Church of Saint Lawrence at Zdouň, Romanesque-Gothic church in Zdouň, Tedražice, Czech Republic
The Church of Saint Lawrence at Zdouň is a Romanesque-Gothic building from the third quarter of the 13th century, standing on a hill above the Pstružná stream. Its nearly square nave has triangular gables and two tall pointed windows with tracery, and a narrower polygonal presbytery with buttresses adjoins it to the east. A square tower with a bell-shaped cupola stands before the west front, its ground floor serving as the entrance porch.
The church is a Romanesque-Gothic building dated to the third quarter of the 13th century, among the oldest churches in the region. A 1314 document already calls it a parish church. In the first half of the 14th century a Gothic presbytery and a sacristy on its south wall replaced the original apse. The nave was vaulted in 1691, and a full reconstruction followed in 2006.
The church is named for Saint Lawrence, and the village of Zdouň grew from the old mining settlement of Vzduny above the Pstružná stream. The church survived the fires that destroyed the Zdouň monastery and Vzduny during the Thirty Years' War, while other sources place the settlement's end earlier, in the Hussite wars of the 15th century.
The church stands on a hill in the Zdouň settlement above the Pstružná stream, west of Tedražice, and is surrounded by a cemetery. The entrance is through the tower's ground floor, which serves as a vestibule. The site is a dominant landmark of the Ostružná valley, visible from the surrounding area.
The church survived the Thirty Years' War fire that destroyed the Zdouň monastery and the Vzduny settlement, though other sources date the settlement's end to the 15th-century Hussite wars. Its nave was vaulted in 1691, and a full reconstruction in 2006 renewed the tower's whitewash, oak doors, forged grille and interior plasterwork.
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