A Marian shrine near Pyrzyce with a Gothic Madonna, an altar from 1613 and a stalactite ceiling by Michał Pahl.
The Shrine of Our Lady of Brzesko is housed in the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Brzesko near Pyrzyce. The village is among the oldest and largest in the Pyrzyce Land, and the granite church, which holds a Renaissance altar and a wooden ceiling from the end of the 17th century, is a place of pilgrimage.
According to the Wikipedia entry the church was built at the turn of the 12th and 13th centuries from dressed granite and unworked fieldstones, on a rectangular plan of 28 by 10 m, as a single-nave building. The heritage register gives the 13th century. In the 15th and 17th centuries the church was rebuilt several times, which blurred its original forms. At the north-east corner stands a free-standing, three-storey brick tower, built in 1815-1857 to a design by Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The previous, wooden one burned down in 1808.
The object of veneration is a Gothic wooden sculpture of the Madonna and Child from the early 15th century, 148 cm high, probably a copy of the stone sculpture from Lübeck Cathedral. The figure stands in the centre of a Renaissance cabinet triptych made by Michał Haentz of Choszczno. An inscription on the wings states that the altar was completed on 18 August 1613. The Madonna is surrounded by four crowned virgin martyrs: Barbara, Margaret, Catherine and Dorothy, and in the wings stand the twelve apostles. The altar is topped by a crucifix from the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries.
Haentz also made the Renaissance pulpit with a canopy, with reliefs of the Evangelists and a Latin inscription from 1612.
The most unusual element of the interior is the wooden false vault of 1697. It gives the illusion of a division into two aisles of five bays each and rests on hanging brackets decorated with acanthus leaves and pine cones, because there are no supports here. It was made by Michał Pahl, a miller's assistant by trade. Among the paintings float angels with instruments and ribbons with biblical verses. On one of the scrolls, above the choir, there is the only Polish inscription: “Through Mary to Jesus”.
The place of Marian worship came into being thanks to the many years of efforts of the custodian, Father January Żelawski, and was approved by Archbishop Marian Przykucki on 8 December 1992. The shrine bears the titles of Our Lady of Working People, Our Lady of Social Justice and Protector of the Rural People. Every year on the feast of the Assumption, 15 August, a procession in historical costume with the figure of the “Dormition of Mary”, known as the “Funeral of Mary”, passes through here.
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