Holy Trinity Church in Volchin - a Roman Catholic parish church in the village of Volchin in the Brest region, Kamenets district in the Republic of Belarus. A monument of late Baroque architecture of international significance. The place of baptism and burial (in the years 1938-1989) of the last King Stanisław August of Poland. It is the only remnant of the palace complex - the former centre of the Poniatowski estate, where the future king was born in 1732 - extended in the mid-18th century by the Czartoryski family.

History
The Wołczyńska parish was established in 1639. It was subordinate to the diocese of Lutsk, being part of the Kamieniec and then Brest deanery. The first church, built from the foundation of the then owner of the Volchinsk estate, Smolensk voivode Aleksander Gosiewski, was a modest wooden building, probably even unconsecrated. It had only the necessary furnishings, including three simple altars: the main one with the picture of the Holy Family and two side altars with pictures of the Virgin Mary with Child and St Anne. It stood in a different place from the temple that exists today - on land located by the road to Vysoké Litvsk, near the Pulva River, the mill and the village of Kotera, north-west of the manor house. It was ruined during the Northern War. In 1727 the building stood without a roof and was unsuitable for liturgy. Masses were celebrated in the local Greek-Catholic church of Sts. Nicholas and George.

The new church was built on the initiative and at the expense of the successive owners of the estate - General Stanisław Poniatowski, the then Grand Treasurer of Lithuania, and his wife Konstancja, née Czartoryska, the parents of the later King Stanisław August, who was born in Wołczyn on 17 January 1732. In the newly planned spatial composition of the residence, the church was placed in a different location than before, on the axis between the palace complex and the town. By means of an exchange, Poniatowski succeeded in acquiring part of the church's land, located directly adjacent to the manor grounds on the south side. The original intention was for the church to be wooden. Construction began in 1728 after a contract was signed with a carpenter from Brest, Jan Żydowicz, who was simultaneously building houses in the town. Meanwhile, over the next few months, Poniatowski's conception of the wooden church changed and he decided to erect a more magnificent brick church. In June 1728, the hired carpenter agreed to build a house for the parson and a new church instead. On 18 July 1729, the cornerstone of the church was consecrated by Władysław Sutkowski, archdeacon of Brześć and surrogate judge of the general consistory of Janów, who gave it the title of Nuptial of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the patron saints of the founders, Stanislaus and Constance. The building took four years to complete. The essential work of erecting the walls and internal divisions, plastering and closing the roof was carried out in 1730 and 1731. The design of the temple is attributed to the Warsaw architect Jan Zygmunt Deybl, employed at the royal building office, while the execution of the construction was entrusted to the mural foreman Stefan Nieckowski, who simultaneously worked on the erection of the palace. The finishing work, including the laying of the marble and brick floors, the laying of the foundations for the three altars and the plastering of the ceilings in the nave, the lodges, under the choir and in the ancillary rooms, continued into 1732 and 1733.

Also contributing to both the construction and the enrichment of the church furnishings was Father Wojciech Kłossowicz, canon of Warsaw, parish priest of Wołczyńsk in 1727-1758.

The church was benedicted in 1733 by the Brest scholastic priest Tomasz Kamiński.

In 1738, Stanisław Poniatowski sold Wołczyn to his brother-in-law Michał Fryderyk Czartoryski, who soon made it the political centre of the reformist Familia party. According to the testimony of Father Kłossowicz, at the time when Wołczyn came into Czartoryski's possession, only the church walls covered with a shingle roof were standing. The initiative and funds of the Prince Chancellor should be attributed to the construction of all the decoration, three altars with paintings and carved decoration, pulpit, organ, lodge, benches, bells, four stone statues of evangelists placed on the pediments, the roof with a tin covering and stone steps in front of the entrance and a brick fence with a gate and a belfry. Work on the interior lasted from 1738 to 1743. Eleonora Czartoryska richly furnished the church with silver paraphernalia, reliquaries and apparatus, e.g. she funded a tin into which, on the Duchess's initiative, a commemorative silver cup with cover, won by Stanislaus Poniatowski in a shooting tournament organised by Augustus II and received from the King's hands, was converted in Gdansk.

