Kościół Świętego Marcina, Kraków

The Church of Saint Martin is the historic Evangelical church on Grodzka Street in Kraków’s Old Town. Its name honours Martin of Tours. The building before you occupies the site of an earlier Romanesque church, probably dating to the twelfth century.

The present church rose between 1637 and 1640 for Discalced Carmelite nuns. Giovanni Trevano designed it. Its Baroque manner comes from the dramatic, richly staged architecture that spread across Europe in the seventeenth century.

The church was consecrated in 1644. The nuns left in 1787 for a new convent and Church of Saint Teresa in Wesoła, and this church was put up for sale. In 1816 it passed to the Evangelical congregation.

Today it serves Kraków’s Evangelical-Augsburg parish and the local Evangelical-Reformed diaspora, while Old Catholic Mariavite services also take place here. Inside the main altar is Henryk Siemiradzki’s 1882 painting of Christ calming a storm at sea. Above it hangs a Gothic crucifix from the late fourteenth century. Near the entrance, the epitaph to the writer Mikołaj Rej was unveiled in 1921; German forces damaged it during the Second World War.