Not far from Lviv lies Navaria, which had been a Roman Catholic parish since the 17th century. It was closed down during Soviet times, but has been returned since 1992. For several years, restoration work has been going on in the local church to restore its splendour.

Navaria - old and new church
Navaria is a small village about 15 km from the centre of old Lviv, and was the seat of the old parish. The first church was built there at the beginning of the 17th century by the foundation of Elżbieta Humnicka of Zimna Woda, the wife of Zygmunt Kazanowski, Grand Chamberlain of the Crown. It is known to have been a brick building. However, over time it deteriorated and in 1726 it was mentioned in documents as needing repair and renovation. The decision to build a new church was taken in the late 1730s.

In 1739, the then owner of the village, Marcin Wieniawski, an argot of Przemyśl, ordered the old church to be demolished and entrusted the design and construction of a new one to the architect Bernardine Meretyn. Marcin Wieniawski did not live to see the completion of his foundation, as he died in 1747 or 1748, but the construction was completed and the church furnished by his son Roch Wieniawski, a carpenter from Przemyśl. Rev. Canon Szczepan Mikulski, archdeacon of Lviv Cathedral, who became the new parish priest in Navarre in 1748, also spared no expense in equipping the new temple. In addition, in 1749 a legation of as much as 30,000 florins was donated by Father Franciszek Wieniawski, canon of the Lviv Cathedral and former parish priest of Navarre.

The architecture of the Navarias church
The old 17th century Navarias church was not, however, completely demolished; the presbytery and two vestries were left over from the previous church, because apparently this was the wish of the founder. The architect therefore had to add a new body to the existing parts. Bernard Meretyn, for whom the commission from Wieniawski was one of the first he carried out after his arrival in Lviv around 1738, fulfilled this task exceptionally well.

The presbytery was relatively low, single-span and trilobed, while the annexes flanking it, with near-square projections, strongly expanded the contour of this part of the church. Meretyn therefore designed a three-nave body in order to compensate for the faults in the width of the church with the help of the side aisles. The three-bay body is considerably higher than the chancel and is thus also well lit by wide windows. In an attempt to integrate the older parts of the building, Meretyn designed the gable wall, which enclosed the nave by the chancel in the form of a screen wall topped with a semi-circular 'clock motif' (bending part of the cornice into the shape of a semicircle), flanked on the sides by volutes (spiral-shaped decoration) ending in pedestals with vases. Similar wavy gable walls with vases were also given to the sides of the treasury and sacristy and the end of the side aisles on the front side.

The façade of the church is monumental, slender and slightly protruding from the line of the side aisles. It has been given articulation carried out by composite pilasters supporting sections of full beam. The finial, continuing the divisions, has a characteristic concave-convex course and is decorated with ornamental vases. Also very characteristic of Meretin's work is the elaboration of the portals and window frames, which in the upper part were given wavy, fanciful forms of the corners of the so-called earlobes.

Also in the interior of the Navarrian church, one can recognise the favourite solutions used by Bernard Meretin. The side naves in the form of chapels were given pseudo-domes as vaults, and the walls of the naves are divided by doubled pilasters on both sides with composite capitals with interwoven rocaille ornaments, supporting prominent fragments of a full beam. The brick music choir, on a trilateral plan, was built into the first bay of the body.

The architect of the Navarna church
Bernard Meretyn (d. 1759) is the most prominent Lviv architect of the 18th century. He probably came from the countries of the Habsburg monarchy, and was well acquainted with the architecture of Upper Austria, the Kingdom of Bohemia and the Moravian lands, as evidenced by the various motifs used in his works. He is first recorded in Lviv in 1738, and it is likely that Meretyn had previously worked for some time in the Prague workshop of Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhoffer, the most important Czech architect of the first half of the 18th century.

