Wooden Church of St. Michael the Archangel UNESCO, Ladomirova, (wooden churches UNESCO)
Church of St. Michael the Archangel is a wooden church with a bell tower from 1742 in the village of Ladomirova dedicated to St. Michael the Archangel, built without a single nail. An important monastery with a printing house stood next to the church. It was founded by Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox monks who moved here after the 1917 Revolution, but was destroyed after World War II. The right side of the iconostasis was also damaged and was restored in 1946. Cerkov was damaged again in 1957 when a linden tree fell during a natural storm. Since 1968 it has been a national cultural monument and since 8 July 2008 it has been listed in the World Heritage List and belongs among Slovak wooden churches unesco.
Unique building
In the church area on the south side there is a wooden belfry of post construction secured from the outside by vertical spruce boards. The church is a log three-space sacral building, divided according to the rites into three significant spaces and was built according to the model types of the Subcarpathian-Russian Lemkos, whose eastern tradition in our country reached the Carpathian region almost up to the Poprad River. The so-called Lemko type of layout is presented in Ladomirova by the classical quadrature of three spaces on a square plan with a central extended nave, covered, like the presbytery, by a wooden dome. The vaulting is not designed by a continuous structural interlocking with the log walls, but by an atypically shaped, raised octagonal vault without pendentives used by the types of the so-called „Hutsul“ churches (see the only Orthodox church in Nizhny Komárnik : www.regionsaris.sk/dreveny-chram-ochrany-bohorodicky-nizny-komarnik).
The motif of the „figure of eight“, still of Russian-Byzantine origin, was applied by the Ladomyr Orthodox church only in this part of the interior, while its spatial-mass composition follows the above-mentioned Lemko pattern, also expressed in the roof clusters with triple-graded shingled onion bulbs. The tower of the church dominates the nave. Both the towers and the stepped two-storey tented roofs above the sanctuary are finished with so-called shingle „poppy“ roofs with wrought-iron crosses. A remarkable characteristic of the sacral complex is determined by the exterior dynamic stepped roof, which is covered with shingles. This type of roof is the prototype for the church in Miroli www.regionsaris.sk/dreveny-chram-ochrany-presvatej-bohorodicky-mirola and Hunkovce www.regionsaris.sk/dreveny-chram-ochrany-presvatej-bohorodicky-hunkovce . The log cabin and the undercroft spaces are exterior finished with vertical spruce boards with slats. On the west side of the nave there is a small choir with a wooden parapet.
In the front part of the fencing of the building, a part of the palanquin - a wooden beamed enclosure with a shingle roof - has been preserved, as well as the entrance gate with a low pitched roof covered with shingles. Artistically valuable is iconostasis and altar, which dates back to the middle of the 18th century. Thanks to these architectural elements, the church in Ladomírová is rightly ranked among the unique wooden churches of UNESCO.
According to the Julian calendar, on the feast of John the Baptist (11 September), pilgrimages are held here.
Source: www.drevenchramy.sk
Photo: Tomáš Šereda
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