Kościół Świętego Marcina, Wrocław

Kościół Świętego Marcina is one of Wrocław’s oldest surviving churches and the sole surviving structure of the former Piast castle. Built in brick in the thirteenth century, it preserves a buried lower level now used as a crypt. Heavy wartime damage led to its distinctive postwar reconstruction.

Kościół Świętego Marcina is the small church before you, dedicated to Martin of Tours. It is one of Wrocław’s oldest surviving churches, a Gothic building—Gothic being the medieval manner of pointed arches and strong vertical forms—on the western side of Ostrów Tumski. What makes this modest church extraordinary is that it alone survives from Wrocław’s former Piast castle.

It was built in brick in the eighteen-eighties of the thirteenth century, and its construction is attributed to the mason Wiland. The original design had two levels: over centuries, the ground outside rose by several metres, leaving the lower storey deeply buried and functioning as a crypt. The church’s story also carries a twentieth-century Polish chapter.

Between nineteen twenty-one and nineteen thirty-nine, Wrocław’s Polish community worshipped here in Polish. The final Polish-language service took place on the seventeenth of September nineteen thirty-nine. The Second World War destroyed about eighty percent of the church.

Its reconstruction, carried out from nineteen fifty-seven to nineteen sixty, deliberately reshaped it: the nave was reduced to its earlier footprint and given a tent-like roof, creating the tower-like form you see today. The building is protected as a provincial historic monument.