Pfarrkirche Hl Martin, Kraßnitz

The Catholic parish church of St Martin stands in the centre of Kraßnitz, a village in the municipality of Straßburg in Carinthia. Built in the Romanesque style, it has a modest nave and a tall late-Gothic choir added in the 15th century. A powerful Gothic south tower rises beside the choir, its three storeys decorated in the early 16th century with pointed sound windows and a diamond-patterned roof. The church is worth visiting for its well-preserved late-Gothic architecture and rich furnishings. The choir’s network ribbed vault bears the date 1458 on its eastern keystone, while the sacristy vault is a pointed barrel. The tower’s ground floor serves as an ossuary, entered through a basket-arched door beneath a high profiled base. A late-Gothic sacrament niche and a 1660 high altar with a painting of the Coronation of the Virgin are also notable. Inside, the nave is covered by a 16th-century net-ribbed barrel vault with three bays. The left side altar holds a 15th-century Madonna statue reworked in the Baroque period, and the right altar of 1693 carries figures of Saints Augustine and Ambrose flanking its image of St Anthony. In the tower chapel stands an early-Baroque winged altar from 1600, painted with scenes from the legend of St Barbara and portraits of the donors, Paulus and Anna Walcher.