Qualla: St. Mary's Church, Chojna

St. Mary's Church, Chojna: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Krzysztof Ziarnek, Kenraiz, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1997 a steel clamp failed somewhere inside the spire of St. Mary's Church, and nobody could climb up to find out why. The clamp was one of a set fitted in 1932 to hold the tower's brickwork together. Above the vault over the porch there was no longer any way in - the fire of 1945 had taken every floor inside - so the engineers were left looking up at eighty and a half metres of masonry they could not inspect, standing over a provincial road and blocks of flats well inside its own collapse radius. That one failed clamp is what finally got the tower rebuilt. The church beneath it had been an open ruin for fifty-two years.

Image: Krzysztof Ziarnek, Kenraiz | CC BY-SA 4.0

St. Mary's Church, Chojna: Brunsberg's Signature

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kapitel, Public domain. The building went up in granite blocks between 1389 and 1407, on a site where a smaller church had stood since shortly after the town was founded in the later 1200s. The new eastern part was consecrated in 1407, and the work continued through the fifteenth century until the churc...

Image: Kapitel | Public domain

St. Mary's Church, Chojna: The Corner That Came Down

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Harald Rossa assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 2.5. On 2 July 1843 the south-western corner of the medieval tower collapsed, taking with it the chapel of St. Anna, which had stood on that side since before 1479. What was left standing was dismantled soon afterwards and never rebuilt. Sixteen years passed before anyone started a re...

Image: No machine-readable author provided. Harald Rossa assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 2.5

St. Mary's Church, Chojna: 16 February 1945

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cezary Kujawski, CC BY-SA 4.0. Soviet troops, who had occupied the town nearly without a fight on 4 February, set fire to it that day, destroying the roof truss, the vaults, nine of the fourteen pillars that divided the naves, everything movable inside, the dome crowning the tower and every ceiling within it. ...

Image: Cezary Kujawski | CC BY-SA 4.0

St. Mary's Church, Chojna: Nine Missing Pillars

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kapitel, Public domain. Four separate attempts to secure the ruin came and went. An engineer named Witkiewicz drew up the first in 1952, proposing concrete ring beams along the tops of the walls; it was never carried out. Legal protection followed in 1956. In 1960 a Warsaw University of Technology team ...

Image: Kapitel | Public domain

St. Mary's Church, Chojna: A Hundred-Year Job

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kapitel, Public domain. Then came the clamp. Securing the tower took from 1998 to 1999, wrapping the unstable section in a reinforced-concrete lattice shell; between 2000 and 2008 a new octagonal pyramid on a steel core replaced the crown missing since 1945, bringing the tower to 98 metres. Work in 2007...

Image: Kapitel | Public domain