Parish Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Divin

Roman Catholic Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Divin (also Dziwin, Belarusian Дзівін, Russian and Ukr. Дивин), a village located in Brest Polesie, in the Kobrin region of Brest Oblast, 6 km north of the Belarusian-Ukrainian border.

History

The first church in Dywin, endowed in 1660 by kings John Casimir Vasa and later by Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki, was wooden, with a sacristy added on the side. It featured three altars, a pulpit and a choir above the entrance. The carved main altar, between four white-painted columns, contained an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the two carved side altars contained representations of St Peter and St Anthony.

In 1728, a new temple was erected with the funds and efforts of Fr Jan Antoni Wojewódzki, who took over as parish priest at the time. The wooden church, rectangular in plan, had two annexes for the sacristy and the treasury, and a high bell above the shingle roof. The furnishings consisted of altars, probably transferred from the previous church, together with their paintings, as well as a pulpit, painted stalls set against the walls of the chancel and a music box in the music choir. The church did not have any branches or chapels, only a chapel with a carved statue of St. John of Nepomuk was located by the Thracian court.

In 1866, the church was taken over by Orthodox Christians and the Catholic parish was cancelled. It is not known what changes were made to the body of the church when it was converted into an Orthodox church, and the fate of the Baroque furnishings is also unknown.

During the warfare of 1915, the former church - then functioning as an Orthodox church for almost half a century - was burnt down. Even before the end of the war, in 1917, the Catholic parish was revived and, thanks to its efforts, another wooden church was built, this time dedicated to the Nativity of the Virgin Mary.

There are no known source accounts describing the appearance and furnishings of the newly erected church. The only iconographic evidence of its existence is a photograph on the cover of the magazine "Polesie" from 1932, showing part of a boarded-up façade with a triangular pediment between the two towers.

After World War II, the Catholic parish was abolished and the church was converted into a restaurant and demolished over time.

The church was located in the centre of the former town, in the area of today's park located at the intersection of Lenina and Sovetskaya Streets. It was wooden, probably of log construction, horizontally boarded, on a rectangular plan. It had a two-tower, tripartite façade with foxworks, above the eaves cornice there was a triangular pediment topped with a cross on a sphere. The towers were square in plan, with rectangular transepts and high hipped shingled roofs.

Artistic issues

There were only mentions of the Dvina church in the scholarly, encyclopaedic and popular literature, which did not address issues relating to its history, form or decoration. It even happened that they were mistakenly illustrated by archival photographs of the wooden Uniate church of Paraskieva Piatnica, built in the 1840s, taken over as an Orthodox church in 1869 (in the interwar period Dywin was called 'a town of three churches').

Known only from archival descriptions, the two previous churches of Dywin looked similar and were part of analogous realisations created on the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the modern period (researchers have noted the long continuity of tradition in the wooden construction of the former Commonwealth). Their small, compact masses with wall-and-gable facades, covered with low roofs, were characteristic of the wooden churches of the area.

The third church, erected in 1917, served the faithful for just over twenty years. Its builders, probably local carpenters, decided to build a two-towered façade, no doubt remembering the previous church, which had been taken away from Catholics by the tsarist government and turned into an Orthodox church. For the construction they used a typical design, perhaps drawn up by one of the Reconstruction Committees, which had already been active since 1915. The temple, despite its two-tower façade, was rather modest. It was reminiscent of both earlier realisations from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and later ones from the inter-war years, such as the church in Levčy (1927-1928). The creation of the Dvina church, the construction of which began during the war, was evidence of the rapid revival of Catholicism and Polishness in these lands and of the clear need to combat ruthenisation, and was part of the idea of rebuilding a new, independent Polish state.