Pfarrkirche Matzleinsdorf

The Catholic parish church of St Bartholomew stands raised above the road in the southern part of Matzleinsdorf, a village in the Melk district of Lower Austria. Its churchyard wall encloses the building and a small cemetery, and both church and graveyard are listed monuments. The parish belongs to the deanery of Melk in the diocese of St Pölten. Records from 1337 mention a church here, and a parish priest appears in 1350. After the estate passed to Melk Abbey in 1693 the fabric decayed until the abbot Berthold Dietmayr commissioned a rebuilding after 1735. The Gothic choir received a new vault early in the 17th century, the tower was added in 1846, and the interior was remodelled between 1893 and 1903. In 1999–2000 an extension was built to designs by Richard Zeitlhuber. The exterior shows a plain nave under a single roof with a three-sided choir end fitted with two-light neo-Gothic windows. A two-storey sacristy of 1735–36 joins the south side, and a solid three-stage tower with clock faces rises at the north-east corner under a Baroque onion dome and lantern. Inside, the nave has a flat ceiling with a 19th-century organ gallery, while the choir is vaulted with two ribbed sections and small keystones on pilasters. The high altar, carved in 1903 by Franz Schmalzl, carries statues of Saints Bartholomew, Peter and Paul, and above them a monk and Saints Benedict and Florian. A late-medieval bell dated 1466 hangs in the tower, and the graveyard wall preserves stretches of medieval rubble masonry with a niche containing a carved Crucifixion group from about 1730–40.