Kostel Seslání svatého Ducha Church

The Church of the Holy Spirit in Višňová is located in the Frýdlant protrusion in northern Bohemia, in close proximity to the Czech-Polish state border. It originally emerged in the early Gothic style and later underwent Baroque reconstruction and further modifications. The oldest part is the presbytery from the end of the thirteenth century. The church is protected as a cultural monument.

According to German-language regional literature, there was already a chapel here in eleven sixty. The first written mention of the parish church dates from thirteen forty-six and mentions a tower, two bells and three altars. In fourteen sixty-eight the church burned down and was replaced by a new building in fourteen ninety-two. Between eighteen oh-two and eighteen oh-four it was substantially reconstructed and its nave was considerably heightened at that time.

After the Second World War it served for stabling cattle and as a storage facility. When the state border was restored, it moreover found itself on Polish territory. It returned to the Czechoslovak side thanks to an agreement on the final delineation of state borders, which both countries signed on June thirteenth, nineteen fifty-eight in Warsaw.

The church has one rectangular nave and an equally shaped presbytery. On its northern side stands a prismatic tower with an octagonal superstructure, crowned with an onion dome. The presbytery is covered by two bays of ribbed cross vaults. From the nave with a flat ceiling it is separated by a pointed triumphal arch. Inside there are wooden galleries, in the nave a three-armed one with two-storey side wings. The church has no historically significant furnishings or organ.

The tower has a square ground plan with a side of six hundred and thirty centimetres and walls of a thickness of one hundred and fifty centimetres. Unusual is the entrance to the vestibule. The doors are in a doubled archway made of carefully worked sandstone blocks. The front part ends in a full arch, twice as high as the rear portlet with a pointed arch. Similarly to city gates, the entrance may have been closed with a portcullis and the church could thus belong among fortified churches. A similar solution is known from Romania or Poland.

In the interior there are figured tombstones from the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries up until around seventeen thirty. Further Baroque tombstones are on the southern outer wall of the tower. On the surrounding cemetery there is a Baroque epitaph in the form of an altar with a high figured relief from the beginning of the eighteenth century and a Classicist tombstone from around eighteen hundred.

Between nineteen eighty-seven and nineteen ninety-three, when the nave was already in a precarious condition, it was separated from the presbytery by a screen. The presbytery was then converted into a chapel so that services could be held there in dignified surroundings.