St. Mary’s Church in Stargard

Stargard’s Church of St. Mary, which currently serves as a collegiate church, is the most important Late Gothic monument of Western Pomerania. Its architecture, despite the near-total destruction of the Old Town, did not suffer too severely, and the “renovation of the century” carried out in recent years restored the splendor of its re-Gothicization conducted in the early 20th century by Heinrich Deneke. Despite the almost complete lack of historical furnishings, a visitor exploring the interior will find no reason to be bored. It does not matter whether the viewer of this masterpiece is prepared to experience such magnificent historical architecture or not—it mesmerizes regardless. The monumental medieval architecture with its splendid details speaks for itself.

Collegiate Church of St. Mary in Stargard, 2023, photo by Kapitel, (source: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stargard_Kolegiata_(1).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stargard_Kolegiata_(1).jpg)), (CC BY-NC 4.0)

St. Mary’s Parish Church, erected on the market square, has been a permanent fixture of Stargard’s urban landscape for over seven centuries. Today, it serves as a collegiate church and a Historic Monument established in 2010 by a decree of the President of the Republic of Poland. The monumental architecture, the complexity of its form, the spaciousness and height of the interior, and the massive western facade likely led the post-war residents of Stargard to begin calling this magnificent work a “cathedral”—although it was never a bishop’s church. It was, however, a reflection of the faith, financial capabilities, and aspirations of former Stargard burghers, who, through the sophisticated form of its architecture, elevated their parish church above all other urban temples existing at the time, including those in the capital city of Szczecin.

In light of current research, it is impossible to state that St. Mary’s Church was the first parish church in Stargard, as was believed until recently. This is because archaeological excavations conducted between 2006 and 2007 beneath the relics of the Augustinian church uncovered an older temple unknown from historical sources. It was built around 1200 and remained in use for about 80 to 100 years. Consequently, its pleban could have been Gerard de Stargard, who is considered the commander of the local Joannite house and was mentioned in a 1186 document by Duke Bogusław I as one of the witnesses. This small church functioned within the area of the market settlement. Therefore, it is uncertain whether it served parish functions. However, it is striking that even several decades after the foundation of Stargard—which took place through Duke Barnim I on June 24, 1243—the Joannites acted as superiors to the town’s citizens. As a result, they must have felt not only co-founders of the new center, but above all pioneers of spiritual life, which was not an isolated case among religious orders, especially chivalric ones. In 1248, Duke Barnim I confirmed to the Bishop of Kamień the right of patronage over the parish church. It is usually commonly agreed that this refers to St. Mary’s parish church. Meanwhile, the document contains no information about which temple is meant. Perhaps it was still the church in the area of the former suburb settlement.

According to tradition and modern documents, the construction of St. Mary’s Church as a brick structure began in 1292. The building erected during this phase was a three-aisled, towerless, four-bay hall church with the height of the current side aisles, covered by groin-rib vaults, featuring a single-aisled, three-bay chancel with a polygonal closure to the east. Its construction was completed in the 1320s and 1330s. The design of the choir section and the monumental western facade, featuring a blind-arched, stepped gable, was drawn from the architecture of mendicant churches, while the remaining elements derive from towns along the southern Baltic coast. Traces of the first hall church are still legible today in the western gable visible between the towers, the main parts of which have been preserved in the attic, in the pillars of the main nave, the walls of the side aisle chapels (original buttresses), the half-pillars of the chancel arch, the side aisle vaults, and the massive shaft-rings.

The new hall church rather quickly ceased to be sufficient for the ambitious burghers of Stargard. Already in the early 1380s, its reconstruction began, encompassing the eastern and western parts of the temple. The chancel with an ambulatory and a wreath of chapels, according to sources testifying to the endowments of the chapels in the ambulatory, was completed around 1384–1388. The two-tower western block was added to the wall of the original hall church. The lower section, with a monumental, axially positioned portal, created a uniform architectural composition. The southern tower, decorated with a characteristic system of blind arcades (*blend*), was never completed. The northern one, significantly taller, featuring a full program of the so-called “Stargard blind arcades,” battlements accented with four corner polygonal pinnacles from which a narrower, octagonal drum rises, was crowned with what was likely a pyramidal spire, which was reconstructed in his drawings in the first half of the 19th century by the eminent Pomeranian art historian Franz Kugler.

