Pfarrkirche Obervellach

The late-Gothic parish church in Obervellach stands in the heart of the market town in upper Carinthia. Built around 1500 by master mason Lorenz Rieder, it was consecrated by Bishop Berthold Pürstinger of Chiemsee. The church has been under Denkmalschutz since the listing was created and was once the seat of an archiepiscopal deaconry for Upper Carinthia. Its exterior shows a broad nave with a three-bay choir ending in a five-sided apse. A 57-metre tower with eight-sided spire rises north of the choir, its seven storeys marked by string courses and slit windows. Inside the church, a star-ribbed vault covers the nave, its ribs meeting at painted bosses shaped like faces, hammers and shields. The south chapel, added in 1781 under parish priest Joseph Egid Ringauf, contains a fresco of Pentecost dated 1586. Visitors enter through the richly profiled west portal with its late-Gothic door fittings. Inside, the painted Doom over the nave shows the donor Balthasar von Khünburg kneeling with his family. The high altar of 1780, carved by Johann Maier and built by Georg Zaderer, dominates the choir with its three-axis structure and life-size statues. In the crypt below the choir a wooden Madonna from about 1430 stands beside the ribs of a fan-vault.