Vier-Evangelisten-Kirche (Arriach)

The Vier-Evangelisten-Kirche in Arriach stands in the rolling hills of southern Austria’s Kärnten region. It is the largest Protestant church building in the province, able to hold about 650 worshippers. The congregation formed after the 1781 Tolerance Patent allowed Protestant worship in the Habsburg lands. From 1895 to 1903 Arriach even housed the superintendent’s seat for Vienna, Niederösterreich, Steiermark and Kärnten under the leadership of Pfarrer Josef Winkler. A small wooden chapel had stood on the site since 1781, but by 1785 it was replaced by a stone building that remained until 1912. The present church was designed by Johann Colombo and built between 1903 and 1907. The church is a west-facing neo-Gothic structure with a narrow choir and double-tiered buttresses along its walls. Its east façade carries a tall tower topped by a pyramid roof, set slightly forward of the main body. Inside, the four-bay nave is roofed with ribbed vaulting, while the polygonal choir carries star-shaped ribs. In 1982 restorers renewed the painted patterns on the choir walls. The furnishings date from the church’s completion in 1907, when Julius Aßmann’s workshop in Lüdenscheid produced the altar, pulpit and font. The altar shows the risen Christ surrounded by the four Evangelists, a copy of Fra Bartolomeo’s original painted by J. Plammer in 1907. The pews were made by Josef Kerschbaumer to seat the congregation. Above them hangs the 1907 organ built by Karl Neusser of Neutitschein, equipped with couplers and octave stops. The building remains a centre of the Arriach Protestant community and a landmark of Kärnten’s tolerant tradition.