St. Martin's Church in Krempany

Abstract

The present St. Martin's Church in Krempachy was erected around the middle of the 16th century. The temple changed its invocation three times. Originally it was dedicated to St. Servatius, then to All Saints, and at the end of the 19th century to - St. Martin. The church is a modest building of transitional type from Gothic to Renaissance. The temple has style characteristics of both periods. For example, the tower in the western part of the temple is decorated with a renaissance attic, but at the same time it has a Gothic hoarding. Attic, the so called Polish one, had close connotations with neighbouring countries, and in particular with Slovakia. Attics were very popular at that time. An additional architectural element was a wooden gallery at the top of the tower. It was significant both for observational and defensive purposes. Hoardings, or brattices, date back to the Middle Ages, and derive from starlings crowning the towers and fortified towers. The interior of the temple, decorated with Rococo furnishings, was entirely different, and is nowadays filled with works of art from the 18th century. According to some researchers of the history of the church, the high altar was built around 1725, as evidenced by a record in the parish chronicle from the same year, in which information about a newly carved reredos painted, silver-plated and gilded by an Austrian painter Jan Grimm was noted. However, the altar is richly decorated with Rococo ornamentation, which forms a coherent whole with its structure, thus suggesting that it may rather date back to the second half of the 18th century. The construction of the new reredos could have been linked to a fire of the church roof in 1788. When visiting the church in Krempachy, the musical choir is also worth noting, which was made in the late Baroque style with a concave-convex balustrade typical for that period. Painted decorations in the form of stylised flower compositions on a black background placed in the windowsills come from much later, probably the 19th century.