Churches of Peace
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. How many people have stood at a site or want to go will be shown once enough people use the app.
Seals, your want-to-go list and the year you stood here are kept in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
In 1648 the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years' War, and in the Silesian hereditary principalities ruled directly by Emperor Ferdinand III the Lutherans, the majority of the population, lost their religious freedom and almost all of their churches. Swedish diplomatic pressure won permission to build just three churches.
The emperor's conditions were strict: the churches had to stand outside the town walls on a site set by imperial officials, be built only of wood and clay, have no tower, and be finished within a year. The architect Albrecht von Sabisch used traditional timber-frame techniques to build the Church of the Holy Spirit in Jawor in 1654 to 1655 and the Church of the Holy Trinity in Swidnica in 1656 to 1657. With their tiers of galleries they are the largest timber-framed religious buildings in Europe.
The third church, built at Glogow in 1652, burned down in 1758. Behind their plain exteriors the two survivors are filled with Baroque decoration, and they have remained Lutheran parish churches after 1945. They were inscribed in 2001.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).