Summary
The earliest phases of the parish church of Saint Margaret and Saint Stanislaus in Żębocin
The paper has been based on archaeological and architectural exploration of the church in Żębocin
carried out in 2011. Żębocin, a village in the Miechó
w district and the Proszowice deanery, had its
beginnings reportedly in the mid
-
11
th
century. However, the first squire of Żębocin documented in
historical sources was Tomko, coat of arms unknown, mentioned in 1384. According to tradition, the
first church
in the village, which has not survived, was built in the years 1059
–
1071 and consecrated
by St. Stani
slas of Szczepanów. In a local legend, the wife of knight Mikołaj of Żębocin took shelter in
the tower of a stone church in Żębocin during the unrest in
the reign of Boleslaus the Brave. The stone
foundation under the north
-
eastern corner of the chancel belonged probably to a stone building, its
function unknown, which may have stood there already in those turbulent times. The extant church,
erected in the
mid
-
13
th
century or soon afterwards, was a small single
-
nave structure with a chancel
closed with a straight wall, built from bricks (with a wendian bond pattern on its elevation) on stone
foundations
.
I t combi ned two s tyl es
: Roman
esque (as shown by the surviving splayed window in the
northern elevation of the chancel) and Gothic (the brick ogival frame in the northern elevation of the
nave). The important question whether the church had a tower from the start and where that tower
w
as located remains undecided; the tower could have been incorporated into the body of the nave
from the west or built above the chancel; it could also have been added afterwards, in the 16
th
century
at the latest. Reportedly, the church in Żębocin once had
a defensive character and was located in
knights’ fortified town. Its founder may have been a progenitor of the Strzemieńczyk or the Odrowąż
families. It should be remembered that Romanesque single
-
nave “village” churches built on a simple
plan are quite
frequent in Central Europe; there are nearly a hundred of them in Poland alone. In
Żębocin, the extant tower of the church, the facade and the sacristy at the western side were built no
later than ca. 1688.