross by a merchant from Gdańsk;

1549 – prebend was assigned to the church;

1598 – the Lublin townspeople bought the plot on which the church stands;

1603 – visitation of bishop Maciejowski, the last mentions of the wooden church;

1618 – the work by Hogenberg and Braun, depicting the wooden church of the Holy Cross, was published in Cologne;

before 1623 – construction of the brick church;

1697 – the church was taken over by reformed Dominican friars, construction of monastery at the northern side of the church;

1800 – the Dominican order cassated, the buildings taken over by the army, and expanded for its purposes;

1921 – the buildings were leased to the University of Lublin;

1934-35 – thorough remodelling of the church carried out by Marian Lalewicz;

September 1939-July 1944 – the buildings were used by the Wehrmacht;

August 1944 – the buildings taken by Russians;

the 1960s – the current church interior décor was created.

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Marian Lalewicz

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In its current form, the church is an oriented building with nave, a single aisle, and chancel closed with semi-circular wall. The chancel is narrower and lower than the nave. The rectangular nave consists of three bays with choir gallery embedded into the western bay. The aisle, formed by remodelling of the southern wing of the adjoining monastery, is much narrower than the nave. The matroneum, which is situated above the aisle, is open towards the nave. The chancel is formed of a rectangular bay adjoining the nave and an apse of equal width. Barrel vault with lunettes which rests on massive wall pillars covers the interior. The chancel shares its northern wall with sacristy constructed in the course of the remodelling works. On the upper storey of the sacristy is the former chaplain’s flat. On the outside, this small part of the building stands out from its body, coped with segmental arch-shaped top with two pilasters on its sides, resembling a pediment but with no entablature.
The church has gable roofing. At the middle of the ridge of the nave roof there is an octagonal bell fleche with bulbous cupola.
The façade, facing west, is divided into three axes and composed of characteristically reduced elements of a giant order attached to the wall: pseudo-pilasters and simplified entablature. Horizontal division into two storeys is accentuated by string course. The groundwork for the composition of the façade consists of vertical elements: wide double pilasters that flank the entire wall, with back sections of the pilasters crowned with returns of the cornice and the pediment. The front sections of the pilasters are coped with detached quarter-circular side segments of the pediment. At the centre of the façade is avant-corps crowned with tympanum in the form of a segmental arch. Rectangular door opening is situated on the main axis of the avant-corps and the entire façade. It is framed and set on the face of the avant-corps together with rusticated portal, which is crowned with tympanum in the form of a segmented arch with a blind window at the centre. At the sides of the portal are small narrow windows that provide additional lighting to the space below the choir gallery inside the church. Above the entrance, on the main axis of the façade, supported by thin cornice that separates the storeys, is a window in the shape of a rectangle crowned with a segmented arch. The moulded window frame has projecting label stops at the upper corners. The entire façade is coped with plain triangular pediment.

The external faces of the church are articulated by means of slender buttresses crowned with quarter-circular small roofs. The horizontal articulation consists of the crowning cornice and the thin string course, which also serves as window sill. Both elements carry on the horizontal divisions of the western face of the church. The nave and the chancel are lit by windows similar to those of the façade.

 

The architecture of the church merges historic, traditional form with modernist treatment of details, which are reduced, simplified in an interesting way. Although the body of the church establishes a relation to the temples built in the so-called Lublin Renaissance style (the seventeenth-century brick church was built in that style), the baroque architecture is the primary point of reference. In the course of the remodelling, Lalewicz introduced a collection of typical baroque architectural motifs, such as segmented tympana with returns, rectangular windows coped with segmented arches, and window frames with label stops at the upper corners. Reduction of the elements of architectural orders and use of pseudo-pilasters with cornice returns instead of capitals are probably inspired by baroque architecture as well. Other typical baroque features are: consistent form of expressing the divisions of the external faces, accentuation of the vertical elements by means of numerous noticeable returns, and the wall-pillar layout of the interior of the nave, with massive wall pillars supporting the vault.

These elements of the baroque architecture were characteristically reduced to the rudimentary architectural forms. Many classical elements of the order (especially mouldings of cornices but also plinths, capitals and pilasters) were omitted, and ornaments are virtually absent.

 

 

 

Text by Hubert Mącik

Edited by Monika Śliwińska

Translated by Jarosław Kobyłko

LiteratureDirect link for this paragraphGo back to indexGo back to index

Bania Z. (1997) Święte miary jerozolimskie. Grób Pański. Anastasis. Kalwaria, Warszawa.
Kopeć J.J. (1975) Droga KrzyżowaDzieje nabożeństwa i antologia współczesnych tekstów, Poznań.
Maisel W. (1989) Archeologia prawna Europy, Warszawa–Poznań.
Marczewski J. (2002) Duszpasterska działalność kościoła w średniowiecznym Lublinie, Lublin.
Mącik H. (2006) Czy w Lublinie istniała późnośredniowieczna kalwaria?, „Roczniki Humanistyczne”, vol. LIV: 2006, issue 4, pp. 315–326.
Michalska M. (2001) Architektura gmachu Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego. Historia i inspiracje stylistyczne, „Roczniki Humanistyczne” vol. XLVIII–XLIX: 2000–2001, issue. 4, pp. 195–232.
Wadowski A. (2004) Kościoły lubelskie, Lublin [reprint].
Zahajkiewicz M.T., ed. (2000) Archidiecezja Lubelska. Historia i administracja, Lublin.

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