Granite church of the 13th century with a stone pulpit altar of 1711, a north wall without windows and a remnant of a sima.
The church in Buk, a village in Dobra municipality near Szczecin, is a medieval building of granite ashlar with a stone pulpit altar of 1711. It stands on a small rise in the centre of the village and has features not found in other churches of the region.
The church was built in the 13th century as a simple rectangle without a chancel or tower. It was built of 26 courses of granite ashlar. The north wall of the nave has no windows and never had any. Wikipedia writes that this is the only free-standing church in Pomerania with such a feature, and the reason is not known. According to Wikipedia, fragments of a sima, a stone gutter carrying water off the roof, have also survived, the only ones of their kind in Pomerania. The original pointed-arch portal in the west wall still exists, although it is not used. The tower was added in the 16th century, and the gables are decorated with blind niches.
The most valuable is the stone pulpit altar of 1711, the work of Erhard Löffler, who made the high altar, which no longer exists, of the Szczecin archcathedral. The altar is decorated with three figures of angels, two spirally twisted columns and a grapevine. On the south wall hangs a large stone epitaph of Major General Otto Gustav von Lepel, commandant of the fortress in Kostrzyn, who died in 1735. In the 18th century a patron's gallery with a tiled stove was set up above the sacristy, and one of the tiles has survived to this day.
At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries the English writer Elizabeth von Arnim, who lived in 1896-1908 in nearby Rzędziny, visited the church. She mentioned the church in Buk in her first book, “Elizabeth and Her German Garden”. In the area she is commemorated by the Elizabeth von Arnim bench in Dobra.
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