Vul. Vynnychenka, 22 – St. Michael Church (former church of discalced carmelites)

ID: 185

The former Barefoot Carmelite Roman Catholic Church (presently St. Michael Church, 20 Vynnychenka Street) is a Baroque construction. The church was constructed on a hill beyond the limits of the old defensive walls. Together with the cells buildings and the defensive wall standing along the driveway of Prosvity and Vynnychenka Streets, the church forms a single architectural ensemble that over the course of the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries had a defensive purpose protecting the city from the east. The main construction chronology dates connected with this object are 1634 (erecting the main section of the building, by the architect Ya. Pokorovych), the second half of the seventeenth century (adding the defensive walls, by the engineer J. Berens), the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries (monastery complex), 1835-1839 (construction of a bell tower, by the architect A. Vondrashka) and 1906 (erection of a bell tower and restoration, by the architect V. Halytskyi).

Architecture

The building of the church is built from stone. It has three naves, no apses and a gable roof with a flèche. The face façade is flanked with towers and topped off with a pediment. The facades are segmented with pilasters, have trimmed semicircular arched windows and are adorned with sculptures of saints (1906). The flights of stone stairs lead up the hill to the entrance portal.

At the intersection of the central nave and the transept the church is covered with a spherical vault; the naves have semicircular vault ceilings. The vaults system is supported by the pillars. The inner space of the side naves forms the interior of the chapels.

The murals dating to 1731-1732, the work of J. K. Pedretti and B. Mazurkiewicz (partially covered in 1870 and 1906) have been preserved in the interior. The main altar-tempietto (dating to the seventeenth century, the work of O. Prochenkowicz) and the fragments of altar plastics have been also preserved.