Kościół pw. Świętej Elżbiety, Gdańsk

Saint Elizabeth’s Church bears the name of Elizabeth of Thuringia. It is protected as an immovable heritage monument in the region. Notice the compact brickwork and the tower rising from the church’s main axis.

Its Brick Gothic design—a medieval manner expressed through brickwork—forms a single-nave church with an axial tower, a star-shaped chancel, and a side chapel. Between thirteen ninety-three and thirteen ninety-four, a chapel dedicated to Saint Elizabeth was added beside a shelter for poor and sick people; that shelter then became a hospital. The substantial church was finished in fourteen seventeen, and its overall outline has changed very little since then.

From sixteen twenty-two until eighteen twenty, it served as Gdańsk’s other Calvinist church. Late in March of nineteen forty-five, Red Army soldiers set the church and its hospital alight, destroying the organ. Pallottine priests undertook the rebuilding, and the restored church opened in nineteen forty-seven.

The tower’s former spire was not recreated; a small roof now covers it. The present organ was built in nineteen fifty-seven and has fifteen stops.