The complex motif of the blind arcade (*blenda*) on the northern tower of St. Mary’s parish church was rather quickly replicated within Stargard itself. First in the tower of St. John’s Church, and later in local defensive architecture projects (the Mill Gate, also known as the Port Gate) and burgher architecture (the gables of Late Gothic tenement houses). We can spot the Stargard-type blind arcade in the church towers of Chociwel, Gryfice, Drawsko Pomorskie, St. James’s Church in Szczecin, Nowogard, and Pasewalk. In Brandenburg, it is visible in the tower of the Mill Gate in the New Town of Brandenburg and the gable of the church in Derwitz near Potsdam. In German Western Pomerania, it appears in the gable of the tenement house at Peenestraße 7 in Anklam; in Mecklenburg, it is found on the gable of the church in Neddermin near Neubrandenburg. The Stargard motif traveled further. We find it in Denmark as well, in northern Zealand—at the Carmelite church in Helsingør, where it subsequently became a model for the decoration of towers and facades of rural churches in the surrounding area: Asminderød, Helsinge, Græsted, Karlebo, Ferslev, Grønholt, Sonnerup, Strø, and Ølstykke. The decoration of the northern tower of St. Mary’s Church in Stargard was also applied in the towns and villages of Pomerania. We see it in the gables and towers of churches in: Suchań, Witkowo, Wyszomierz, Kania, Długołęka, Borkowo Wielkie, Sąpolnica, Rosowo, Niemierze, Kościernica, Bagno, Redło, Dębice, Siwkowice, and Kościernica. The influence of Stargard’s parish church architecture did not end in the Late Middle Ages. The Stargard-type blind arcade motif returned, transformed in the Baroque spirit, and is visible in the tower decoration of the church in Zaborsko near Pyrzyce.

Around 1403, the construction of the polygonal St. Mary’s Chapel located on the northern side was completed, and it was precisely in this year that masses were endowed there. By the mid-15th century, the nave body was heightened, and later the side aisle chapels were also masonry-built. The reasons for the transformations and the grand expansion of the Stargard parish church could have been quite mundane, driven by ambition and stemming from the ever-growing commercial competition with neighboring Szczecin, which ultimately led to a military conflict in the mid-15th century. In the 1370s, the city on the Oder began the construction of the parish church of St. James according to a new concept, which consisted of an ambulatory hall-type chancel with a wreath of chapels located between internal buttresses. As Jarosław Jarzewicz notes, Stargard’s response had to reach “far and high.” In the city on the Ina, just like in Szczecin, they reached for the model of an ambulatory choir, but one significantly richer in form and detail, and additionally featuring a basilican character. It employed a triforium gallery, and the exterior decoration of lesenes with glazed corner details and surface fillings in the form of tracery, gablets (*wimpergs*), and probably terracotta sculptures may have connotations as distant as works in Schwäbisch-Gmünd, Nuremberg, or Malbork, but were also present in Western Pomeranian architecture since the early 14th century in Gryfice and Pyrzyce. The aforementioned features of the chancel closure of the Stargard parish church are frequently linked to the person of the builder, who is traditionally believed to have been Heinrich Brunsberg. Meanwhile, there is no source data indicating his involvement in the work on St. Mary’s Church in Stargard. Currently, the question of the author behind the reconstruction of the Stargard parish church is discussed in professional literature solely on the basis of stylistic analogies. These are primarily St. Catherine’s Church in Brandenburg—the only documented work of H. Brunsberg—and St. Mary’s Church in Chojna, as both structures share obvious similarities. Consequently, in the works of Jarosław Jarzewicz, an eminent expert on the Stargard parish church, a dilemma arises. According to him, the author of the design and reconstruction of St. Mary’s Church could have been Heinrich Brunsberg himself, but equally well his student or follower, whom he terms the Master of the Stargard Choir.

St. Mary’s Parish Church in Stargard likely possessed magnificent Late Gothic furnishings, such as altar retables, traces of which may be found in triptychs or their remains transferred after the Reformation to churches in villages owned by the town. These were still recorded in early 20th-century art catalogs, but today only elements of the retables in Święte and Grzędzicze remain, along with an altarpiece shrine from Lubowo kept in the National Museum in Szczecin. Other objects mentioned in sources included a magnificent astronomical clock and an organ case. To this day, only partially preserved wall and vault paintings remain from this period, visible primarily in the chapels of the Three Kings, St. Bartholomew, and in the sacristy.

Collegiate Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of the World in Stargard – interior, 2012, photo by Marcin Kuna, (source: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stargard_kolegiata_kolb0475.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stargard_kolegiata_kolb0475.JPG)), CC BY-NC 3.0

Perhaps among the surviving artifacts from the original furnishings are such fortunate objects as the Late Gothic cupboard from around 1450, decorated on its door panels with tracery rosettes, which is exhibited in the Copernicus House in Toruń, and the bronze crucifix with the figure of Christ Crucified from around 1330, bearing witness to the magnificent casting craftsmanship of Jan Apengeter. Considered lost during World War II until two decades ago, it is currently kept near Poznań in one of the religious houses of the Society of Christ Fathers. Another important testimony to the former furnishings of the Stargard parish church was its library. In 1404, Henning Zallentin, upon founding the Chapel of All Angels and Saints above the sacristy, also donated his books, which became the foundation for the St. Mary’s collection known in the early modern period as the Biblioteca Mariana Stargardiensis. The most valuable and surviving medieval manuscripts, incunabula, and old prints became part of the collection of the Peter Gröning Gymnasium in Stargard in the 19th century, and after World War II, they enriched the holdings of the National Library in Warsaw, the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, the Pomeranian Library in Szczecin, and many other libraries. These collections, particularly those from the 16th century, are considered the most important of those secured in the Western Territories after 1945.

