Leštiny is a village of a few hundred people in the hills above the Orava valley, and it has a UNESCO World Heritage church because of a law. In 1681 the Habsburg emperor let Protestants in royal Hungary build again — but only two churches in a whole county, only outside the towns, only of wood, without a tower, and finished within a year. Orava's second permitted church was assigned to Vyšný Kubín and ended up being built here instead. Everything odd about the building, from where it stands to what it is made of, is that permission turned into timber.Leštiny sú dedina s niekoľkými stovkami obyvateľov v kopcoch nad oravskou dolinou a kostol zapísaný v Zozname svetového dedičstva UNESCO majú vďaka jednému zákonu. Cisár v roku 1681 dovolil evanjelikom v kráľovskom Uhorsku znovu stavať — ale len dva kostoly na celú stolicu, len mimo miest, len z dreva, bez veže a hotové do roka. Druhé oravské povolené miesto pripadlo Vyšnému Kubínu a kostol napokon vyrástol tu. Všetko, čo je na tej stavbe zvláštne — kde stojí aj z čoho je — je to povolenie prevedené do dreva.
Drag the bar, or pick a year, to see what was happening here then.Potiahnite lištu alebo vyberte rok a uvidíte, čo sa tu vtedy dialo.
Castles and lordsHrady a páni
Leštiny enter the written record in the fourteenth century; reference works give 1325 and 1381 for the earliest mentions, the same decades in which the neighbouring Kubíns first appear. Orava was not magnate country. Instead of one great lord with a village of tenants, it filled up with lesser gentry — many small noble families, each with a few fields, noble enough to bear arms and far too poor to build a palace. The family that held Leštiny were the Zmeškals, and they did what noble families did with a place they owned: they put its name into their own, and were known ever after as Zmeškal of Domanovce and Leštiny.Do písomných prameňov vstupujú Leštiny v 14. storočí; príručky uvádzajú ako najstaršie zmienky roky 1325 a 1381, teda tie isté desaťročia, v ktorých sa objavujú aj susedné Kubíny. Orava nebola krajom magnátov. Namiesto jedného veľkého pána s dedinou poddaných sa zaplnila drobným zemianstvom — mnohými malými šľachtickými rodinami, každá s pár poľami, dosť urodzenými na erb a priďaleko od peňazí na kaštieľ. Leštiny držali Zmeškalovci a urobili s nimi to, čo šľachtické rody robievali s majetkom: dali si ich meno do vlastného a odvtedy sa písali Zmeškalovci z Domanoviec a Leštín.
During the sixteenth century the Reformation swept through the counties of upper Hungary, and Orava went with it almost completely: its gentry families, its market towns and its villages became Lutheran, and the parish churches went with them. This is the fact that makes the rest of the village's history make sense. Being Lutheran was unremarkable in Orava in 1560 and would be dangerous a hundred years later, when the Habsburg court set about pulling the kingdom back to Catholicism. No Ottoman army ever came near this valley; the war that reached Leštiny was a war about which church you belonged to.V priebehu 16. storočia sa reformácia prehnala hornouhorskými stolicami a Orava sa k nej priklonila takmer celá: zemianske rodiny, mestečká aj dediny sa stali evanjelickými a farské kostoly prešli s nimi. Bez tohto faktu nedávajú ďalšie dejiny dediny zmysel. Byť roku 1560 na Orave evanjelikom bolo bežné — a o sto rokov neskôr to bolo nebezpečné, keď sa habsburský dvor pustil do vracania krajiny ku katolicizmu. Do tejto doliny sa turecké vojsko nikdy nedostalo; vojna, ktorá doľahla na Leštiny, bola vojnou o to, do ktorého kostola chodíte.
