Historical outline

The village is situated on a small river called Gniła, at a rather peculiar historical point. During the Partitions of Poland, the Austro-Russian and later Polish-Soviet borders ran nearby. However, not much is known about the history of the village itself. The information available in the sources is rather sparse, and is further clouded by the fact that there are several villages with the same name in Ukraine. The owners of the estate, over the centuries, include: Jan Sieciech of Horodnica (15th century), Andrzej Sieciech of Horodnica (16th century), Jozef Zabielski, Count Tytus Dzieduszycki (19th century), and the Jablonowskis (19th-20th century).

At first, Horodnica was under the authority of the parish in Liczkowce (Chortki decanate). At the end of the 19th century, efforts began to establish an independent parish on the site, but as Andrzej Betlej writes in his study of the site: "The documents concerning the successive stages of the establishment of a pastoral institution on the site provide a good illustration of the complexity of church and state procedures in this area, as well as a certain inconsistency in the use of legal terminology."

The village did not have a separate, independent religious facility. A chapel was therefore erected there (1895), which was later slightly extended. The creation of the temple was made possible by donations from, among others: Florentyna ks. Czartoryska, Elżbieta Dzieduszycka, Olga née Jabłonowska Brykczyńska and, above all, Stanisław Jabłonowski.

A fully independent parish was not established in Horodnica until 1925, although it should be emphasised that this did not happen overnight anyway. In the first phase, the parish functioned as an exposition and later as a branch of the Lyakiv parish.

There is no information on the fate of the church and its furnishings. As Andrzej Betlej writes in his study of the building: "The transformation of the building probably took place not long after its erection, as it is known that the church originally had a wooden vault, the roof was covered with shingles and only the bell turret was covered with sheet metal, while an archive photograph shows the building covered with tiles."

The Second World War was a time of great unrest. On the night of the second to third of February 1944 there was an attack on the vicarage by Ukrainian UPA terrorists. The building was burnt down and six Poles were killed in the village. The following day, priest Mateusz Franków, fearing for his life, left the village, and the care of the surviving church was taken over by priest Michał Sujata from Liczkowiec.

Around 1949, the new Soviet authorities turned the church into a grain warehouse. In 1993, the building was handed over to the Greek-Catholic Church.

Architecture

The building is located on the road leading through the village. It consists of a three-bay nave and a lower, narrower, single-span presbytery closed with a trilateral side facing south. A rectangular sacristy is attached to the altar area to the east. According to Andrzej Betlej in his study of the building, the church in Horodnica is a modest work from the end of the 19th century, maintained in historicist forms with a predominance of neo-Gothic.

The façade is on a pedestal and is supported by buttresses, which are added diagonally at the corners. A profiled cornice surrounds the entire building. The façade is single-axis, single-storey and topped with a triangular gable with a circular window in its field. Below, a simple portal section with a rectangular entrance opening, rounded off at the top.

The nave and vestry are covered by gable roofs. In contrast, a multi-pitched roof was used over the chancel. All were covered with tile, which was replaced with sheet metal in the 1990s. The turret had a high pyramidal cupola, which was replaced by a bulb-shaped cap as a result of the conversion of the building from Catholic to Greek Catholic.

The articulation of the walls of the main body was carried out with doubled pillars on both sides. On the south wall of the nave, a belt beam joins the pillars that support the semicircular rainbow arcade. The nave was covered with wooden vaults, referred to in the language of art history as 'apparent vaults'. The main section was covered with such cross vaults. The chancel has a similar design, except that it changes to a lunette vault. The windows in the church, as befits a neo-Gothic building, are rectangular in shape, closed with a semicircle.

The choir is entirely made of wood, but is supported by pillars with chamfered corners. Access to it is via a staircase in the north-west corner of the nave.

The most important elements associated with the furnishings and surrounds of the building include or belonged to:

• A wooden altar dating to around 1898;
• A brick bell tower located in front of the church with three bell clearances.

The building has survived to the present day in good condition, especially thanks to renovations carried out in the 1990s. Of the original furnishings, only a chalice with a paten was found in the parish church in Czarnów near Kostrzyn.

Name: parish church of Our Lady Queen of Carmel in Horodnica.

Name in use today: Greek Catholic church

Division: architecture

Location: Ukraine, district: Ternopil, locality: Horodnitsa

Author: Unknown

Date of construction: 1895 r.

Technical data: Brick building