Between 1738 and 1743, a new brick vicarage was also built on the eastern side of the church cemetery.

On 21 July 1743, Franciszek Antoni Kobielski, Bishop of Lutsk and Brest, consecrated the church dedicated to the Holy Trinity, the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St Stanislaus, Bishop and Martyr.

In 1753, 11-year-old Antoni Czartoryski was buried in the crypt under the altar, and before 1754, Jozef Horain.

On 19 November 1761 the church hosted the weddings of the family members of the owners of Wolczyn - Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski to Izabella née Flemming, and of Aleksandra Czartoryska 1° voto Sapieżyna to Michał Kazimierz Ogiński, which were performed by the Bishop of Poznań, Teodor Kazimierz Czartoryski.

In the years 1777-1780, when Wolczyn belonged to Adam Kazimierz and Izabela Czartoryski, along with the renovation work carried out on the palace, restoration of the church was also carried out. The whole work was supervised by the court architect Joachim Hempel, but most of the work was done by local foremen. At that time, the ceiling was replaced and the roof was covered with new metal sheeting, painted white and green when laid. The facades were also renewed and the stucco inside was improved. The stucco work was carried out by N. Judycki, and the gilding work by Ptaszynski.

In 1798, the parish became part of the diocese of Vilnius.

In 1866, as part of the repressions following the January Uprising, the Tsarist authorities took the temple away from the Catholic Church and in 1873 began its reconstruction into an Orthodox church. The marble floor was torn out, the porch, altar and choir were demolished, and the bells and pews were taken away. To meet the requirements of worship, the temple was reoriented, forcing a change in the location of the main entrance. The iconostasis was placed on the eastern wall. Thus, the original entrance on the south side was bricked up and the porch was demolished, and a new one was knocked down in the west wall, while a new porch with Russo-Byzantine style features was added to it. The lantern finial was replaced with an onion-shaped cupola. On the axis of the new entrance, on the road side, a two-storey brick gate-bell tower was erected. On 30 August 1876, the church was consecrated as the Holy Trinity Church. It was subordinated to the Saint Nicholas the Miracle Worker Church in Wolczyn. During the period when the building functioned as an Orthodox church, no major renovations or alterations were carried out.

In 1918, the Roman Catholic parish was reactivated, from 1925 belonging to the newly established diocese of Pinsk. The building was returned to the faithful. It was in a deplorable condition, with the plaster and stucco falling off in many places. The original furnishings and paintings had not been returned to the church, nor had the pulpit been restored, and the choir functioned as the former supper box. In 1925, the plasterwork was repaired and the roof was repaired. In 1924, a neo-Baroque vicarage was built near the church. The partial restoration of the church was brought about by the unexpected event of the burial of the remains of Stanislaus Augustus, who was brought here from Leningrad in July 1938.

The church survived the warfare of 1939 and 1941. In 1944, during the withdrawal of German troops holding a defence post there, the roof was shot through. Soon afterwards, the church was ransacked by the Soviet army and the royal coffin was looted, but after the frontal operations ceased, it was put back into its niche. In April 1945, the last parish priest, Antoni Czyszewicz, repatriating to Poland, managed to take the church archives (including Stanisław August's birth certificate) and some of the paraments with him, which ended up in Gnojno (Biała Podlaska district). After 1991, they found their way to the Diocesan Archive in Drohiczyn.

