Cerkiew św. Trójcy, Warszawa

Inside the tenement at Podwale five, you have reached Cerkiew św. Trójcy, an Orthodox church dedicated to the Holy Trinity. Greek merchants acquired this property in eighteen eighteen.

Jakub Kubicki designed the courtyard chapel they established here. Its manner is classical, drawing on the composed forms of ancient Greece and Rome. The original chapel was a modest rectangular structure, attached to neighbouring buildings.

Its icon screen held images brought from Greece or purchased from French troops withdrawing from Russia. For a striking chapter in its history, this small chapel functioned as the cathedral for Warsaw’s Orthodox bishop. During the war, a bomb caused a fire; later, the Warsaw Uprising brought total destruction.

The Kubicki chapel was never reconstructed. After the Orthodox Church regained the property, worship returned in a chapel arranged on the ground floor, consecrated in November two thousand two. The church remains part of the Polish Orthodox Church and also provides a religious home for Poland’s Coptic Orthodox community. A surviving Pochayiv Mother of God icon connects the present chapel with the church that vanished in the ruins.