Protection of Our Most Holy Lady Church in Owczary

I arrived in the town of Owczary. It wasn’t too far from the previous village and it is the next stop for me tour of southern Poland. My trip no longer be just about the Wooden Church of Southern Lesser Poland but it would also be including another UNESCO site – the Wooden Tserkvas of the Carpathian region in Poland and Ukraine. It is a mouthful of a listing but what is important are that the tserkvas are also churches and that they are also made of wood. There are several sites in the listing but some of them are too far away for me to include in this trip. It was a shame since those seem to be the better looking ones but they were too far which was almost at the Ukrainian border.

There are a few sights here in southern Poland and thankfully, within driving distance from Krakow. Owczary is the first village I will be visiting and like the other villages, it was also tiny and almost too quiet. The Protection of Our Most Holy Lady Church is the point of interest here. This region has a mix of faiths where people adopted the Catholic faith and some adopted the Greek or Eastern Orthodox faith. The people of the Greek or Eastern Orthodox faith built these churches called tserkvas and using the local tradition, they also built these out of wood. A look at these tserkvas and one would feel a sense of familiarity and at the same time a sense that it is very different from the previous churches I have seen.