Wooden Church of St. Catherine in Ostrava

People who come to the wooden church in the Hrabová district of Ostrava are amazed at the excellent condition in which such an old church has been preserved.

This is the first secret of the only wooden church standing in the industrial city. The explanation is simple: the church is brand new. It is a new building that has only been serving the faithful since 2004. The original church, which looked very similar, fell into ashes along with the centuries-old linden trees that sheltered the sanctuary at Easter 2002.

When the construction of the new church, which was to be as faithful a copy of the original as possible, was being prepared, conservationists discovered that there was no accurate documentation of the 15th century church. The new church was therefore based on photographs and details that local people remembered. The construction was undertaken by a company that works for the open-air museum in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm and which knows the original methods best. So even today’s church is built the way our great-grandfathers knew how – without a single metal nail.

Perhaps the biggest mystery, which is still disputed today, is where the church in Hrabová actually came from. The most common legend is that in the fourteenth century it stood in the Beskydy area village of Metylovice. The local people decided to build a new brick church and did not know what to do with the original one. The inhabitants of Hrabová, who did not have a sanctuary of their own, took advantage of this. So they decided to buy the church dismantled into individual beams. Allegedly, they took advantage of the wagoners who used to travel with goods from Ostrava to Beskydy and on their way to Ostrava they used to drive empty-handed. Thanks to the construction, they transported the beams to the church.

Contact

OSTRAVAINFO!!! - pobočka Věž
Prokešovo náměstí 1803/8
702 00 Moravská Ostrava a Přívoz

E-mail: vez@ostravainfo.cz
Web: http://www.ostravainfo.cz/
Tel.: +420 599 443 096