Churches and monasteries
a Baroque chapel where about three thousand human skulls cover the walls and vault
Churches and monasteries
an eclectic church from the end of the 18th century on Góra Parkowa, entered in the heritage register
Churches and monasteries
19th-century Evangelical Reformed church with an adjoining cemetery of the same denomination
Churches and monasteries
a baroque filial church from 1908-1909 with a surviving Czech-German cemetery from before the war
Churches in Kudowa-Zdrój means four places of worship of different denominations, from the Skull Chapel in Czermna to 19th-century Protestant churches.
The most famous is the Skull Chapel in Czermna, a Baroque cemetery chapel in the valley of the Czermnica river, about a kilometre from the town centre. Thousands of human skulls and bones cover its walls and vault. Father Wacław Tomaszek, a parish priest of Czech origin, built it in 1776-1784. In 1776 he found remains in an embankment near the bell tower, and with the gravedigger J. Langer and the sexton J. Schmidt he spent almost twenty years gathering them in one place.
The Church of Christ the Lord on Park Hill (Góra Parkowa) is a Lutheran branch church from 1797-1798, consecrated in 1798. It has one nave, one tower and eclectic organs from 1874-1879, and inside a Rococo altar installed in 1975. In the Słone district stands the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Baroque, single-nave, with a semicircular chancel. It owes its present shape to a 1908 rebuilding and was consecrated on 9 September 1909. A cemetery with Czech and German gravestones from before the Second World War survives by the church.
The Evangelical Reformed church in Pstrążna was built in 1847-1848 on the site of a wooden church from 1813. The local community wanted its own place of worship because the church on Park Hill was too far away. Pastor Ernst Josef Bergmann supervised the building, funded by the faithful's donations and the Gustav-Adolf-Werk organisation. You will find more heritage of the region on the page about churches and monasteries and among the Kudowa-Zdrój attractions.
