Qualla: Chwarszczany

Chwarszczany: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kapitel, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1232 Władysław Odonic, Duke of Greater Poland, gave away a thousand hides of land — something on the order of seventeen thousand hectares — to a military order whose headquarters lay in the crusader states of the eastern Mediterranean. The grant was centred on the Kostrzyn region, and it was not primarily an act of piety. A frontier that nobody governed was a frontier somebody else would take, and the Knights Templar were the medieval answer to both problems at once: they would hold the ground and they would settle it. About 220 people live in Chwarszczany today. Their parish church is the building the Templars put up, and it has been standing since 1280.

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Image: Kapitel | CC BY-SA 4.0

Chwarszczany: A Duke Buys Insurance

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kapitel, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 v...

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Image: Kapitel | CC BY-SA 4.0

Chwarszczany: The Deal at the Border

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kapitel, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 th...

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Image: Kapitel | CC BY-SA 4.0

Chwarszczany: Granite, Then Brick

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MOs810, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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: gran...

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Image: MOs810 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Chwarszczany: The Order Disappears

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MOs810, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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, suppress...

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Image: MOs810 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Chwarszczany: Under the Whitewash

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MOs810, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 uncoverin...

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Image: MOs810 | CC BY-SA 4.0