Pfarrkirche Sankt Jakob in Thal

The Pfarrkirche Thal stands in the market town of Thal near Graz in Styria. It is a Roman Catholic parish church dedicated to St James the Elder and linked to Rein Abbey. The building and its former cemetery are protected monuments. Its present artistic form comes from Ernst Fuchs, a leading figure of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. The church’s history reaches back to 1322, when the parish was first recorded. After a fire in 1715 destroyed much of Unterthal Castle, the old castle chapel fell into ruin. In 1772 the parish rights moved to a wooden chapel on the Thaler Kirchberg, which stood on what may have been a plague cemetery. A stone chapel with an onion dome replaced it in 1739, and the building was extended several times as the population grew. By 1987 Bishop Johann Weber agreed to a new church, designed by Manfred Fuchsbichler to preserve the old fabric while adding a modern sanctuary. Volunteers contributed about 4,000 hours, and Ernst Fuchs transformed the whole into a Gesamtkunstwerk of vivid colour, form and light. Visitors enter beneath a red timber canopy and find the old church now serving as the sacrament and baptism chapel. The open rainbow-coloured roof recalls the desert tent of the Israelites, while seventeen triangular skylights and mirrored pilasters fill the space with changing light. The apse holds three large glass works by Fuchs: a Maria-Hilf window, the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor with St James among the witnesses, and the Calling by the Sea of Galilee. The altar is made of crystal glass, and behind it a glass stele displays a fossilised scallop shell from Retznei. The old nave remains, with its 1897 Neo-Renaissance high altar and 18th-century side altarpiece. Outside, three sweeping roofs rise like the facets of a crystal, and a pilgrim path winds round the back to the altar, its uneven surface recalling life’s uneven ways.