Description of the attraction
The town of Novy Sverzhen is a suburb of Stolbtsy, built on the left bank of the Neman. The first chronicle mention Sverzhno refers to 1428, when the legendary prince Vitovt gave it to his wife Ulyana. The development of the city was associated with the navigable river Neman. In the 16th century, a ferry was launched across the river. Warehouses have sprung up along the banks of the river. Here merchants received, stored and distributed their goods. The historical building of the city began from the river and repeats its contours. The city was also famous for the Radziwills faience factory, built in 1742 by Mikhail Kazimir Radziwill Rybonka.
On the main trading square of Novy Sverzhen there are two churches that are the high-rise dominants of the city: the Peter and Paul Church and the Assumption Church. The Assumption Church was built as a Uniate temple in the Vilna Baroque style characteristic of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In the middle of the 18th century, the temple was rebuilt into an Orthodox church. This temple has witnessed the glory, miracles and death of the miraculous icon of the Mother of God of Novosverzhensk. The ancient icon, acquired thanks to a miracle of God, survived all wars and fires, saving and healing people many times, but during the closure of the Assumption Church during the Khrushchev period of Soviet rule, when the atheists roughly threw it into a truck, it crumbled to dust.
The Peter and Paul Church was built as a Calvinist church. Imagination is struck by its stern, unyielding beauty, which is not typical for the temples of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In 1588, the temple was transferred to the Catholic Church by Prince Radziwill the Orphan, an adamant fighter against the Calvinist faith. Now it is a functioning church.
An ancient water mill, reconstructed today, has survived to this day.
The Christian cemetery contains the graves of Polish soldiers during the First World War. Austere rows of mossy Catholic crosses are all that remains of the former military glory.
From the synagogue, built at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, now only ruins remain. But the old Jewish cemetery has survived.
