Z-Art 39 St. Anna Church

St Anna Church is located in the open-air museum in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm, Czech Republic. This is a copy of the previous St Václav Church in Větřkovice which was built in 1939-1941. The church is a wooden building with a massive tower and a brick vestry. The original church, consecrated to St Václav, was built in 1637 in Větřkovice and it was destroyed in a fire in 1887. The church was 15 mts long and 7.5 mts wide, made of wood and divided into three parts – a nave, built in an almost exact square floor plan, a three-sided presbytery, and a rectangle entrance hall with a front door and two side doors. There was a prismatic tower built with a belfry and a wooden cupola on the roof. There was another cupola above the sanctuary. A brick vestry with a single window was built on the side of the church. The paving was made of bricks and the interior was lit by four windows on the southern side and two windows on the northern side. It was surrounded by a graveyard with a wooden charnel house and a wooden fence. As the church aged, it dilapidated gradually. There were attempts to repair it, but due to lack of money, these were not very successful. The major renovation took place in 1868-1872. However, the church was destroyed in a fire in 1887 and it was never built again. In 1925, the open-air museum in nearby Rožnov pod Radhoštěm was established and one of the first plans was to build a wooden church there. The architect, Wilhelm Pazofský, picked the old Větřkovice church as a model for this “model” church. The patron was Jan Antonín Baťa. The final building was a combination of the original church in Větřkovice and its state after the renovation. It has a nave with a roughly square shape, a polygonal presbytery, an entrance hall and a brick vestry. The nave has two pairs of small windows, the presbytery has three windows, there is a simple gallery on pillars on the southern side. There are two wooden cupolas and a wooden belfry. The beautiful interior is toned in blue colour and it is decorated with religious paintings and statues typical for 19th Century. There are two altars – the front altar is devoted to Saint Anna and the smaller side altar is devoted to Saint Václav. There is a graveyard around the church with graves of famous people coming from the Wallachia region.