History

In 1690, Jan Karol Dolski, starosta of Pinsk and Grand Marshal of Lithuania, founded a new settlement with the character of a town - Karolin (named after his middle name), located about 1.5 km east of Pinsk. Over the course of five years, he erected a fortified manor house in the town, and brought communist priests there from Italy, for whom he founded a wooden church and monastery. After Dolski's death, the town, along with the hand of his daughter Catherine, was inherited by Michal Serwacy Wiśniowiecki (1680-1744), who rebuilt the manor into a magnificent castle surrounded by a moat and rampart with bastions, destroyed during the Northern War in 1706 by Swedish troops. Its relics survived until the interwar period (recorded in a drawing by Napoleon Orda). In 1799, the town was incorporated into Pinsk.

The Communist Church of St. Charles Borromeo was built in 1695, in the north-eastern part of the town of Karolin, on the northern frontage of the square, almost exactly on the axis of the castle occupying the southern frontage. Its appearance is known from a visitation in 1732 - it was a small wooden, two-towered church with five altars. In 1737, a wooden sacristy was added behind the altar (which suggests that the church had a simple enclosure, without a separate chancel). The priests lived in a wooden presbytery-cloister building, situated behind the presbytery.

A new brick church was erected in 1782 at the expense of the then parish priest, Fr Tomasz Lipczyński. Probably due to a lack of funds before 1790, the next administrator Fr Kacper Dąbrowski renovated the wooden furnishings from the old church and installed them in the new one. In 1836, after the death of the last of the Communist priests, Izydor Kontowicz, the activities of this congregation in Pinsk ceased. Services were held in the church only once a year and it was gradually devastated. In Helena Skirmunttowa's 1868 drawing, the church is in a bad state, with visible defects in the plaster, as well as plants (including sizable bushes) growing on the roofs. In 1912, Fr Casimir Bukraba, later bishop, was appointed chaplain of the church and made efforts to restore and renovate it. After the First World War - as can be seen from archival photographs - most of the church furnishings disappeared, including the main altar, three side altars, pulpit and pews. It can therefore be assumed that the church was occupied by the occupying army and was used inappropriately, e.g. as a depot or lazarette. In the inter-war period, the church served as a branch parish of the cathedral parish and a makeshift decoration was arranged then, using relics of the former furnishings. In 1932, the later prominent reporter Ryszard Kapuściński was baptised here. The church survived the Second World War undamaged and was only closed in 1960, when a warehouse was located there. Between 1980 and 1983, the church was converted into an exhibition hall, presumably at which point the rest of the furnishings were lost. In 1993, the building was converted into a concert hall and an electronic organ was installed. In 2013, extensive renovations were carried out, including the roof, and the south-east façade was connected via a link to the new building housing the box office and hall. Contemporary stained glass windows with secular themes were placed in the windows. A wooden stage was built in the chancel to accommodate its current function, and rows of seats were set up in the nave.

Architecture

The church is situated in the north-eastern part of the present city centre, on a square surrounded by urban buildings from the second half of the twentieth century, on Kirov Street (in the inter-war period on Albrechtowska Street, then, after 1936, on the 84th Polesie Rifle Regiment). The chancel faces north-west. Built of brick, plastered in white. The nave is rectangular in plan, three-bay with the middle bay slightly wider, risalitic in the side elevations; in front, a square tower slightly blended in with the body; the nave is closed with a straight wall, with a small, shallow, trilaterally closed recess (apse) blended in with a sacristy, much lower in form, rectangular in plan, slightly narrower than the body, adjoining it from the north-east. The interior is hall-like, with strongly projecting pillars supporting wide gurtzes, between which spans a wide vaulted cradle, with lunettes. The porch is covered with a cross vault, the vestry and the storeroom with ceilings.

Artistic features

The Pińsk church of the communist priests (also known as the Bartholomew or Bartholomew Fathers) is one of the few temples of this congregation in the First Republic, and, after the Węgrów church, is probably the most magnificent among them. This is the second temple erected on this site - virtually nothing is known about the first wooden church from 1695. The construction of the current edifice took place in 1782, at a time when even in provincial Polesia, Baroque forms were in decline. In this case, however, it was decided to build an edifice completely belonging to this style, and in some respects perhaps even anachronistic. However, these are non-trivial forms and find no analogue in the architecture of Polesia, or even in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania of that time - the mass is compact, with a massive tower. It is difficult to relate this architecture to other buildings of Pinsk of that time, preserved (such as the nearby Bernardine Church, built almost simultaneously but in much more conventional forms), as well as to those not preserved (churches of the Dominicans, Jesuits). It is also impossible at this stage of research to identify the architectural milieu or the artist who could have been the designer of this remarkable temple.

Almost nothing is known about the vicarage building, which served as a monastery. It was wooden, most probably of the manor house type. The earliest known iconographic record of the church, a drawing made in 1868 by Helena Skirmuntt, shows on the right the outline of a fragment of the building with a picturesque broken roof.