The 1670s were the hard years: Protestant churches across royal Hungary were taken away, ministers were tried and some were sold to the galleys. Then at the Diet of Sopron in 1681, Leopold I gave a narrow permission back, in articles 25 and 26 of its acts — which is where the word articular comes from. The conditions were designed to keep it small: at most two churches in a county, at the edge of a settlement and outside any town wall, built of wood on a stone footing barely a foot high, with no tower, the door not facing the street, and the whole thing finished within a single year. Orava's two articular places were Istebné and Vyšný Kubín; the Vyšný Kubín church was in the end put up here at Leštiny in 1688–89, on the order of Jób Zmeškal, captain of the guard at Orava Castle, with the family giving ground for the church, the graveyard and the parsonage.Sedemdesiate roky 17. storočia boli tvrdé: evanjelickým cirkevným zborom v kráľovskom Uhorsku brali kostoly, kazateľov súdili a časť z nich predali na galeje. Potom Leopold I. na šopronskom sneme roku 1681 vrátil úzke povolenie — v článkoch 25 a 26 jeho zákonov, odkiaľ pochádza slovo artikulárny. Podmienky mali povolenie udržať malé: najviac dva kostoly na stolicu, na okraji obce a mimo mestských hradieb, z dreva na kamennej podmurovke sotva stopu vysokej, bez veže, so vchodom nie z ulice a celé to hotové do jedného roka. Oravskými artikulárnymi miestami boli Istebné a Vyšný Kubín; kostol určený Vyšnému Kubínu napokon postavili tu v Leštinách v rokoch 1688 – 1689 na príkaz Jóba Zmeškala, veliteľa stráže na Oravskom hrade, a rodina darovala pozemok na kostol, cintorín aj faru.
The rule had forced the congregation to build low, small and plain on the outside, so they spent the next century on the inside: timber galleries in two tiers to seat a whole parish in a building forbidden any height, and painted panels over almost every flat surface. The seventeenth-century floral painting was replaced by new work in 1775, and the early Baroque altar carving dates from the end of the previous century. In 1759 Nikolaus Zmeskall was born in this village, went to Vienna as an official of the Hungarian court chancellery, and became one of Ludwig van Beethoven's closest friends — over a hundred of Beethoven's letters to him survive, and Beethoven dedicated the F minor String Quartet to him. In 1781 Joseph II's Patent of Toleration lifted the articular restrictions altogether, and Protestants could build with towers and stone again; Leštiny simply never did.Predpis prinútil cirkevný zbor stavať nízko, malo a zvonka nenápadne, a tak zbor strávil ďalšie storočie vnútrajškom: drevené empory v dvoch podlažiach, aby sa do stavby, ktorej zakázali výšku, vošla celá farnosť, a maľované dosky takmer na každej rovnej ploche. Kvetinovú maľbu zo 17. storočia nahradila v roku 1775 nová a ranobarokové rezbárske práce na oltári pochádzajú z konca predchádzajúceho storočia. V roku 1759 sa v tejto dedine narodil Mikuláš Zmeškal, odišiel do Viedne ako úradník uhorskej dvorskej kancelárie a stal sa jedným z najbližších priateľov Ludwiga van Beethovena — zachovalo sa vyše sto Beethovenových listov jemu a Beethoven mu venoval sláčikové kvarteto f mol. V roku 1781 zrušil tolerančný patent Jozefa II. artikulárne obmedzenia a evanjelici mohli opäť stavať z kameňa aj s vežou; Leštiny to jednoducho nikdy neurobili.
