History
The church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Choszczno (German: Arnswalde) was built by the Knights Hospitaller in the first half of the 14th century on the site of an earlier granite church from the 13th century. This was confirmed by the document of Margrave Waldemar from 1309, in which he gave the Knights Hospitaller the right of patronage. This privilege was confirmed by Pope John XXII in 1312.
The date of completion of the construction of the church is unknown, but a document from 1350 recorded the foundation of a new altar for the church by margrave Ludwig. For this reason, it can be assumed that the construction of the chancel and the nave was completed or significantly advanced at that time. The sacristy was also built in the same period. The church tower was built on the plinth of the first church, and work on it was completed around 1400. Presumably, the installation of vaults in the nave was also completed in the 15th century.
The Choszczno parish church was damaged many times by fires and wars. It was damaged in a fire of 1511, and then during the Thirty Years’ War it burned down along with the entire town in 1637. Only the chancel survived, while the restoration of the rest lasted until the 1660s. In 1752, 1762 and 1797 the tower was damaged and its roof had to be renovated every time. In the years 1859-1861, a neo-Gothic renovation of the entire church was carried out, but its effects ruined the Second World War. Reconstruction works began in 1956, which restored the church’s original Gothic appearance.
Architecture
The church was built in the southern part of the market square, within the town walls. It was constructed of bricks in the monk bond, with granite blocks in the plinth, likely recovered from the older church. It comprised a four-bay hall-shaped nave with two aisles, characteristically built on a roughly square plan, followed by a lower and elongated chancel, polygonal to the east, and a quadrangular western tower with five storeys. The nave was as long as the chancel, which was created to be as wide as the central nave. A sacristy adjoined the chancel to the north. The church was covered with gable roofs and a hip roof over the tower. The church’s structure clearly outlined all its parts, arranged in a gradation: from the low chancel, through the slightly higher nave, to the tower towering above all.
The church’s exterior facades were decorated primarily with vertical accents. Large pointed-arch windows were created in the chancel and aisles, separated by single-stepped buttresses. Additionally, a polygonal communication turret was placed in the southeast corner of the nave. A stone plinth and crowning cornices were used as horizontal elements. The eastern gable of the nave was divided by a stepped arrangement of twenty pointed blendes and a small circular blende at the top. The tower was divided into stories by cornices (except for the space between the third and fourth stories) and decorated with pointed blendes. The exception was the austere ground floor, which featured only a portal on the west side. The tower’s blendes were divided by axially arranged two-light openings, three on each side on the top story. All were framed by pointed arches with a circular blende at the top, but with varying jambs: three orders on the second story, two orders and a concave on the third story, and shafts on the fourth story. The ground floor of the tower was topped with a frieze of ceramic segments arranged in an openwork motif of triangles and rhombuses, bisected by a single horizontal bar.
The main entrance to the church was located in the ground floor of the tower on the west, where it led to the porch beneath the tower. A magnificent pointed portal with handsome moulded jambs was set there, with alternating shafts and concaves running continuously from the plinth to the archivolt boss. Similar, but smaller portals were located in the aisles in the second bay from the west and in the chancel at the point of connection with the sacristy (in the extreme western bay).
Inside, the bays of the nave and chancel were designed as rectangles perpendicular to the church axis, while the bays of the side aisles were almost square. The central nave was built twice as wide as the aisles. All were covered with a brick vault, resting on three pairs of octagonal pillars and semi-octagonal half-pillars. Their function was to support the arcade’s moulded arches, along with the wall-shafts superimposed on the aisles sides. The wall-shafts were trapezoidal in cross-section and flanked by other shafts. In the chancel, they were originally suspended on corbels. In the aisles and probably in the central nave, a stellar vault was used, while in the chancel a cross-rib vault was built. A similar vault may also have been installed in the original northern sacristy.
The articulation of the church’s interior walls was designed in a distinctive manner, employing a two-story system of niches, separated by rectangular pilaster strips that served as internal buttresses. Windows were placed in the upper story. The lower story, a plinth-like structure, was treated as a massive wall, in which semicircular recesses were created. Similar recesses were built in the parish church in Gryfice, although in Choszczno, no gallery was placed above it, nor were the wall pillars pierced by it.
The southern wall of the chancel featured tripartite sedilia, enclosed by a single large niche, capped with a pointed arch and moulded with shafts, concaves, and offsets. Three trefoil-shaped arcades in the lower part of the niche were decorated with crockets and supported by corbels in the form of bas-relief capitals with leaves. The upper part of the niche was formed by a tympanum with a brick relief depicting the Tree of Jesse, an artistic representation of Christ’s family tree. It was made of burnt bricks, pressed in a special mold. Individual sections of the relief were joined with mortar – a sculptural depiction of a crucifix with Christ, figures of Mary and St. John, logs, and busts of men holding banderoles. Furthermore, the backgrounds were extended with vines, creating a convex decorative grid.
Current state
The church is one of the most monumental examples of a group of three-aisle hall buildings with compact nave and elongated chancel (Dobigniew, Drawsko, Recz, collegiate in Kołobrzeg). Nineteenth-century renovations contributed to the addition of turrets in the western corners of the aisles, removal of the original northern sacristy and construction of the southern sacristy. Also the stellar vault of the interior of the nave is a post-war reconstruction of the nineteenth-century vault, which in turn was based on the traces preserved in the north-eastern corner of the central nave. During the regothisation, windows tracery were also made, and the chancel wall- shafts were extended to the floor. Unfortunately, there is no vault in the tower ground floor. The oldest monuments inside the church include the epitaphs from the fifteenth century and the most valuable monument of the church – Jesse’s Tree from the fourteenth century, that is, an artistic representation of the genealogical tree of Christ in the form of a ceramic bas-relief in the niche in the southern wall of the chancel. Moreover, among the original architectural details, the three entrance portals, the ceramic frieze on the ground floor of the tower, the facades of the tower upper floors, and the eastern gable of the nave stand out.
bibliography:
Jarzewicz J., Architektura średniowieczna Pomorza Zachodniego, Poznań 2019.
Jarzewicz J., Gotycka architektura Nowej Marchii, Poznań 2000.
Kołodziejska T., Architektura kościoła parafialnego w Choszcznie, „Materiały Zachodniopomorskie”, tom 8/1962.
Pilch J., Kowalski S., Leksykon zabytków Pomorza Zachodniego i ziemi lubuskiej, Warszawa 2012.