Evidence of this is the vaulting of the chancel of the Navarra church, very characteristic, set in the type of the so-called Bohemian kapa. It is a type of vaulting on the plan of a polygon, formed from the bowl of a sphere or ellipse, with the diameter equal to half of the diagonal of the polygon constituting the plan of the presbytery. In addition, in Navaria we have to deal with the extrusion of the corners, for the already planned painting decoration. This type of vaulting was unknown in Lviv and the Russian provinces at the time of the construction of the Navarra church. The only place where Bernard Meretyn was able to learn the technology of building such a vault was in Dientzenhoffer's workshop in Prague (in the 1820s).

It is also worth noting that an improved version of the slender façade of the Navarrian temple was used by Meretyn in Hodovica, a few kilometres away, where in 1751-1758 Master Bernard built (according to his own design) a new church of All Saints from the foundation of Father Szczepan Mikulski. Unfortunately, this one of the most outstanding works of sacred architecture was ruined during the Soviet era.

The decoration and furnishings of the temple in Navaria
Shortly after the new church was built, the old 17th century furnishings were used, with the main altar at the forefront. As late as 1755, there were only two, old settings in the temple. Intensive work on the church and its furnishings was carried out in the mid 1760s. In the spring of 1766, an arcaded, slender bell tower was built in front of the church, designed by the Lviv architect and sculptor Piotr Polejowski (1734-1776), who personally led the construction.

Polejowski was also engaged by Fr Szczepan Mikulski to make some of the church furnishings. Before 1763, a pulpit was created with a basket decorated with figures of the four Evangelists, topped by an ornamental canopy with a figure of the Good Shepherd, chiseled by Piotr Polejowski. Following the realisation of the pulpit, Piotr designed the main altar, which was completed by 1765. It is a very dynamic structure, consisting of a central settee framed on the sides by bundles of columns on pedestals, forming the projection of an open ellipse. This is a characteristic way of designing altars, which Piotr Polejowski learnt in the workshop of his master Bernard Meretyn and applied also to the main altar in the Latin Cathedral in Lviv (1765-1770) or the main altar in the Franciscan Church in Przemyśl (1761-1765).

The sculptural decoration of the altar in Navarra was made by Piotr together with his brother, the sculptor Maciej Polejowski (died after 1794). Piotr was responsible for the statues of Our Lady of Sorrows and St John, whose composition was related to the sculptures of the main altar in the church in Hodovica, while Maciej Polejowski was responsible for the figures of Moses (personification of the Old Testament), St Gregory (personification of the New Testament), Christ Crucified in the centre of the settee and two angels and God the Father on the sphere in the finial. Piotr Polejowski also designed the altar of St Valentine in the right side aisle (1768). The altars at the rainbow arch were made by an unidentified Lviv workshop.

The final decoration was a polychrome of the interior made in 1770 by the painter Antonio Tavellia, best known for his works for the Archbishop of Lviv, Waclaw Hieronim Sierakowski, including those in the Latin Cathedral in Lviv. In Navarre he was employed by Fr Mikulski and executed an illusionist polychromy of the entire presbytery. On the vault he placed the scene of the Parable of the Perverse Farmers (Matthew 21, 33-41), and on the side walls St Paul's Sermon on the Crucified Christ from the Acts of the Apostles and Constantine's Battle with Maxentius. The decoration of the nave is by an anonymous painter. The ornamental cartouches contain images of both the saints Nicholas, John Nepomucene and Eligius in the martyrdom scene, and the saints: Albanus, Felix and Aquilinus and the miracle of St Valentine. The choice of these saints was dictated by their particular importance in the prevention of selected diseases and natural disasters.

The post-war fate of the Navaria church
The Navaria church was closed by the authorities of Soviet Ukraine in March 1946 and turned into a warehouse for vegetables and then skins. The interior was devastated and the original furnishings scattered. Some of it was transported with the displaced Poles and is now housed in a church in Uraz near Wroclaw. The church was returned to the Roman Catholic community and solemnly consecrated in 1992. Since then, conservation work has been undertaken and the necessary conservation documentation is being compiled. A few years ago, the Polonica Institute became involved in efforts to restore the former splendour of the Navarre church.