After 1945, the church was excluded from worship, ransacked, stripped of its sacred decoration and turned into a fertiliser warehouse for the local kolkhoz. In 1953, it was removed from the list of monuments of the Belarusian SSR . At the end of the 1980s, after the roof collapsed, the church was abandoned by the kolkhoz warehouse. In 1987, following an initiative to examine the remains of Stanislav Augustus buried in the church, conservators from the Grodno museum carried out a partial restoration of the ruins. In 1989, on behalf of the Polish Culture Foundation, archaeological research was carried out and basic conservation work was carried out inside the church. Photogrammetric measurements were also taken of the building and the preserved architectural and sculptural elements of the interior.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the local parish was revived and the faithful began preparations for the restoration of the church. The church stood closed in a half-ruined state. In 2007, it was decided to hand over the damaged building to the diocese of Pinsk. In 2009-2013, the church was rebuilt from the outside under the direction of conservation architect Wiktor Wilk from Zamosc. The original orientation was restored by knocking out the entrance on the south side, the remains of the church porch (on the west side) were demolished, and the former colours of the facades were restored. Thanks to the support of the Polish Copper Foundation from Lubin, the church was covered with a roof and a tower with a clock was erected. In the following years, restoration work was carried out that did not comply with the art of conservation, including the removal of the stuccowork of the façade and its replacement with plastic castings that repeated the former form, or the installation of plastic windows with muntin bars that did not correspond to the original divisions.

On 22 November 2020, the Bishop of Pinsk, Bishop Antoni Dziemianko, consecrated the restored temple and celebrated Mass there.

Burial place of Stanisław August Poniatowski
In July 1938, the coffin containing the royal remains was unexpectedly returned to Poland by the Soviet government in connection with plans to redevelop the centre of Leningrad and the anticipated demolition of St Catherine's Church, the resting place of Stanislaw August. The Polish government had been notified of the Soviet decision several months earlier. By the decision of Prime Minister Felicjan Slawoj-Składkowski, the coffin, without observance of the state ceremonial, was to be placed in Wołczyn, and all actions taken in this connection were strictly secret. In May, the Ministry of the Interior decided to undertake an appropriate renovation of the church, but mobilising funds for this purpose encountered difficulties. Finally, in June, the parish priest, Father Antoni Czyszewicz, obliged to maintain strict secrecy, commissioned the renovation of the niche to Józef Charyton, a painting student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, who was spending his holidays in his home town of Vysoky Litewski. The "important renovation and restoration work" entrusted to Charyton included cleaning, tidying up and painting decoration in the spirit of Stanislavsky classicism of the niche in the former treasury room in the north-western annex of the church, and placing the gilded inscription "Stanislaus Augustus Rex Poloniae".

The royal coffin, delivered by train to the border station in Stołpce and on to Wysokie, was brought to Wołczyn in conspiracy and under police protection on the night of 17 July. The burial took place in secret from the public, without state ceremonies. The casket with the coffin, weighing about 600 kilograms, did not fit into the prepared crypt, it was too large and was therefore placed in the vault niche, carefully secured, and the urn containing the king's heart and entrails was placed in the crypt. After two weeks, the Polish public was informed in a press release that the remains of the last Polish king had been transported and buried in his birthplace. Then, in November, a large hole was punched in the walled entrance to the vault and an iron grate was inserted to allow the coffin to be viewed.

In September 1939, after the invasion of the Red Army, the tomb was ransacked and the sarcophagus destroyed. On the night of 27-28 April 1945, the church was broken into. Items from the royal coffin were then stolen.

In 1987, the first attempts were made to examine the crypt and niches of the church in search of the remains of Stanislaus Augustus. In December 1988. the then Minister of Culture and Arts of the People's Republic of Poland, Aleksander Krawczuk, appointed a commission to bring the King's remains to Poland, chaired by Professor Aleksander Gieysztor. On 12 December, the commission went to Wołczyn to visually inspect the church. Considerable damage to the building and scattered remains of the burial were found. The exhumed remains of the presumed burial remains (bone fragments, fragments of robes and a coffin) were taken to Warsaw. The remains and fragments of cloth were subjected to anthropological, palaeopathological and conservation studies and then collected into an urn. It was initially exhibited at the Palace on the Island in the Royal Łazienki Park and then deposited at the Royal Castle in Warsaw. Finally, on 14 February 1995, a ceremonial funeral was held for the remains, which were laid to rest in the royal crypt at the St John's Archcathedral in Warsaw.

