What stands in the middle of Vetschau - Wětošow in Lower Sorbian - is a single Protestant church with two complete naves lying against each other, sharing a bell tower at the west end and a vestry at the east. The first church here probably went up late in the thirteenth century, during the Christianisation of the Wends, as the German-speakers of the time called their Slavic neighbours. It was built from stones cleared out of the fields and from bog iron dug out of the marshes, which is about as local as building material gets. The lords von Schlieben took the parish Protestant in 1540. Fire gutted it in 1619 and damaged it again in 1642, leaving only the base of the tower standing. That base is still there, carrying everything above it.

After the Thirty Years' War a new brick church was raised on the old foundations - flat ceiling, exposed crossbeams, tall lancet windows, no tower for the moment. On the north side a chapel was added for the local German lords, and services in German were held in it as required. A register entry from 1673 and 1674 is unambiguous about the arrangement: the main building is the principal church, and it is used above all for services in Wendish, serving the ten Sorbian-speaking hamlets in the surrounding countryside. The Germans in the chapel were the congregation on the side. They did not care for the arrangement, and there were efforts on their part to have their chapel recognised as the principal church instead. It did not work.

So they built their own. The German share of the town's population was rising while the countryside stayed Sorbian, and the townspeople wanted the distinction made visible, in religion as elsewhere. The chapel was pulled down in 1689; foundations for a proper German church were laid on 31 May 1690, the building was finished in 1693, and the General Superintendent Römer came from Lübben to consecrate it on 30 January 1694. The local clergy, by all accounts, were against the whole scheme. What resulted was a late Baroque brick nave with a barrel vault and galleries carrying the lords' private lodges - grander than its neighbour, and formally subordinate to it, since the Wendish church kept its status as the parish church. The tower was rebuilt between 1704 and 1709, an octagonal brick stage on the old square stump, and topped with a Star of Bethlehem above a lying crescent moon to mark the halting of the Ottoman advance.

In 1910 the two congregations were merged into one parish, at a time when the German authorities were working steadily to push Sorbian out of public life. Schooling in the language had already been discontinued. Attendance at the Wendish services fell away, and the last one was held in 1932; the timing suggests eagerness to anticipate what the new regime would want. Both naves were still used for worship until 1977, after which the Wendish church stopped being a church and became a store. What it stored is the bitterest detail in the building. Parts of the church of Pritzen were kept in it, because Pritzen had to be demolished for an open-cast lignite mine. The thirteenth-century font that now stands to the left of the German altar came from Schönfeld, another village the coal removed. Its lid ended up in Kittlitz.

On 10 October 1995 a society called Wendische Kirche was founded to give the empty nave a purpose, and both churches were restored across 2000 and 2001. The German side still holds regular services. The Sorbian side belongs to the town now, and is used for concerts and exhibitions - one of them devoted to the churches that were destroyed in this region to reach the coal. Every year since 1995 a service in Lower Sorbian has been held here on European Heritage Day, which is not a living congregation but is not nothing either. On the tower a plaque remembers Hans Bock, the Lower Sorbian poet born in Vetschau in 1569. The brown-coal power station that dominated the town from 1964 was shut down in 1996 and its chimneys felled the year after. The church outlasted it, both halves of it.