Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Baroque brick church in Lviv, Ukraine.
The Church of St. Mary Magdalene is a three-nave, six-pillar basilica with an elongated choir and apse covered by cross vaults. Its architecture combines Baroque and Renaissance elements, and the facade has two towers. The building stands outside the old city walls to the south of Lviv's historic centre.
Anna Pstrokońska donated the land called "100 Fields" to the Dominicans in 1600, and the brick church was built between 1600 and 1612 to designs by Wojciech Kielar and Jan Godny, completed in 1635. In 1648 troops of Bohdan Khmelnytsky seized the monastery fortifications. Marcin Urbanik rebuilt and enlarged the church in 1754–1758, adding towers and new facades; Joseph II's secularization made it a parish church in 1786 and turned the monastery into a women's prison.
Since 2001 the Roman Catholic parish has again held services in the former Dominican church, though the Blessed Sacrament cannot be stored there and the priest carries it out after each Mass. The building also houses the Lviv Organ Hall, which stages organ and chamber concerts, folklore events and academic ceremonies; during these the altar is usually covered with a curtain and the movable pew backs are shifted toward it.
The building stands at Stepana Bandery Street 8, outside the old town walls near Lviv Polytechnic. It serves as the Lviv Organ Hall, with concerts in the former church and a gallery whose exhibitions change monthly. The hall seats up to 400 listeners. During concerts the altar is usually covered with a curtain and the movable pew backs are shifted toward it.
The organ, built by the Czech firm Rieger-Kloss and inaugurated on 5 June 1933, has 60 registers and nearly 5,000 pipes on three manuals. A fourth manual, the 12-register Fernwerk, sits at the opposite end of the hall and was unused as of 2020. Frescoes by Jan Henryk Rosen, dated 1931, were found in 2019 under plaster in rooms once used as toilets.
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