Prienai Christ Revelation Church

The first church in Prienai was built back in early 17th c. and had a parish school.

The modern-day wooden church was built in 1750 and later reconstructed and widened in 1875. The plan of the Baroque building is characteristic to the period, featuring a Greek cross plan, two belfries, two side chapels and two sacristies. The main part of the front façade, finished with a triangular pediment and a turret, is framed by two three-section belfries, decorated with Baroque domes. The roof is tinned, the transept protrusions and apse turrets are finished with Baroque bell roofs and ornamented crosses. The middle nave is wider and higher than the side ones, divided by arcades of paired pillars.

The interior is rich with elements of painted décor, characteristic to wooden churches – on cornices, on ceilings and arcades. Currently the church has five altars: The Three Kings, St Jude Thaddeus, the Blessed Archbishop Jurgis Matulaitis, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St Anthony. The number and titles of the altars changed throughout the building’s long history. Back in the 18th c., the church was titled after the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, while the painting of the Blessed Virgin Mary, created for the great altar in 1767-1769, is currently decorating the side chapel. Another evidence of that is the remaining sculpture group of the Holy Trinity, located in the second section of the great altar, holding the crown, which is supposed to descend on the Blessed Virgin Mary below. That is a typical arrangement, characteristic to the Baroque European art.

In 1885, the church has been consecrated under the name of the Revelation of Christ, later the great altar was decorated with the early Classicist painting of the Adoration of the Kings, which, although valuable historically, disrupts the iconographic arrangement.

The late Baroque altars are also decorated with sculptures, dating back to the second half of the 18th c. The majority of them were created by the same author and thus harmoniously blend in with the entire iconographic arrangement. The sculptures of St Peter and St Paul, St Casimir, St John Cantius, and the archangels Gabriel and Raphael are particularly valuable. The especially decorative Rococo pulpit and the organ balcony also fit the late Baroque interior and its decorative altar carvings.

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