Zbór Zielonoświątkowy, Wrocław

The slender church before you is Zbór Zielonoświątkowy, Wrocław’s Pentecostal congregation on Miła Street. It is the city’s earliest Neo-Gothic church: a nineteenth-century revival of the medieval Gothic manner. Alexis Langer designed the replacement church, built here in either 1858 or 1860, while the site had previously held a modest timber-framed St Lawrence chapel serving a cemetery.

Notice the tower at the church’s western end. It rises thirty-five metres and finishes in an openwork stone spire; the compact single-aisle church below measures only fifteen metres long. Langer himself was buried in the cemetery that once surrounded the church, although his grave has never been identified.

The building survived the war, but in terrible condition. With neither roof nor windows, it deteriorated for years and was used as a stable by Roma residents of nearby streets. Pentecostals took it over on the twenty-first of May 1960, when it was sixty percent ruined, mouldy, and stripped of its furnishings.

Windows and a tiled roof returned it to use within a year. Further restoration followed from 1970 to 1973, and on the eighth of January 1973 it became the formal property of Poland’s Pentecostal Church. Today this congregation has more than three hundred members.