Wooden Church of St Francis of Assisi, Hervartov

Gothic in red spruce

Hervartov is a village in the Bardejov district, at the foot of the Čergov hills. In the middle of the village, on a small rise, stands the Roman Catholic wooden Church of St Francis of Assisi, built at the end of the 15th century in the Gothic style from red spruce. It is regarded as the oldest and one of the best-preserved wooden churches in Slovakia. On the outside the church has barely changed in five centuries, while the interior went through several alterations — during the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and the Baroque period.

In 1968 the church and its stone wall were declared a national cultural monument, and in 2008 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of the “Wooden Churches of the Slovak part of the Carpathian Mountain Area”. Unlike the neighbouring Lemko churches of the Eastern rite, Hervartov is a Western, Roman Catholic shrine, and the difference is easy to see in its architecture. The same UNESCO site includes one more Roman Catholic church — All Saints’ in Tvrdošín — the Protestant articular churches in Kežmarok, Leštiny and Hronsek, and the Greek Catholic churches in Bodružal, Ladomirová and Ruská Bystrá.

What to see

• A silhouette behind the wall. The church is enclosed by a stone wall with pilasters, which makes the ensemble look like a small fortress. The building consists of a polygonal chancel, nave, sacristy and the base of the tower, converted into a women’s vestibule; above them rise a tall bell tower and steep shingle roofs.
• Wall paintings. The walls are covered with geometric compositions, scenes from the lives of saints and moralising subjects. Paintings from 1655 and 1805 were uncovered and restored in the 1970s; among them is a dated Last Supper.
• The Gothic altar of St Catherine, the Virgin Mary and St Barbara, restored in the late 1990s, and a late-Gothic painting of Saints Francis of Assisi, Christopher and Catherine of Siena. Part of the original furnishings — the altar wings, a cupboard tabernacle and a portable altar of 1514 — is kept in the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest, and a side altar of 1524 in Bardejov town hall.
• Granaries. Next to the church stand traditional wooden storehouses (sypance) from the late 19th century; there are 24 in the village, several of them listed monuments.

Practical information

Hervartov is about 9 km from Bardejov, so it is easy to reach by car or bike. A tourist service centre with an information point operates next to the church. Interior visits should be arranged in advance by phone, using the number on the regional tourism portal (as of October 2026). This is an active church: there are no visits during Mass; please keep quiet and do not use flash. The path to the entrance climbs a little, partly with steps.

Above the village, on Žobrák hill, stand two lookout towers, an old and a new one — a nice short walk for anyone wanting to see Čergov and the valley from above.

Nearby

Hervartov makes a good first stop on a wooden-church route: seven more Greek Catholic wooden churches survive around Bardejov — in Tročany, Krivé, Kožany, Lukov, Frička and Jedlinka, while two, from Mikulášová and Zboj, were moved to the open-air museum. Next come Bardejov’s medieval centre, a UNESCO site, and the open-air museum in Bardejovské Kúpele. To the south, towards Prešov, are the ruins of Šariš Castle, and to the east the Lemko churches of Ladomirová and Bodružal.

Official website: tik.bardejov.travel

Photos: Henryk Bielamowicz, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons; Palickap, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons; Lure, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons; Draceane, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.