The revolution of 1848 abolished serfdom across the Kingdom of Hungary — the legal duty of a peasant to work his lord's land — which turned tenants into smallholders and left the small gentry of villages like this one with fields they now had to pay someone to farm. The next year, in a gentry family at Vyšný Kubín on the far side of Dolný Kubín, a son was born and named Pavol Országh; he was brought to the church at Leštiny to be baptised, and as a boy in the later 1850s he was schooled partly here and partly at Jasenová. He grew up to write under the name Hviezdoslav and to prove, against the whole pressure of a Hungarian-language schooling, that Slovak could carry great literature. The building he was carried into is still standing on its hill.Revolúcia roku 1848 zrušila v Uhorsku poddanstvo — povinnosť sedliaka pracovať na panskom — čím sa z poddaných stali maloroľníci a drobnému zemianstvu v dedinách, ako je táto, zostali polia, na ktoré si teraz muselo niekoho platiť. O rok neskôr sa v zemianskej rodine vo Vyšnom Kubíne, za Dolným Kubínom, narodil syn Pavol Országh; krstiť ho priniesli do kostola v Leštinách a ako chlapec chodil koncom päťdesiatych rokov do školy sčasti tu a sčasti v Jasenovej. Vyrástol z neho básnik píšuci pod menom Hviezdoslav, ktorý napriek celému tlaku maďarskej školy dokázal, že slovenčina unesie veľkú literatúru. Stavba, do ktorej ho priniesli, stojí na svojom kopci dodnes.
In 1877 the congregation added a belfry — standing separately, because the church itself was still the towerless building the 1681 law had required, and a free-standing bell tower had always been the way round that rule. It hung a bell already more than a century old, cast in 1764. These were the decades after the Compromise of 1867, when the Kingdom of Hungary ran its schools and offices in Hungarian and closed the Slovak grammar schools and Matica slovenská. In a village of a few hundred people the Lutheran parish was the one institution that went on working in the local language, week after week, without asking anybody's permission.V roku 1877 pribudla cirkevnému zboru zvonica — stojaca osobitne, lebo kostol sám bol stále tou stavbou bez veže, akú predpísal zákon z roku 1681, a samostatná drevená zvonica bola odjakživa spôsob, ako to obísť. Zavesili do nej zvon o vyše storočie starší, uliaty v roku 1764. Boli to desaťročia po vyrovnaní roku 1867, keď Uhorsko viedlo školy a úrady po maďarsky a zatvorilo slovenské gymnáziá aj Maticu slovenskú. V dedine s niekoľkými stovkami ľudí bol evanjelický zbor jedinou ustanovizňou, ktorá týždeň čo týždeň fungovala v domácom jazyku a nikoho sa na to nepýtala.
Czechoslovakia was declared in 1918 and the Hungarian-language administration ended; Slovak became the language of the school as well as of the church, and Leštiny stopped being a place that had to defend its language. The church's second bell is dated 1924. Across Slovakia the early 1920s were the years when parishes recast their bells, because the army had requisitioned church bronze for guns and shell cases during the First World War — hundreds of village bells went into the melt and were replaced afterwards by subscription. A new bell in a poor village is a small thing; it is also a village deciding it intends to go on.V roku 1918 vzniklo Československo a maďarská správa sa skončila; slovenčina sa stala jazykom školy, nielen kostola, a Leštiny prestali byť miestom, ktoré musí svoju reč obhajovať. Druhý zvon kostola je datovaný rokom 1924. Začiatok dvadsiatych rokov bol na celom Slovensku časom, keď zbory dávali zvony preliať nanovo, lebo armáda počas prvej svetovej vojny rekvirovala kostolný bronz na delá a nábojnice — stovky dedinských zvonov skončili v peci a po vojne ich nahradili zo zbierok. Nový zvon v chudobnej dedine je maličkosť; a zároveň je to rozhodnutie dediny, že mieni pokračovať.
