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Wang church in Karpacz
Vang stave church (Świątynia Wang, also Vang stavkirke, German: Stabkirche Wang) is a stave church which was bought by the Prussian King and transferred from Vang in Norway and re-erected in 1842 in Brückenberg near Krummhübel in Germany, nowKarpacz
in the Karkonosze mountains of Poland.The church is a four-post
single-nave stave church originally built around 1200 in the parish of Vang in the Valdres region of
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Drawing of the stave church from 1841 by F.W. Schiertz
Original location of Vang stave church
In 1832 the local council decided to pull down the stave church because it was
too small and had become structurally unsafe over the years. The plans for its
demolition and replacement were known already in 1826,
when the painter Johan Christian Dahl made the first attempt to save it. He urged the council to repair and
extend it.
There was also an attempt to have it
re-erected at Heensåsen in the same parish as an annex church. Knut Nordsveen,
a local farmer, offered to donate the building site to the community, but his
offer was rejected. Disappointed by the rebuff, he later sold his farm and
emigrated to America. In 1932 a monument was erected in memory of him.
While traveling in
Dahl saw no other way than to buy
the church himself. He asked the vicar of Vang to bid on his behalf at the public
auction held in January of 1841. Dahl won the bid at 86 speciedaler,
1 ort and 7 skilling, on the condition that
the site was cleared by the end of the year. Accused of being a speculant, Dahl
defended himself by stating that his only intention was to rescue the church,
and that he had no intention of making money from the deal.
The solution came from Crown Prince,
later King Frederick William IV of Prussia, whom Dahl knew personally. After the exchange of several letters, he
persuaded the prince to take over responsibility for the Vang stave church and
cover the costs of re-erecting it in Potsdam.
The task of surveying the church,
marking the materials, supervising the dismantling and preparing for the
transportation was entrusted to the young German architect Franz Wilhelm Schiertz, who had helped Dahl to make the plates for his book on the stave
churches, and who was probably also known to the Crown Prince. Schiertz did
pioneering work in documentation and planning for an enterprise without
precedent. His drawings and inventories are now priceless sources of knowledge
about the original appearance of the stave church. All pieces were marked and
packed for transportation during the summer. In September they were delivered
at the
The original plan had been to
re-erect the church on the Pfaueninsel (Peacock Island) in Potsdam. But in
the meantime, this plan was discarded in favour of a site at the remote village
ofBrückenberg near Krummhübel in the Riesengebirge, now the Karkonosze mountains, in the
In the spring of 1842 the materials were again taken by river barge up the Oder to the foothills, and from there by wagon to
the mountain
The foundation stone was laid on
August 2,
The long lost apse was
reconstructed, albeit with a very strange baroque roof. The gallery and the flèche were reconstructed, but several new
windows without historical precedent were put in. The doorways were turned
inside out, with the carvings facing inward. The decorated ceiling above the
choir was not restored, probably because it seemed too Catholic in a Protestant
church. All the original roof trusses were renewed.
The work took two years and the
total cost amounted to more than 75 000 marks. On the King's birthday, October
15, 1843, the flèche with the date 1200 was raised. On July 27, 1844 Prince
Frederick of the Netherlands together with huge crowds witnessed the
consecration of "Die
Bergkirche unseres Erlösers zu Wang" (The
mountain church of Our Savior of Vang). The former owner J. C. Dahl was not
present, but he was happy to know that his project had been realised. He was
spared the burden of preserving only certain decorated elements, and pleased
that "a fair likeness" had been rebuilt.
Now serving a Polish community, Wang church has become a major tourist
attraction and is probably the world's most visited stave church with about 200
000 visitors each year.
The layout with four internal posts
or staves is common to several stave churches in
the Valdres region. But in the stave churches of Høre and Lomen they are incorporated into a construction with a raised roof above the
central part of the nave, whereas the churches of Vang and Øye have ordinary saddle roofs, with no structural connection between the
roof and the interior posts.
According to tradition, the church
had been relocated once before at an earlier date, confirming the opinion of
many scholars that it was much altered before leaving Vang. The Norwegian
architect Arne Berg has after thorough examination of the rebuilt church
concluded that the remaining original materials belonged to a stave church of
the Sogn type with a raised roof above the central part of the nave. Dating
evidence is, however, scant. He estimates it to have been built around 1200 — confirming the rather dubious date inscribed in 1843.
It may have been rebuilt already in the medieval period, but perhaps as late as 1600.
There is a runic inscription listed
in Rundata as N 83 located on the doorway of the church, of which the expert Magnus
Olsen has proposed the translation: " Eindridi the dexterouscarved (the doorway),
the son of Olav of Lo" (Old Norse: Eindriði skar, mjáfingr, sonr Ólafs
á Ló).[1] If this is the correct interpretation, the inscription identifies the
artist. His name was Eindridi, his nickname was "dexterous" or
"handy", and his father was Olav of Lo. In 1937, the inscription was
reported as badly damaged and hardly readable. The interpretations of the
inscriptions are based on copies made before the church was moved.
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