Church of St. George

The wooden church of St. George in the Trnové district of Žilina is the westernmost Gothic wooden sacral building in Slovakia. This unique church stands in the middle of an old cemetery on a slight hill and forms a beautiful harmonious whole with the surrounding nature. The church was probably built at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on the model of the wooden church of St. Elizabeth in Zábrež in Orava. The oldest preserved written mention of it dates back to 1583. It is a one-nave log building with a gabled roof and later an added tower, which narrows upwards and is topped with a hipped roof. At the top of the tower there are two precious Renaissance bells from 1604 and 1606, which were purchased by the local richtár Mikuláš Trnovský. Both bells bear the same Latin inscription with the meaning "May the word of the Lord ring for ever". The interior of the church is decorated with schematic ornamentation in white, red and grey from the first half of the seventeenth century. It is dominated by a Baroque altar from the first third of the eighteenth century with a sculpture of St George, a polychrome woodcut complemented by a halo with two angels and an oil painting of St Anne with the Virgin Mary. The church has been a national cultural monument since 1963. Until 1994 it was regularly used for religious services, but now it is not open to the public.