Pfarrkirche Gaisberg Friesach

The Roman Catholic parish church of Gaisberg stands in the village of Friesach in Carinthia. It is dedicated to Saint George and first appears in records from 1283. Until 1939 the church belonged to the collegiate chapter of Saint Bartholomew in Friesach. The building shows layers from several centuries. Romanesque walls of the nave survive, along with two original windows in the south wall and the square choir bay. In the early 15th century a Gothic choir with a five-sided apse was added, supported by two-stage buttresses. A Gothic sacristy on the north side has ribbed vaulting, while the southern sacristy is Baroque. Around 1450 a west tower was built and later topped with a Baroque onion dome and lantern. Inside the tower two bells hang, one cast by Peter Pfinzing in 1515 and the other dated 1520. The nave is covered by a Baroque trough vault, and a round-arched triumphal arch leads to the choir. Inside the choir a late-Gothic star vault rests on short corbels, its capitals and keystones carved with figures including the head of Christ, the Lamb of God and the symbols of the Evangelists. A profiled pointed-arched doorway gives access to the sacristy, its door fitted with iron straps. The choir also contains a late-Gothic lavabo niche and a sacrament house whose tympanum relief of the Man of Sorrows dates from the early 15th century. Eighteen surviving stained-glass panels in the three-light choir windows, made about 1420–30, depict the twelve Apostles, Saint George, the Throne of Grace and a Madonna, with decorative tracery above. On the north wall of the choir faded frescoes of the Adoration of the Magi from the early 15th century share space with the Manna in the Desert painted in the late 16th century.