Kościół Świętej Elżbiety Węgierskiej, Wrocław

The Church of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary is a Catholic church on Grabiszyńska Street, built between 1893 and 1896 to Joseph Ebers’s Gothic Revival design. Its original tower was destroyed during the 1945 siege of Wrocław; the distinctive openwork steel replacement was installed in 1981.

The openwork steel spire marks the Church of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, a Catholic church on Grabiszyńska Street. The church is dedicated to Elizabeth of Thuringia. Built from 1893 to 1896 beside a hospital-and-convent complex for the Elizabethan sisters, it was financed entirely by Cardinal Georg von Kopp, then bishop of Wrocław.

Joseph Ebers designed the building in Gothic Revival style, a nineteenth-century return to medieval Gothic forms. The airy metal tower gives this brick church a silhouette unlike most others in Wrocław. That tower carries a difficult history.

In mid-March 1945, German troops blew up the original tower while preparing defensive positions during the siege of Wrocław; its collapse badly damaged the roof and vaulting, and much of the furnishing was lost. Services resumed here on the third of June 1945, and reconstruction continued for decades. The current tower was installed on the twenty-first of October 1981, designed by Tadeusz Zipser and Marek Dobrowolski as a modern echo of Gothic architecture. Soon afterward, at the start of martial law, parish priest Franciszek Głód hid opposition activists in the tower for several days, including Władysław Frasyniuk, Józef Pinior, and Barbara Labuda.