While after the Reformation, which took place in Pomerania in 1534, some of the late medieval furnishings were destroyed or relocated due to the change in confession, the remainder fell victim to a fire in 1635. The reconstruction of the church after this cataclysm began as early as the late 1630s. The work lasted a long time, stretching into the 1660s. During this period, major political changes took place, with Stargard also becoming their arena. The death of the last Griffins and the resolutions of the Peace of Westphalia led to the division of the former Duchy of Pomerania. Szczecin, along with the western part, came into the possession of the Swedes. The eastern part with Stargard, Kołobrzeg, and Słupsk became a Brandenburg territory. In the late 1650s, it was precisely in Stargard that the Brandenburgers established the capital for the new part of their state. Consequently, the rebuilt St. Mary’s parish church became the most important temple in capital Stargard. It was here that high electoral and later royal officials had their pews, burial chapels, and memorials in the form of epitaphs and gravestones. For nearly fifty consecutive years, St. Mary’s Church acquired new Late Mannerist and Early Baroque furnishings, which 19th-century restorers could not come to terms with. As a result, around 1819, during the re-Gothicization, most of it ceased to exist. To this day, the only survivors are the altarpiece of the so-called small altar (the current main altar), funded in 1663 by Christian Püttman and his wife Urszula, featuring a main scene depicting Christ before Pilate painted after Rembrandt van Rijn’s Ecce Homo print from around 1635, as well as the supraports of the former burial chapels of the von Weyher, Krüger, and Movius families, the last of which was relocated in the early 20th century and now serves as a decorative framing for the vestibule of the southern tower portal.

Between 1905 and 1911, the eminent architect Heinrich Deneke carried out a re-Gothicization of the interior. We can essentially admire its effects to this day, as its ideas were restored during the recent “renovation of the century,” which was largely completed in 2023. The painted interior was complemented by a set of Neo-Gothic and historicist stained-glass windows, which were installed, among other places, in the windows of the ambulatory chapels and the southern chapels. The narrative designed within them encompassed scenes from the history of Stargard and Pomerania, as well as the life and martyrdom of Christ. Unfortunately, most of them did not survive the last war.

Collegiate Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of the World in Stargard. Altar, 2005, photo by Politykstargard (source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stargard_Kolegiata_O%C5%82tarz.JPG), GFDL

St. Mary’s Church in Stargard holds supra-regional significance in both its monumental design and details, playing one of the most important roles in the history of Baltic Late Gothic brick architecture. Despite the almost entirely lost furnishings, it is the sheer magnitude, clarity, scale, and grandeur of the architecture that captivates visitors exploring its interior. Despite the considerable height of the main nave, which reaches nearly 32 meters, its beautiful form is not overwhelming. The duality of the chancel closure walls, the triforium gallery, and the interplay of light from the windows and glazed details remain etched in the memory of visitors forever.

Collegiate Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of the World in Stargard, photo by Politykstargard, (source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stargard_Kolegiata6.JPG), GFDL

Download

Jarosław Jarzewicz, Kościół Mariacki w Stargardzie Szczecińskim, [w:] Innowacja i tradycja. Henryk Brunsberg i późnogotycka architektura ceglana Pomorza i Brandenburgii, red. Michał Gierke, Biblioteka „Rocznika Chojeńskiego” 2, Chojna 2015, s. 57-67.

Jarosław Jarzewicz, Architektura średniowieczna Pomorza Zachodniego, Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM 2019.

Agnieszka Lindenhayn-Fiedorowicz, Kościół Mariacki w Stargardzie – pierwotna forma kościoła na tle rozwoju pomorskiej architektury halowej drugiej połowy XIII i początku XIV wieku, „Stargardia. Rocznik Muzeum w Stargardzie poświęcony przeszłości i kulturze Pomorze” 5 (2005-2009), 2010, s. 119-152.

Agnieszka Lindenhayn-Fiedorowicz, Die Marienkirche zu Strgard in ihrer ersten Baugestalt. Ein frühes Beispiel städtischer Repräsentation im hinterpommerschen Pfarrkirchenbau, „Baltische Studien” 109, 2023, s. 59-98.

Marek Ober, O blendzie typu stargardzkiego, [w:] Terra Transoderana. Sztuka Pomorza Nadodrzańskiego i dawnej Nowej Marchii w średniowieczu. Materiały z seminarium naukowego poświęconego jubileuszowi 50-lecia pracy w muzealnictwie szczecińskim Zofii Krzymuskiej-Fafius, 7-8 czerwca 2002, Szczecin: Stowarzyszenie Historyków Sztuki, Oddział Szczeciński 2004, s. 89-99.

Marcin Majewski