The text describes the town of Slonim. Numerous monuments of this "ancient city" are mentioned, including the former Bernardian monastery and the statue of St Dominic. The church, which stands empty - like the monastery - is also described. All the architectural elements of this building are listed in detail. The text is also accompanied by several photographs (Source: "Ziemia. Tygodnik Krajoznawczy Ilustrowany' Warsaw 1925, no. 10-11-12, pp. 32-36, after: Wielkopolska Biblioteka Cyfrowa).

A modernised reading of the text

Słonim

Whether you are driving along the wide, sandy road from Dercczyn, the former residence of Prince Sapieha, or along the road from boring and dirty Baranovichi, which is the junction of several railway lines, or from the side of the ancient Zhirovichi monastery, a resting place for Polish knights on their expeditions to Moscow, you will encounter the ancient town of Slonim. On your way from either direction, you will first see the tops of the city's towers; then, if you are hurrying from Dercchyn, the huge gates will suddenly open. Then, if you are hurrying from Dercczyn, the gates suddenly open. From behind the last one, between the gentle hills, you will see the town lying on a flat mountain. You will have to drive your horses or fuel your motorbike with a stronger stream of petrol. The soaring white walls of lofty churches call to you, the rust-coloured blocks of monastery roofs warmly welcome you. The arms of the attics of the magnificent synagogue stretch out towards you... Here and there, a massive roof, set on a massive block, catches your eye - these are the former palace buildings. Hundreds of houses, clustered closer to the centre of the town, standing more loosely further on, swarm to form streets and alleys.

At the entrance to Slonim, at its four outlets, stood chapels, one of which, architecturally very rich though without ornaments, protects the statue of St. Dominic from the rains and heat of the sun under its roof supported by four pillars set on a single shaft.

This statue does not seem to be a contemporary of the chapel. The cool and unsophisticated lines of the figure of the saint are far removed from the swollen and heavily shaded forms of the chapel, vividly reminiscent of the similar chapel of St Hyacinth in Pohulanka in Vilnius. The chapel, modestly situated by the road leading to the town, by a bridge over a stream, surrounded by birch trees planted by a loving hand, cheerfully greets the distressed passer-by. Of the two remaining chapels, one, at the exit to Żyrowice, is contaminated beyond recognition, while the third remains only in ruins... Picking out the more important architectural landmarks from the multitude of houses and cottages, we obtain an interesting array of historical buildings. And if we managed to resurrect two monasteries, with churches that are undoubtedly gothic, of which the remains of one are still visible to people living today, and about the other we have information from vaults that collapsed 30 years ago, we would get an interesting picture of a Polish borderland "monastery town".

With its low banks, the overflowing Štara River flows here along the plateau on its left bank, on which the town emerged. Its right bank, passing into an immeasurable plain, still creates marshy pastures, once marshes and swamps, defending this castle, built to the glory of God and the Republic, from the eastern onslaught. On the Szczaranska chord stood a tense arch of monasteries, garnering a synagogue in its midst.

The remnants of the monastery, jutting out towards Żyrowice, whose church was demolished under Russian rule, stand, forming a solitary block. Pilasters, cornices, internal vaults and the plan of the building all attest to the Baroque style. No more can be said about this building, in its present state, without examination of the buried foundations. The second building in the semi-circle of buildings in Slonim is the empty Bernardine Monastery and Church. It is an exquisite monument: a specimen of Polish Baroque architecture in our eastern lands. And if anyone ever talks about the Polish style in architecture, this church must come first. It has all the Poland of the best times.

This church stands on a small hill. It has grown as if out of it. The massive buttresses supporting the four-tiered tower, which turns into an octagon from the third storey, form its proper architecture. The right-hand side of the annex strongly supports the mighty tower. The small, circular openings, made for self-bellows, and the narrow windows, set on the top floor of the belfry, emphasise its muscularity. The very low, semi arched entrances to the tower, with their exquisitely hand-crafted primitive Baroque portals in brick and plaster, link the entire body of the church with the hill, creating a unified composition with the surroundings. The proportions of the three windows on each side of the church are reminiscent of Gothic influences, from which, almost directly, the borderland architecture came under the dominion of the freedom of the Baroque style, so perfectly harmonising with the Polish national character. This church, like all others preserved so far in Slonim, has a single nave. Its eastern continuation, 6 metres wider than the nave, becomes an elongated presbytery. The two chapels added decades later by local families form a cross with the rest of the church. Modest on the outside, though baroque, the chapel blocks, with primitive lanterns at the top, are beautifully outlined by a domed covering of softly laid shingles. Below, to the right, stands a gate, severely damaged by time and people. As the entrance to the monastery garden, it forms a kind of tiny barbican. The decoration is so original that, when a student designed a similar one based on it, the professorial body in Warsaw found the composition impossible. This masterpiece has stood for nearly two hundred years. The church clearly dominates the monastery, connected to it by a narrow passage hidden in the walls to a spacious, vaulted sacristy. The sacristy and the former treasury form a block, connecting the church to the south-facing horseshoe of the monastery. Modest, decorated with pilasters on the seams of the outer transverse walls, the cloister is this serious building. The whole is bathed in lush greenery, sprinkled with numerous springs gushing out from the foot of the hill.

