St. Nicholas Church is a wooden Greek Catholic Church of the Eastern Rite situated in a village Bodruzal in Svidnik district in the Presov region. It is registered on the UNESCO's World Heritage List as part of the Wooden Churches of the Slovak part of the Carpathian Mountain Area.
The church is part of a unique urban entity situated on an elevated place in the village centre. Apart from the church it is made up of a separate bell tower, an adjacent cemetery and a wooden enclosure with a shingle roof and an entrance gate covered by a conical and an onion shape roof.
The church itself is a prototype church of the so-called Lemko type. It dates back to 1658 and belongs to the oldest wooden sacral buildings of the Eastern Rites in Slovakia.
The church has three towers. The construction is made out of logs, in a shape of three squares arranged on the same axis oriented from east to west. The exterior is decorated with vertically laid planks. The logs were also used on the construction of imitation tiered corbelled arches (of a truncated pyramid) in the sanctum and the nave. The arrangement of individual parts of the church represents the Holy Trinity. The church is situated on the highest hillock of the village. With its location it is higher than the rest of the buildings and houses.
The roof is made out of shingles. The tent roof above the presbytery and the nave is finished with a short square structure, to which conical bodies are attached to. To them baroque onion-like little roofs are fixed, finished with small shingle conical heads set with wrought iron crosses.
References:Spišskà Kapitula, a unique fortified ecclesiastical ensemble, began as a small fortified settlement overlooking Spišské Podhradie in the 12th century. It was the site of the residence of the Provost of the castle, in the no longer extant St Martin"s monastery, and later became a capitulary. This was destroyed in by Tatars in 1241-1243, but the pilgrim"s chapel, in rotunda form and dedicated to the Virgin, survived until the 18th century and the monastery until the 15th century.
The complex of buildings there is based on the Cathedral of St Martin, where building began in 1285 as a three-aisled Romanesque basilica with a chancel at the west end and a double spire. It owes its present form to successive remodellings and additions in the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque styles.
The Provost's residence was completed in 1281 and further religious buildings were added. Frequent raids by marauding Bulgars and others led to its being fortified in the 14th century. The cathedral was rebuilt in the later 14th century. In 1776 it became the residence of the Bishop and four years later a seminary was established. In 1819 the first teacher training centre in Hungary was founded there.
The Bishop's Palace is largely Baroque, with some excellent interior decorations, like many of the religious buildings in the group. The oval ground plan of the centre of the town is due to its having been fortified in the 14th century. The various religious buildings had defensive functions in this early period. New monastery buildings were erected when the provost"s residence was rebuilt and the whole area fortified. The earlier central fortifications were removed in the 18th century.
Spišské Kapitula is part of the UNESCO World Heritage site Levoča, Spiš Castle and the associated cultural monuments.