There is a moment on the main road to Zakopane when the hills suddenly open out to reveal a glorious view of the Tatra Mountains to the south. All too quickly, the vista disappears as the road descends into a valley, bridging the River Raba on a miserable concrete viaduct, before curving up towards the next ridge. Just as the highway approaches the crest, a wooden church appears to the right of the road. As wooden churches go, it is unexceptional, but its fetching location beside the highway surely makes the Church of the Holy Cross one of the most photographed buildings in rural Poland. The hill villages of this region were depleted in the mid-nineteenth century by emigration, with many residents moving to Minnesota. But even though people left Rdzawka, the old village church remains. The carriage road to Zakopane has been vastly improved to accommodate the thousands of motorists who nowadays speed south through the Beskidy Hills towards the Tatra Mountains.
If there is just one commodity which defines the Tatras and the wider Carpathian region it is wood. And for those driving south from Kraków towards Zakopane, the Church of the Holy Cross, so prominently positioned by the main road at Rdzawka, is an intimation of all the good things that lie ahead. It is a blessing after the relentless muddle of roadside advertisement hoardings and the untidy villages of Malopolska.
If there is just one commodity which defines the Tatras and the wider Carpathian region it is wood.
The vernacular wooden architecture of villages around the Tatra Mountains, on both the Polish and Slovakian side of the border, is just one expression of the affection for wood that inflects the entire Carpathian region. In this feature we venture east from the Tatra Mountains into remote hill country which is still home to an ethnic and linguistic minority called the Rusyns. You can read more about Rusyns in an accompanying article on pages 19–21 of this issue of hidden europe and there is a map of the region on page 9.
Elemental virtue
There is a restrained eloquence to architecture in wood. Whether it be an ancient wooden temple or palace in Japan, a fragile wooden church in the remote Russian tundra or a handsome wooden barn in New England, wood brings to buildings a peculiar quality of harmony.
The virtues of wood are of course not universally appreciated. Thomas Jefferson reacted in the closing years of the eighteenth century against “the unhappy prejudice that houses of brick and stone are less wholesome than those of wood.” Jefferson had built himself a fine Palladian home of masonry, and was happy to throw in his lot with modernity. But long after Jefferson’s death the managers of slave plantations in the American South were still favouring wood for their own colonial-style mansions, while consigning their workers to functional housing blocks made from local stone.
Jefferson’s message would have found no resonance in the Carpathian Mountains of Europe, where the intrinsic virtue of wood as a building material was never disputed. It was not that stone was unavailable in the Carpathian region. Rather it was a case of a deeply cherished belief in the benign beauty of wood, a beauty that would be revealed and enhanced through the patient work of carpenters — a profession ennobled in the Carpathian mind by the fact that Joseph was a carpenter. There was (and still is) something socially inclusive about the use of wood in communities in the mountains of south-east Poland, north-east Slovakia and neighbouring areas of Carpathian Ukraine. The humblest homes in a village were all historically built of wood, and so too was the grandest building: the church.
Wood was thus a symbol of unity within a community, a mark of a village’s connection with its host landscape. Wood had certain other advantages, particularly when it came to churches. They were naturally portable. If a community outgrew its church and needed to build a larger one, the redundant structure could be dismantled and moved to another community in need of a church of that size. A sizeable proportion of the wooden churches in Carpathian Europe have seen service in more than one village. This is modular architecture par excellence. There is also an essential transparency about wooden architecture. Entire churches can be assembled from logs of various shapes and sizes without the use of nails — which might evoke painful associations with the Crucifixion. And the results of local craftsmanship are plain and visible for all to see — and, if they wish, to copy. Wood is thus a medium of chaste simplicity. It holds no secrets.
The vernacular architecture of the Goral villages in the Carpathian Mountains is characterised by an essential simplicity enhanced by the sparing use of decorative elements. These cottages are in Ždiar, a village in Slovakia where many Goral families still live (photo © hidden europe).
For the entire Carpathian region, wood thus became more than merely a building material. It was a carrier of values and traditions, connecting communities with their local landscapes. Small surprise therefore that when, in the late nineteenth century, leading artists and intellectuals were looking to develop a distinctly Polish style of architecture, they were inspired by the vernacular wooden architecture of the Carpathian region.
Poland was of course at the time divided among three empires: Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. In the hills of southern Poland, then part of the Habsburg province of Galicia, a new middle class was seeking refuge from rapidly industrialising cities by building villas and farmsteads that recalled Alpine architecture.
The artist Stanisław Witkiewicz reacted against the trend, arguing that the region deserved more than merely buildings which mimicked a style from a distant part of Europe. Swiss chalets, argued Witkiewicz, had no place in the Tatra Mountains. So Witkiewicz developed a new architectural grammar that spoke to a uniquely Polish identity, drawing upon the vernacular building traditions of the Carpathian region. He and others in his artistic circle were particularly inspired by the wooden churches of the Carpathian region to the east of the Tatra Mountains.
