Kościół pw. Świętego Antoniego, Wrocław

Before you is St Anthony’s Church, a Roman Catholic church serving Karłowice parish under the same patron. It rose here in nineteen hundred and nineteen oh one, designed by Ludwig Schneider in Neo-Gothic style, a revival of medieval Gothic architecture. Notice the church’s brick basilica form: the façade has two towers, a rose window, and a deep porch with three entrances.

A small, tall roof turret marks the centre of the building from a distance. The church grew from the Franciscans’ return to Wrocław in eighteen eighty-eight. They had been absent since eighteen ten, when Prussian authorities dissolved the monasteries.

As their community expanded, they established a monastery here between eighteen ninety-five and eighteen ninety-seven; the church’s foundation stone followed in nineteen hundred, and the new building was consecrated the next year as St Anthony’s. Inside, the church has a thirty-four-stop pneumatic organ, made in nineteen oh three by the Świdnica firm Schlag und Söhne. Restored in two thousand and three, it remains in use both for worship and concerts. The adjoining monastery also houses the Franciscan Province of St Hedwig’s curia and its higher seminary.