The Church of Sts. Olha and Elizabeth is a

Catholic The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...

church located in

Lviv Lviv ( uk, Львів) is the largest city in western Ukraine, and the seventh-largest in Ukraine, with a population of . It serves as the administrative centre of Lviv Oblast and Lviv Raion, and is one of the main cultural centres of Ukrain ...

Ukraine Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...

between the city's main rail station and the Old Town. It was originally built as a Western Catholic church and today serves as a Ukrainian Greek Catholic church. The church was built by the Latin Archbishop of Lviv Saint Joseph Bilczewski in the years 1903-1911 as a parish church for the city's dynamically developing western suburb. It was designed by Polish architect Teodor Talowski, in the

neo-Gothic Gothic Revival (also referred to as Victorian Gothic, neo-Gothic, or Gothick) is an architectural movement that began in the late 1740s in England. The movement gained momentum and expanded in the first half of the 19th century, as increasingly ...

style, similar to that of the Votive Church in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

. St. Elisabeth's, placed on a hill which is the watershed of the

Baltic Baltic may refer to: Peoples and languages * Baltic languages, a subfamily of Indo-European languages, including Lithuanian, Latvian and extinct Old Prussian *Balts (or Baltic peoples), ethnic groups speaking the Baltic languages and/or originati ...

and

Black Sea The Black Sea is a marginal mediterranean sea of the Atlantic Ocean lying between Europe and Asia, east of the Balkans, south of the East European Plain, west of the Caucasus, and north of Anatolia. It is bounded by Bulgaria, Georgia, Rom ...

, with its facade flanked by two tall towers and an 85 m belfry on the north side with imposing spires was envisioned as Lviv's first landmark to greet visitors arriving in the city by train. In 1939 the church was damaged in a bombing raid but remained open until 1946. After the war, the building was used as warehouseL. Galusek, ''Reconstructing a Shattered Mosaic: The Common Heritage of Poland and Ukraine'', Centropa: a journal of central European architecture and related arts, vol. 7, 2007, p. 107 and fell further into ruin, until it was returned to faithful with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1991 a Ukrainian Greek Catholic was established and the church was reconsecrated as the Church of Sts. Olha and Elizabeth.

Gallery

File:Church of Saints Olga and Elizabeth, Lviv (5).jpg File:Церква св. Ольги і Єлизавети 2.jpg SStOlha and ElizabethChurch Lviv Interior1.jpg File:Ukraine-Lviv-Church of Olga and Elizabeth-6.jpg File:Church of Saints Olga and Elizabeth, Lviv (W. Rawski).jpg

References

Churches in Lviv Roman Catholic churches completed in 1911 Church buildings converted to a different denomination Roman Catholic churches in Ukraine Ukrainian Catholic churches in Ukraine Gothic Revival church buildings in Ukraine 20th-century Roman Catholic church buildings in Ukraine {{Ukraine-UGK-church-stub