Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.17018/portal.2020.8
Two Naves, Four Orders and the Bishop's Nephew: Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Donja Glogovnica
Krešimir Karlo
orcid.org/0000-0001-5748-6353
; Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, Conservation Department in Bjelovar, Croatia
Abstract
The parish church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary is located about ten kilometres north of Križevci, in the centre of Donja Glogovnica, at the end of the southern slopes of the Kalnik Mountains. The church’s extensive bibliography has been caused by several factors: first of all, the fact that the present-day village of Glogovnica shares its name with the Glogovnica, a minor river used as a spatial determinant in the Middle Ages. The toponym developed into a synonym that would accommodate various and diverse estates, including the properties of the Knights Templar and Hospitaller, and the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. The spatial organization of the building, whose nave is divided into two parts, a distinct rarity in the context of medieval architecture in Croatia, would also cause numerous hypotheses about the development of its architectural history. In addition, architectural sculptures embedded in the interior and exterior of the church, as well as the nearby parish house, are cited as unique examples of Romanesque sculpture in continental Croatia. The church in Glogovnica can also be seen as a case study in the history of conservation, since the first conservator in the Banovina of Croatia, Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski, led the restauration of the monument in the mid-19th century. He would start a radical reconstruction of the west façade by placing an octagonal bell tower in its axis, and forcing the symetry upon the other façades by constructing new, pointed neoGothic window. Finally, the church is also mentioned in the context of defensive architecture, either as a fortified church or as a fortification in the defence system against Ottoman attacks in the 16th century. The obvious shortcoming of the perspective from which the monument is observed even today is the predominance of interpretations that deal with individual elements (origin of the architectural sculpture, dating of the quatrefoil columns dividing the nave, whether the nave was vaulted or not, whether the columns belong to the oldest construction phase or not), and this is how the entire architectural history of the church is perceived. The incompatibility between various components of the Glogovnica narrative thus results in an uncertainty that still allows for a lively coexistence of diverse interpretations of its architectural phases, provenance and dating. So far, the results of archaeological, conservation and restoration research indicate that, during its oldest architectural phase in the 13th century, the church of St. Mary was a single-nave building with a vaulted square chancel and a shallow semi-circular apse. The north wall of the nave of the first church was incorporated into the north wall of the nave of the present-day building – a double-nave hall church with an elongated polygonal sanctuary, built in the second half of the 15th century. Reddish sandstone was used to build the quatrefoil columns in the nave, a pointed triumphal arch, the sanctuary and stone window sills, which clearly indicates all the elements were built at the same time. This rejects the hypotheses about an unfinished three-nave Romanesque church, as well as the hypotheses about a vaulted nave from the 15th century, and establishes clearer analogies with the typologically similar architecture of Central Europe of the same period. Furthermore, the adaptation of the church at the beginning of the 17th century, carried out by the Jesuit order, combining Gothic and Baroque decorative and construction elements, has also been noted. The Jesuit adaptation at the same time hides the semi-columns and consoles and the older consoles in the sanctuary, but instead of the construction of a Baroque vault, the existing one was redesigned by removing the sanctuary services. This project, which included furnishing the church with a choir, which still has a complete cycle of wall paintings depicting the Way of the Cross on the wall that surrounded it, was crowned by carving the IHS monogram into the eastern keystone of the vault. After the abolition of the Jesuit order, the estate and parish of Glogovnica were given to the Greek Catholic diocese in 1781, and today the parish is part of the Diocese of Bjelovar-Križevci.
Keywords
Glogovnica; Donja Glogovnica; medieval architecture; Canons Regular of the Holy Sepulchre; sepulchral; knightly orders; double-nave church
Hrčak ID:
250638
URI
Publication date:
20.12.2020.
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