Ostrzeszów is a county town situated ca. 160 km south-east of Poznań, by the road to Katowice.
The Bernardine monks were brought into Ostrzeszów in ca. 1630, on initiative of the local gentry. The local rector allowed them to use St. Nicholas’s church for their purposes, by the time they built a temple of their own. Although wooden convent buildings were completed by 1638, the Swedes burnt down the church and the convent in 1656. Construction of new, brick church and convent buildings lasted between 1680 and 1740. The convent was eventually closed down by the Prussian authorities in 1840. The Sisters of Nazareth have found home for themselves there since 1933.
The baroque church of St. Michael the Archangel is a mononave building with a narrower semi-circularly enclosed presbytery. The church is buttressed in the outside, with a particularly powerful buttress supporting the presbytery at the south-east. The interior is covered by barrel or tunnel vaults furnished with lunettes. A late-baroque figural polychrome, dated 1840 (restored and partly repainted in 1946), was originally made by Antoni-Ignacy Linke. The church interior’s baroque furnishings include a.o. three altars – the main one separating a monastic oratory – a pulpit and three confessionals.
The storied convent building, constructed on a cross plan, is adjacent to the church at the north. In the yard in front of the church is an 18th-century square-shaped tiny chapel of St. Juda Thaddeus, covered by a tent roof. The chapel’s interior, covered by a domed vault, contains a small baroque altar with a painting featuring the patron. There is an impressive linden trunk surviving in front of the church: according to a legend, the linden was planted there in 1684 as part of a thanksgiving ceremony held on the occasion of the victory of King John III Sobieski at the Vienna battle.
