Nobody knows where the first Templars of Chwarszczany came from. The likeliest source is the order's Silesian commandery at Oleśnica Mała, but the records simply do not say. What the records do show is that the endowment grew fast: in 1241 a Polish magnate named Włast added the villages of Lubno and Oborzany. They were building on contested ground, and everyone involved knew it. The dukes of Pomerania insisted the whole district belonged to their castle at Kinice, not to Kostrzyn and Santok, and the claim was never really settled by argument. It was settled by who arrived, built, and stayed.

By the middle of the thirteenth century the Ascanian margraves of Brandenburg had taken control of the territory, and the Templars had a choice between a fight they could not win and a bargain. They took the bargain. In 1261 the two sides came to terms: the knights surrendered their rights to a commandery at Myślibórz and gave up the lands along the road from Kostrzyn to Gorzów, and in return had their possession of Chwarszczany confirmed, with ten villages attached and Kaleńsko added on top. The arrangement worked. In 1286 Otto VI, Margrave of Brandenburg-Salzwedel, entered the order's house here — a ruling prince taking vows in a village monastery raised its standing considerably. By the 1290s Bernhard von Eberstein was running Templar affairs for Poland, the Neumark, Bohemia and Moravia, and doing it from this bend in the Myśla.

The chapel was consecrated on 23 April 1280, replacing an earlier Romanesque building from around the middle of the century. It sits on an elliptical rise roughly 100 by 150 metres, and it is built the way frontier churches were built when stone was what the fields gave you: granite blocks below, Gothic brick above, in the stripped-down style Polish scholars call reduced Gothic — the vocabulary of a cathedral spoken by masons who had one village's worth of money. The presbytery closes in a polygon. Nineteenth-century restorers were not shy about it; the window tracery dates from 1859, and a neo-Gothic sacristy was added during campaigns in 1870 and 1898. What survives is not a ruin dressed up for visitors. It is a working building that has never stopped being one.

In 1308 a brother named Günther von Köthen sold the village of Cychry to two brothers of the wealthy Hokemann family of Frankfurt an der Oder. That transaction is the last documented trace of the Templars in this district. Within four years the order was gone everywhere, suppressed in 1312 after the arrests, torture and confessions that had begun in France in 1307. At Chwarszczany the transfer was administrative rather than dramatic: the Knights Hospitaller took the commandery over and held it until 1540, when Margrave John of Küstrin seized the property. In the sixteenth century the chapel became a Protestant prayer house. Five owners, four confessions, and the granite did not move.

Sometime in the early fifteenth century, painters covered the interior walls with Apostles, Holy Virgins, and a Saint Christopher carrying the Christ child across his shoulder. After 1949 the frescoes were whitewashed over, and there they stayed until conservators began uncovering them in 1996 and 1997. The chapel had been reconsecrated in 1948 as a filial church of the parish at Sarbinowo — the village a couple of kilometres south that used to be called Zorndorf, where Frederick the Great and the Russian army spent the bloodiest day of the eighteenth century. Today it is the Church of Saint Stanislaus Kostka, the centrepiece of a designated cultural park, and routinely described as one of the most valuable monuments in Western Pomerania. Treasure legends have attached themselves to it, as they attach to every Templar site — the Holy Grail gets mentioned, and international travel writers have made the pilgrimage to say so. Nothing has ever been found. The building is the treasure.