Church of the Holy Trinity, Lutheran wooden church in Kezmarok, Slovakia.
The Church of the Holy Trinity is a wooden Lutheran articular church built in the form of an isosceles Greek cross, with arms covered by a wide barrel vault resting on four twisted pillars. Its walls are white clay daub on a red spruce log frame, fastened with wooden pegs and no metal nails; the only stone part is the sacristy. The steep shingled roof has a cross on the gable.
The 1681 Sopron diet allowed Protestants to build one church per town, outside the walls and from the cheapest material, wood. Kežmarok's first wooden church rose in 1687; in 1717 builder Georg Müttermann rebuilt it in three months into the Greek-cross form seen today. It became a national cultural monument in 1985 and joined UNESCO's Carpathian wooden churches in 2008.
The church was consecrated to the Holy Trinity, and services are still held here in Slovak and German tradition. The ceiling painting shows a blue sky with clouds, the twelve apostles and four evangelists, begun in 1717 and attributed to a Levoča painter named Mayer, later corrected to Gottlieb Kramer and his son Ján. The altar by Ján Lerch was commissioned in 1718 and gilded in 1727 by the Kežmarok pharmacist Joachim Augustín Weiss and his wife Marta Várady-Szakmáry.
The church stands outside the old town walls, next to the newer Lutheran church. The interior is entered at ground level; the wooden floor under the pews was relaid with stone cubes during the 1991–1996 restoration. Look for the sacristy, the only stone part of the building, originally a 1593 pub.
The church stands on a Greek-cross plan modelled on Amsterdam's Noorderkerk, and tradition credits Swedish sailors with shaping the interior roof like an upturned ship, echoed by the round windows. In fact, builders came from neighbouring towns, and the carpentry was done by Johann Lerch of Kežmarok.
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