St. James, Levoča

Standing in the nave of St. James in Levoča, the eye is pulled straight to the east end, where a forest of carved and gilded limewood climbs 18.62 metres towards the vault. Completed in 1517 by the workshop of Master Paul of Levoča, the high altar is the tallest Gothic wooden altar in the world. Beneath a canopy of pinnacles stand the Virgin and Child flanked by Saint James and Saint John the Evangelist, while the wings tell the stories of the two apostles in relief and the predella below holds a Last Supper carved in high relief.

The altar was ordered by the parish priest Johannes Henckel, a learned man who had studied in Kraków, Vienna and Italy, with a clear model in mind: the great altar of St. Mary's Basilica in Kraków by Veit Stoss. Work began in 1508, the gilding was finished in 1517, and many of the painted Passion scenes on the wings follow Lucas Cranach's woodcut series published in 1509. The statues of the twelve apostles on the altar's superstructure are older, dating from around 1390. The only contemporary written evidence that Master Paul made the altar is a painted epitaph on the church wall for his niece. Around this masterpiece the church gathers some eighteen altars in all, among them Master Paul's Altar of Saint Anne and Altar of the Four Saint Johns, a late-fifteenth-century altar associated with King Matthias Corvinus, and a carved Saint George fighting the dragon from his workshop. The walls carry a cycle of the Seven Virtues and Seven Deadly Sins from about 1385, twenty scenes from the legend of Saint Dorothy and a Last Judgement.

The church itself was begun in the fourteenth century and is the largest sacred building of the Spiš region and the second largest church in Slovakia. During the Reformation it was Protestant from 1544, and its organ, begun in 1622 by Hans Hummel, who fell to his death from the scaffolding in 1630, was the largest in the Kingdom of Hungary in its day. The neo-Gothic tower, about 70 metres high, replaced the medieval one in the mid-nineteenth century. Levoča, chartered in 1271 as the chief town of the Spiš Saxons, still keeps most of its walls and a main square lined with burghers' houses and a Renaissance town hall, and in 2009 its historic centre and the works of Master Paul joined the UNESCO World Heritage site that also includes Spiš Castle. The church was named a minor basilica in 2015.

Getting there

The basilica stands on the main square of Levoča. The nearest larger town, Spišská Nová Ves, is about 9 km to the south and lies on the Košice–Žilina railway. The nearest airport is Poprad–Tatry (TAT), about 26 km to the west.