Church of St. Michael the Archangel, Renaissance parish church in Branná, Czech Republic

The Church of St. Michael the Archangel is a single-nave Renaissance hall church with a three-sided apse at each end, built from 1614. A 59-metre tower with seven storeys and a lantern-topped onion dome stands before the south-west facade, flanked by spiral staircases added in 1690–1694. The nave is vaulted with a barrel vault cut by lunettes and studded with stucco panels holding eight-pointed stars.

Hynek the Younger Bruntálský z Vrbna built it as the Evangelical Church of the Resurrection of Christ, consecrated in 1614; his debts forced him to sell the Kolštejn estate to the Petřvaldský family in 1615. Repaired in 1743 as a Catholic church, it received its present dedication then. Further repairs followed a fire in 1852 and again in 1907.

The church was consecrated in 1614 as the Evangelical Church of the Resurrection of Christ and only received its current dedication to St. Michael in 1743, when it was re-Catholicised. Inside, look for the late Gothic Madonna from the 1520s, moved here from the abolished Church of the Virgin Mary in 1789.

The church stands at the level of the town square but higher than the castle, on a rocky spur whose tower edge is held by a wall up to 10 m high. A short roofed corridor on two vaulted arches links it to the 1784 Classicist rectory, and one arch spans the old entrance path to the square.

The nave is covered by a barrel vault with lunette sections, divided by stucco panels filled with eight-pointed stars, not Gothic rib vaults. A tribune on Tuscan columns runs around the hall, interrupted only above the altar.