The interior of the church has a rich, splendidly conceived choir, a reminiscence of St James's in Vilnius, but finer in structure. The five altars, two of which are in the nave and three in the chancel, of one artist's design, are a unified Rococo composition. The entrance to the chapels, now partially walled up when pierced, will link these annexes into one with the rest of the church. The south chapel is already a more refined specimen of the Baroque. This interior, illuminated from the upper side, gives an extremely original Gothic effect to the Baroque wall decorations. Nearby, a small rectangular square, surrounded by town houses, is attached by a strong Baroque attic to an axial, slightly recessed synagogue. It is similar in detail to the Bernardine Monastery. Its interior is covered by a vaulted square-shaped ceiling, supported by four pillars containing the altar. This is also where we find the small openings in the walls, so perfectly increasing the monumentality of the buildings.

Turning to the north, we see the walls of the convent of the SS. Immaculate Convent, formerly known as the Bernardine Convent. Extended on this side, the nearly 100-metre-long block of church and monastery wings, set in a single line, with a thick Bernardine tower in the middle, boldly shoots upwards with huge roofs and a squat helmet. The monastery stands on a plane. All around, life is in full swing. The pause bells ring. The din of children's voices echoes in the courtyard or garden. Then again, the sounds of the girls' choir sneak out, despite the closed windows, from the great vaulted ground floor hall, as if to announce to everyone the noble pulse that beats in this monastery. Then again, in the silence of the sweltering noon, in the monastery courtyard, through the open windows of the school classroom, one can hear a lesson being given in a bold voice.

One enters the church yard through a gate - the bell tower, richly decorated in Baroque. Its thick walls, closed for the night by powerful gates, contain steep, sloping steps that lead to the bell, set on the first floor. Having passed through this gate, we enter a slender courtyard shaded by old trees. To the left is the church with its high tower merging into the closed rectangle of the monastery opposite the entrance. This courtyard forms a beautiful interior. A view of the northern wall of the church with two characteristic low entrances, one directly into the nave and the other through the tower, with windows with a flat arch (almost ubiquitous in Slonim), framed by a profile cut into the plaster, broken everywhere from below, with garlands and angels, primitively above each window in the cornice freely suspended, gives the façade, together with rare pilasters, boldly overhanging, with primitive heads - an expression not fragmented, but, even in the western sun, synthetic. Moving on, we pass the tower, which, viewed here closely, in foreshortened perspective, its rich shapes strongly marked. The heads of the pilasters, richer on the side of the apse, slowly pass as if they were only a sketch, and the last of them, at the fusion of the tower with the crude block of the monastery, has only a projecting base for the Corinthian volute. Further on, the monastery already stands enclosed on all sides. A high S-shaped roof (indivisible in Slonim), supported by a Baroque cornice, protects the walls of the two-storey edifice. The pilasters, irregular but substantial, again on the seams of the walls, form the only decoration among the small windows. The pellucidity of the outer walls gives the whole a strange charm.

This charm is further enhanced when, having entered the interior through a large parlor, one stands in the cheerful vaulted corridor surrounding the central courtyard of the monastery. The nuns, in their white and blue habits, hurry in with bright smiles, a look of concentration and yet great kindness. The order in this monastery survived the worst of the Russian persecution. Putting on the robes of the order of SS. Bernardines, it has survived all the invasions and today radiates, like the sun, over the surrounding area. He has grown to love the historic building he inhabits and enlivens these beautiful walls with a truly extraordinary spirituality. - The former spacious cells around the corridor have been made, joining them in pairs or threes, into classrooms for the scientific establishment, run by the Order. - Nowhere thinner than 1.10 m, the walls of the monastery bear cross vaults. One of the corridors, east-west, wider than the others, connects the two main centres of the monastery's life; at its western end is a spacious refectory of a hundred and some square metres, barrel-vaulted, with lunettes (next to it the kitchens, with traces of the former smokehouse, which rose for two storeys upwards); the other end leads to the east-oriented Baroque church. From the first floor, a small door, set in the tower wall, nearly two metres thick, leads into a huge sort of lodge - the second storey of the tower. This tall vaulted room, open across the width and height of the wall to the cascading church choir with organ, under the ... dynasty) asks to be mapped out as a model of local carpentry.

In the flood of hideous houses, built now and during the Russian, the worst architectural times for our borderlands, we encounter a large number of massive blocks of flats, with sentences! roofed. They were wings and annexes of the palace of the Oginskis, which existed here until the beginning of the 19th century. These are Baroque buildings. Stripped of their former garments or recently... redecorated in Art Nouveau, their proportions, which give Slonim its character, beg for closer attention. - The large cloth halls, still standing at the foot of the convent of SS. Immaculata convent, transformed unrecognisably in pale, anaemic brick, used to be several storeys high with a huge S-shaped roof supported by a multitude of columns. A few more mansions, surrounded by old trees, and the municipal residences of the surrounding families, testify to an outstanding borderland town, and the wealth and variety of buildings attest to its old Polish culture.