On 14 March 1939 Slovakia became a separate state under German protection, led by a Catholic priest and built on a Catholic-national idea of the nation; Lutherans, about a tenth of the population and heavily concentrated in districts like Orava and Turiec, were a distrusted minority within it. The Slovak National Uprising broke out on 29 August 1944, Orava lay inside the ground it briefly held, and Slovak Lutherans — clergy included — were markedly over-represented among those who joined it. German units moved into the valley within weeks and the winter that followed brought reprisals and arrests across the region.Štrnásteho marca 1939 sa Slovensko stalo samostatným štátom pod nemeckou ochranou, na čele s katolíckym kňazom a postaveným na katolícko-národnej predstave o národe; evanjelici, asi desatina obyvateľstva a sústredení práve v krajoch ako Orava či Turiec, v ňom boli menšinou, ktorej sa neverilo. Slovenské národné povstanie vypuklo 29. augusta 1944, Orava ležala na území, ktoré nakrátko ovládlo, a slovenskí evanjelici vrátane farárov boli medzi jeho účastníkmi nápadne silno zastúpení. Nemecké jednotky vošli do doliny o pár týždňov a nasledujúca zima priniesla po celom kraji represálie a zatýkanie.
Under the communist state the land around Leštiny went into a collective farm, the young left for the factories of Dolný Kubín and Ružomberok, and the village shrank to a few hundred people who mostly worked somewhere else. The church came through the forty years better than might be expected: it stayed a working parish church with services in it, and the state's own monument service took an interest in it precisely because it was old, wooden and unlike anything else. That is a real tension in the period — a government hostile to religion, protecting religious buildings as national heritage. What kept the church standing was that both sides wanted it to.Za komunistického štátu prešli polia okolo Leštín do jednotného roľníckeho družstva, mladí odišli do fabrík v Dolnom Kubíne a Ružomberku a dedina sa scvrkla na niekoľko stoviek ľudí, ktorí väčšinou pracovali inde. Kostol prežil tých štyridsať rokov lepšie, než by sa dalo čakať: zostal fungujúcim farským kostolom s bohoslužbami a štátna pamiatková starostlivosť sa oň zaujímala práve preto, že bol starý, drevený a nepodobný ničomu inému. Je v tom skutočné napätie tej doby — vláda nepriateľská voči náboženstvu chráni sakrálne stavby ako národné dedičstvo. Kostol udržali pri živote obe strany naraz, lebo obom na ňom záležalo.
In 1994 the central painting was stolen from the altar — a reminder of what an unguarded rural church is exposed to, and part of why access is now arranged rather than open. On 7 July 2008 the church was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as one of eight Wooden Churches of the Slovak part of the Carpathian Mountain Area, together with the articular churches of Kežmarok and Hronsek, the Roman Catholic churches of Hervartov and Tvrdošín, and three Greek Catholic churches in the north-east. It is still a working Evangelical church with a congregation of a few hundred, not an exhibit: outside the summer months the door is locked and a keyholder opens it for an arranged visit. That is not an inconvenience to complain about — it is the same arrangement that has kept the building in one piece for three hundred and forty years.V roku 1994 z oltára ukradli ústredný obraz — pripomienka toho, čomu je nestrážený dedinský kostol vystavený, a časť dôvodu, prečo sa vstup dnes dohaduje a nie je voľný. Siedmeho júla 2008 bol kostol zapísaný do Zoznamu svetového dedičstva UNESCO ako jeden z ôsmich drevených chrámov slovenskej časti Karpatského oblúka, spolu s artikulárnymi kostolmi v Kežmarku a Hronseku, rímskokatolíckymi kostolmi v Hervartove a Tvrdošíne a tromi gréckokatolíckymi chrámami na severovýchode. Stále je to fungujúci evanjelický kostol s niekoľkostovkovým zborom, nie exponát: mimo letných mesiacov býva zamknutý a na dohodnutú návštevu ho otvorí kľúčnik. Nie je to obťažovanie, na ktoré sa treba sťažovať — je to to isté opatrenie, vďaka ktorému stavba tristoštyridsať rokov drží pokope.
Sources consulted while researching this page. Follow them to read further — and to check us.Zdroje, z ktorých sme pri príprave tejto stránky vychádzali. Kliknite a čítajte ďalej — aj si nás overte.
Sixteen videos for this chapter.Šestnásť videí k tejto kapitole.