Description of the attraction
The Church of St. Roch is a Roman Catholic church located in Bialystok. Another name for the church is "Monument to the Restoration of Poland's Independence".
It was decided to build the church on a hill, on the site of a former Catholic cemetery, desecrated by the Russians during the January uprising. In 1926, a competition was announced in an architectural magazine for the design of the church. The editorial board received about 70 different proposals. The competition was won by the Polish architect Oskar Sosnowski.
Construction work began in 1927. By the beginning of the war, the church was not completed to the end, the walls and the roof were erected, but the builders did not have time to start the internal work. In September 1939, Oskar Sosnovsky died, the construction work, which lasted until 1945, was continued by the architect Stanislav Bukowski.
The monumental building in the modernist style was built using a new material - reinforced concrete, as well as using new technologies, without which it would have been impossible to achieve the effect of spaciousness and lightness of the interior. The main altar was designed by Anthony Mastonia.
The church has an impressive 83-meter tower, on top of which there is a three-meter figure of the Virgin Mary. Next to the church there is a priest's house, built according to the project of Sosnovsky. During the Soviet occupation, the new authorities wanted to open a circus in the building, but the idea remained unrealized.
In January 2011, at the initiative of the parish priest, a memorial plaque was erected in the church in memory of the victims of the accident of the Polish Tu-154 that crashed near Smolensk.
