Kostel svatého Michaela archanděla (Dolní Poustevna) Church

The Church of Saint Michael the Archangel is a Roman Catholic parish church in Dolní Poustevna. It stands not far from the town center on a slope near the main road leading towards Lobendau. This neo-Gothic church was built in eighteen fifty-four and eighteen fifty-five and together with the adjacent rectory forms one unit.

Dolní Poustevna became a parish relatively late, not until eighteen fifty-two, when the first priest Joseph Václav Kindermann arrived. Before that, the village belonged to neighboring Sebnitze and from fifteen thirty-nine to the more distant parish in Lobendau. The community acquired its own sanctuary in seventeen sixty-seven. It was a small Baroque chapel of Saint John of Nepomuk in the center of the village near the border. It had a large oval window in the front, side walls supported by buttresses and a small tower with a bell on the roof. The cemetery was established at the same time. In eighteen forty-five it was enlarged, but it still could not meet the needs of the community.

Construction of the new church began in the middle of August eighteen fifty-four. A major supporter was mayor Karl Sieber. He donated land for the church and the rectory and later gave one of three new bells. The church was completed the following year and at the beginning of September it was consecrated by the Litomeřice bishop Augustin Bartholomew Hille, who was born in nearby Velké Šenov. The main altar from the old chapel was moved into the new church. The old chapel then passed to the community, which had it torn down in eighteen sixty-eight and erected a large iron cross with a figure of Christ in its place.

In eighteen fifty-seven the church received an organ from the organ builder Reisse from Saxon Gersdorf. It underwent major renovation in nineteen-oh-five at the initiative of priest Gustav Adolf Šelbický. The stained glass windows in the presbytery and the clock mechanism by Bernhardt Zacharias from Leipzig date from that time. After the Second World War and during the Communist regime, the church fell into neglect and was cared for mainly by volunteers from among the parishioners. By the late nineteen-seventies the facade was restored. At the end of the twentieth century, under priest Václav Horniak, the interior was renovated and a new roof was installed, replacing the original slate with sheet metal. The church serves religious services and occasional cultural events and is not under monument protection.

The single-nave structure has been preserved in almost its original form. It has a rectangular floor plan and a five-sided apse. The front has a simple portal, above it now an empty niche where a concrete statue of the Archangel Michael once stood, and a round window. From the gable rises a square tower with a clock. The side walls are decorated with tall windows with pointed arches. The facade is gray with yellow ornaments below the cornices and around the windows. Inside, brown paint predominates and the lower part of the walls is covered with wooden paneling. The wooden neo-Gothic stations of the cross date from eighteen ninety and the cast concrete floor has a two-colored checkered pattern.