The fullest expression of Witkiewicz’s work can be seen in the resort of Zakopane on the north side of the Tatras — and it is that town which lent its name to the approach, namely styl zakopiański or ‘Zakopane style’. It came with all the fussiness of art nouveau and was surely a challenge to even the most accomplished craftsmen. Where there is elegance in the simplicity of folk vernacular architecture of the Carpathians, the Zakopane style is the precise opposite. It is self-consciously ornate, favouring complicated roof lines and complex arrangements of windows. Yet it too is a product of the Carpathian region, and Witkiewicz generously recognised how much he had learnt about working with wood from his journeys through Rusyn and Lemko communities in Galicia, from his visits to Goral villages close to Zakopane and his appreciation of the wooden churches of the region to the east, where he was especially impressed by the large early-sixteenth century high-roofed church at Sękowa.
A Carpathian foray
This spring we followed in Witkiewicz’s footsteps travelling east from Zakopane through the Carpathian Mountains, stopping off here and there on either side of the high ridges that separate Poland (to the north) from Slovakia (to the south). While wooden architecture is a feature of the entire Carpathian region, the use of wood in ecclesiastical and vernacular architecture is arguably at its most impressive in that arc of the Carpathians that extends east from the Tatra Mountains as far as the sub-Carpathian town of Uzhhorod (Ужгород), a modest-sized place in the south-west corner of Ukraine which has over the last century, not always voluntarily, renegotiated its political allegiances several times. In Habsburg days it was part of Upper Hungary, and thereafter at times part of Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union, and then since 1991 within the borders of an independent Ukraine.
This is, first and foremost, a region of Europe which is divided by borders (see our article on Carpathian borders on pages 8 to 10 in this issue of hidden europe). And those borders fragment the territory of the Rusyn people for whom the Carpathians represent their cultural heartland.
Driving east from Zakopane towards the Slovakian border, the road skirts the northern edge of the Tatra Mountains before dropping steeply to cross the River Białka, entering Slovakia at Łysa Polana. Then it’s east through Tatranská Javorina where the local landowner, though himself a Lutheran, very decently built the Catholic villagers a fine wooden church. Generosity of spirit in this part of Europe so often finds expression in wood. Little more than an hour after entering Slovakia — now following the Poprad Valley upstream near L’ubotin — there is a symbolic border marker: the first village to proclaim its identity with a sign in Cyrillic on the main road: Руська Воля. Ruská Voľa is just a wee slip of a place, but it marks the entry into a different Europe. Suddenly the landscape closes in, as the main road leaves the benign comfort of the Poprad Valley and takes to the hills.
“Welcome to the land of the Rusyns,” says a young woman in perfect English when we stop in a small village just a short drive beyond Ruská Voľa. It turns out that Michaela does not speak a word of Rusyn, but she does kindly lead us to the old wooden church that stands on a hillside above the village of Lukov. “This part of our village is called Venécia,” she says, struggling to compete with the music being broadcast from the loudspeakers that hang on lamp posts and telegraph poles.
The name Venécia, we learn, recalls a past link between glassmakers from this region and their counterparts working in the same industry on the islands of the Venetian lagoon. It was the prowess of local glassmakers that brought modest wealth to Lukov-Venécia, allowing the community to buy outright in 1754 a wooden church that had been built 50 years earlier in a village on the other side of the Carpathians (near Nowy Sącz in modern-day Poland). It is a tribute to the portability of simple structures crafted from wood.
The Greek-Catholic church at Venécia (part of the village of Lukov-Venécia) in north-east Slovakia. Like so many churches in the region, it has seen service in more than one village. It was moved to its present location in 1708 (photo © hidden europe).
Michaela leaves us to explore the church which follows the Greek-Catholic tradition. The term Greek-Catholic misleadingly suggests a link with Greece. Instead, it alludes to the fact that this is a branch of the Catholic Church which prefers to use the Byzantine-style liturgies more commonly associated with the Orthodox Churches of eastern Europe. The simple wooden tserkva at Venécia reveals all the key elements of Greek-Catholic churches: a stepped pyramid design, shingled roof and planked walls, with an Orthodox-style iconostasis in the interior.
Our journey further east into the Carpathian hills is a tranquil exploration of two dozen simple wooden churches — many of them included on UNESCO’s World Heritage List which cites churches in Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine (see box opposite). We find churches which have stood on the same plot of land for generations, and others which have been dismantled and moved from village to village. We encounter churches which have shifted their religious allegiances, not always voluntarily, from Greek-Catholic to Orthodox and back again. And one Sunday morning, in the Slovakian spa town of Bardejovské Kúpele, we find two exquisitely beautiful churches just a hundred metres from each other. Visitors to the spa are making their way through light spring drizzle, some heading for the stone church painted in characteristic Habsburg yellow where they will attend Holy Mass. A smaller group of the faithful walks up the hill to the old wooden church (pictured on the front cover of this issue of hidden europe) where they will sing the Divine Liturgy in the Greek-Catholic tradition.
This is a Jefferson moment. Stone or wood? Baroque comfort in the newer Habsburg church which will surely be bright and airy, or do we settle for the simpler option of a wooden church built in 1730 (but only moved from its original site in Mikulášová to Bardejovské Kúpele two hundred years later)? Each path has its blessings. But we do not hesitate and fall in line behind the smaller group of churchgoers who appreciate that the real treasure of the Carpathian region is wood.
The church at Ruská Bystrá pictured on page 19 in this issue is another fine example of a Greek-Catholic wooden church from the Carpathians. The photo gallery section of the hidden europe website has a virtual excursion around the wooden churches of north-east Slovakia. Our selection of images in the gallery highlights the full variety of architectural styles found in the region’s churches.
