Kościół Świętej Rodziny, Wrocław

Kościół Świętej Rodziny is the Catholic church of Sępolno, created in nineteen twenty-nine and nineteen thirty to Kurt Langer’s design. Its brick body is a three-aisled basilica, gathered beneath a particularly weighty tower at the front. The design joins modernism with neo-Romanesque ideas—a return to the solid, early-medieval architectural vocabulary—so the building feels both of its own age and deliberately ancient in character.

Notice the tower’s crisp geometric roof and the brick banding at its crown. At the eastern end, the sanctuary closes in a five-sided form, rather than a simple rectangle. The church suffered only limited wartime damage and was repaired in nineteen forty-six; later work has renewed the roof and replaced the tower covering with copper.

There is a musical history here as well. Rieger built the organ in nineteen thirty-one with forty stops, making it one of Wrocław’s larger instruments. A major overhaul in nineteen eighty and nineteen eighty-one enlarged it to forty-five stops.

Before the Second World War, four bells hung in the tower; in nineteen forty-two, three were taken for the armaments industry, leaving only the smallest, named John the Baptist. Today the church is protected as a provincial historic monument.