Church of St. Hedwig

The strikingly modern tower of the Church of St Hedwig, visible from afar and reminiscent of an American skyscraper, is crowned by a canopy with a concrete Latin cross and forms one of the most distinctive landmarks on the Opava skyline. Today it is hard to imagine the city without it. From 1945 until the early 1990s, however, the tower stood without its crowning cross, which was destroyed in April 1945 during wartime fighting. At the time, the Luftwaffe used the tower as an observation post, making it an obvious target for the advancing troops. During the war, the church itself served as a storage facility for military supplies, and in the following decades it fell into disuse and disrepair. From 1955 to 1989, it was used to store medical equipment. The building was finally completed in the early 1990s and consecrated in 1993.
The area along the road to Bruntál and Krnov formed part of Opava’s Hradec suburb. In 1789, the site later occupied by the Church of St. Hedwig began to be used as a cemetery, which is reflected in local place names such as Hřbitovní Street (Am Friedhof / Cemetery) and later Starý hřbitov (Alte Friedhof / Old Cemetery). The burial ground remained in use until 1891, when it was closed following the establishment of a new cemetery in the southern part of Opava, near Otická Street. After the First World War, plans emerged to build a new church in this western part of the city. It was to serve not only as a place of worship but also as a memorial to the fallen of the First World War, and was to be dedicated to St. Hedwig, patron saint of Silesia.
The idea of constructing a new church dated back to the 1890s, when Father Josef Eichler, a priest and teacher at the Opava Realschule, first proposed a church dedicated to Silesia’s patron saint. To this end, he established a foundation and contributed 6,000 gulden. The search for a suitable site continued, and during the First World War the plan took on the additional role of commemorating the war dead. In 1928, architect Adolf Müller prepared one of the first designs, followed by another by Karl Gottwald. The scheme only began to take shape with the purchase of a former cemetery plot. In December 1931, an architectural competition was announced, open to designers from Czechoslovak Silesia. The jury included Mayor Ernst Franz, Provost Paul Heider, director of the Silesian Provincial Museum Wilhelm Braun, painter Adolf Zdrazila, sculptor Josef Obeth, and architects Erich Geldner and Jan Rubý. The results, announced in spring 1932, awarded first prize to architect Leopold Bauer, second to Oskar Wittek, and third to Wilhelm Schönn from Bruntál. Bauer subsequently developed the winning design in detail, and construction began at the end of July 1932. Given the scale and complexity of the task, completion of the church was delayed until mid-1937.
While Wittek envisioned an archetypal monument with a pared-down twin-tower façade and expressionist articulation, Bauer pursued a form consistent with his own oeuvre – combining symbolic emphasis with a distinctive approach to space, structure, and artistic expression. Bauer’s initial study featured a large church on a Latin-cross plan with a three-bay elevated portico as the main façade. He later revised this concept, replacing the projecting portico with a tiered tower mass topped by a square belfry crowned with a canopy and a Latin cross.
Bauer’s design combined a Latin-cross plan and pyramidally stepped three-stage tower with a modern reinforced-concrete frame and the medieval principle of an enclosed volume opened to the exterior through large windows. His inspiration drew both from medieval art and from the work of French architect Auguste Perret, who pioneered reinforced concrete as both a structural and artistic foundation. The choice of a tiered tower continued a theme from Bauer’s earlier projects influenced by American skyscrapers – most notably his unbuilt design for the Austrian National Bank in Vienna.
The church structure is based on an infilled reinforced-concrete skeleton, used both for its engineering advantages and to rhythmically articulate the façades with pilaster strips and beams. These support cornices inscribed with Latin quotes from Ludwig van Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. The same rhythmic treatment is applied to the tower mass of the main façade and to the side and rear elevations of the nave Inside, the church is a single-aisle space with a transverse transept. The nave is covered by a segmental reinforced-concrete vault, while the transept arms and chancel have flat ceilings. The square chancel, as wide as the nave, is framed by reinforced-concrete piers and beams that emphasize the rational, geometrically composed spatial concept. This classically ordered structure, based on a Latin-cross plan combined with a skeletal frame, reflects Bauer’s traditional orientation while embracing modern construction methods.
The plastered walls of the transept and chancel are decorated with figurative murals by Silesian painter Paul Gebauer (1888–⁠1951). The central work, a strikingly expressive depiction of the Resurrection of Christ, occupies the chancel wall behind the high altar. The triumphal arch features a painting of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (the Holy Trinity). On the Gospel side of the transept is a mural of the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven, while on the Epistle side St Hedwig is depicted alongside other Czech patron saints. The high altar is adorned with reliefs by Silesian sculptor Helena Scholz-Železná (1882–⁠1974). The main entrance is fitted with a decorative wrought-iron gate by Opava craftsman Ludwig Blucha, based on Bauer’s design. The entrance walls were once decorated with murals by Adolf Zdrazila (1868–⁠1942), a frequent collaborator of the architect; these were painted over in the post-war period and have yet to be restored.
The Church of St. Hedwig is one of Leopold Bauer’s most significant works and his final project, bringing to a close his complex and remarkable career. As a textbook example of the Gesamtkunstwerk, it also marks the end of an important chapter in the architecture and art of Czechoslovak Silesia.
Used as a warehouse until 1990, the church was declared a cultural monument after the Velvet Revolution. It was restored and consecrated on 16 October 1993 – 750 years after the death of St. Hedwig. From a broader urban perspective, the surrounding square was further shaped in the 1930s by residential blocks built by local builder Karel Kern. After the Second World War, between 1947 and 1949, three blocks of late-functionalist housing were added, designed by Brno architect Bohuslav Fuchs. The ensemble was finally completed with the Socialist-Realist U Zlatého kříže (At the Golden Cross) block, designed by the Opava office of the Ostrava-based Stavoprojekt.

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