GÓRKA-KLASZTORNA
The locality is situated ca. 2 km north-west of Łobżenica.
A local tradition has it that in 1079, on the site of where the convent is situated today, in an oak above a small well, Our Lady revealed herself to a shepherd boy grazing his cattle. The water in the well has displayed miraculous properties ever since. The news of a miraculous revelation spread across the vicinity soon after. Hence, the church at Górka-Klasztorna is deemed to be the oldest Marian sanctuary in Poland.
The first wooden church was built there probably in as early as the beginning of 12th century. Since 1404, the Augustine friars, brought down to Łobżenica, were in charge of the temple. 1550 saw expulsion of the monks by the then dissenter owners of the town, the Krotowskis; twenty-five years later, in the intent to destroy the local cult of Our Lady, they set fire on the wooden church and filled up the miraculous well. The temple was rebuilt in the 1620s.
In 1638, the custody over the sanctuary was passed into the hands of the Bernardine Order. Soon thereafter, in 1649, they embarked on building a brick temple with a cloister. The Swedish invasion has interrupted the venture, which was eventually completed by 1687. 1841 was the year of the convent’s cassation by the Prussian authorities; the last Bernardine monk residing there died in 1847. Ever since, the sanctuary was overseen by priests of the nearby Łobżenica parish. The convent developments were partly dismantled in 1847; then, in 1907, the church’s interior fell victim to a destructive fire. The convent has been home to the Missionaries of the Holy Family from 1923 onwards.
During the Nazi occupation, the convent building was initially made prison to Polish priests and nuns and subsequently, a camp for the Jews; then again, in mid-1940, a camp for British prisoners-of-war. It was made the site of a Hitlerjugend training camp in autumn 1943. The Missionary monks regained their sanctuary home in 1945.
The baroque Church of Our Lady the Immaculately Conceived is a single-nave edifice covered with barrel vaults with lunettes. The main altar displays a painting of Our Lady of Górka [Polish, Matka Boska Górecka]. It is a copy of the seventeenth-century counterfeit, made in 1954 by Jerzy Hoppen. This benevolent icon was adorned with papal crowns in 1965 by the Primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński.
Two wings of the baroque cloister are adjacent to the church. Somewhat further up, at the Objawienia [Revelation] Square, is a belfry with a cloister ambulatory and a chapel with the miraculous well. Not far from there stand two neo-gothic shrines, built in 19th century: one was later devoted to the Home Army soldiers, the other having been turned into a mausoleum of priests and brethren murdered in 1939, at the outset of WW2. A modest monument has been erected at the site of exhumed graves of the Nazi terror’s victims. A farming machinery heritage park arranged within the convent premises is a local curiosity.