Architecture and decoration of the church
The church is situated in the centre of the estate, between the old town and the remains of the palace complex, on the road from Brest to Vysoké.

It was built of brick and plastered, in the style of late Baroque architecture with elements of Regency and Rococo styles. It is a temple of central composition, built on a square plan with truncated corners, covered with a faceted marquee roof with a tall turret for a bell and clock (funded by the Czartoryski family, destroyed in 1939, restored in 2010). In the basement of the two corners on the west side (under the former treasury and music choir) there are shallow crypts.

The facades have been given an analogous decoration, and are painted in a distinctive red colour contrasted with white plaster frame divisions. The entrance is in the south wall, facing the former town. The longer facades are framed by pairs of composite pilasters in great order, between which are semicircular closed windows and above that oval windows, in a rich stucco setting with motifs of garlands, suspended scarves and cartouches. The stuccowork was most probably made by the workshop of Jan Jerzy Plersch. The façades are crowned with segmental pediments, on which were set stone sculptures of the four Evangelists by Johann Chrysostom Redler (now only St John). The narrow corner walls have windows in three tiers - two closed with segmental pediments and an oculus at the top, also in a rich setting.

The interior has a Greek cross plan, achieved by inserting in the corners protruding into the interior, triangularly closed, two-storey annexes containing the staircase and oval rooms: in the ground floor the treasury, vestry and storerooms, and in the first storey the empores and originally the collegiate lodge. The walls are divided into two storeys by an encircling beam, broken above the central windows of the longer walls. The lower part is articulated with composite pilasters framing the windows and half-pillars in the corners of the walls, the upper part with Tuscan pilasters. In the walls of the annexes, there are three segmentally closed openings each in the form of doors, above them portes-fenêtres and at most windows. The wall decoration, once very rich, includes Regency and Rococo motifs: angel heads among clouds, cherubs, leafy rosettes and crossed palm branches in the frieze, a belt of acanthus-tape ornament with a shell, draped ribbons with campanula-pink overhangs, cartouches with suspended draperies. The floor was laid with square slabs of Gothic stone.

Nothing of the church's rich decoration and furnishings has survived. The main elements of the interior decoration were three altars in the form of scenographic structures, whose composition made use of the articulation of the wall. In the main altar, a large window, framed by stucco gloria and framed by wall pilasters, provided a luminous backdrop for a tabernacle in the shape of a ciborium on columns, on the sides stood large gilded figures of kneeling angels, and the top, above the wall beam, was decorated with a group of the Holy Trinity made of stucco. The side altars had the invocations of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St Stanislaus the Bishop. Tradition has it that a painting of the Virgin Mary and Child from the first half of the 17th century came from the church in Volchin, which has been in the church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Secymin-Noviny since 1995 and is venerated there as Our Lady of Joy, Protector of Nature.

Artistic values of the church
The architecture of the Volchin church places it among the outstanding works of a truly European class. The original design has no analogy with the contemporary sacral architecture in the Republic of Poland. The central plan with the arrangement of the lodges inside, the elegant facade design and the artistic late-Baroque stucco decoration give the building the character of an ornamental pavilion belonging to the palace complex. The body and form of the architecture, together with the decoration, incorporated the church into the residence complex. It clearly complemented the palace grounds and had the character of a manorial chapel, which was located in an axial relationship with the complex, on its south side, between the town and the residence. The royal court-minded Poniatowski managed to engage one of the good architects associated with the Royal Building Office operating in Warsaw, most probably Jan Zygmunt Deybl, to design the shrine that would grace his residence. High-class Warsaw artists were also employed by the Czartoryskis for the stucco work (workshop of Jan Jerzy Plersch) and the sculptures of the Evangelists (Jan Chryzostom Redler).

The church was used as a model for later chapels erected at the residences, including those in Jablonowo Litewski (now Szczeczyce, Belarus), the Pruszyński burial chapel in Loszyca (now Minsk, Belarus) and the Starzeński manorial chapel in Klukowo (Wysokie Mazowieckie County, Podlaskie Voivodeship).