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:
The Holy Trinity Column in Olomouc is a Baroque monument built in 1716–1754 in honour of God. The main purpose was a spectacular celebration of Catholic Church and faith, partly caused by feeling of gratitude for ending a plague, which struck Moravia between 1713 and 1715. The column was also understood to be an expression of local patriotism, since all artists and master craftsmen working on this monument were Olomouc citizens, and almost all depicted saints were connected with the city of Olomouc in some way. The column is the biggest Baroque sculptural group in the Czech Republic. In 2000 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list.
The column is dominated by gilded copper sculptures of the Holy Trinity accompanied by the Archangel Gabriel on the top and the Assumption of the Virgin beneath it.
The base of the column, in three levels, is surrounded by 18 more stone sculptures of saints and 14 reliefs in elaborate cartouches. At the uppermost stage are saints connected with Jesus’ earth life – his mother’s parents St. Anne and St. Joachim, his foster-father St. Joseph, and St. John the Baptist, who was preparing his coming – who are accompanied by St. Lawrence and St. Jerome, saints to whom the chapel in the Olomouc town hall was dedicated. Three reliefs represent the Three theological virtues Faith, Hope, and Love.
Below them, the second stage is dedicated to Moravian saints St. Cyril and St. Methodius, who came to Great Moravia to spread Christianity in 863, St. Blaise, in whose name one of the main Olomouc churches is consecrated, and patrons of neighbouring Bohemia St. Adalbert of Prague and St. John of Nepomuk, whose following was very strong there as well.
In the lowest stage one can see the figures of an Austrian patron St. Maurice and a Bohemian patron St. Wenceslas, in whose names two important Olomouc churches were consecrated, another Austrian patron St. Florian, who was also viewed as a protector against various disasters, especially fire, St. John of Capistrano, who used to preach in Olomouc, St. Anthony of Padua, a member of the Franciscan Order, which owned an important monastery in Olomouc, and St. Aloysius Gonzaga, a patron of students. His sculpture showed that Olomouc was very proud of its university. Reliefs of all twelve apostles are placed among these sculptures.
The column also houses a small chapel inside with reliefs depicting Cain's offering from his crop, Abel's offering of firstlings of his flock, Noah's first burnt offering after the Flood, Abraham's offering of Isaac and of a lamb, and Jesus' death. The cities of Jerusalem and Olomouc can be seen in the background of the last mentioned relief.