Parish Church Hirschbach

The late-medieval parish church of Hirschbach stands on a low hill above the village in the rolling farmland of Upper Austria’s Mühlviertel. Built between 1480 and 1490 as a spacious country church, it replaced an earlier 14th-century sanctuary dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The Freistadt master mason Mathes Klayndl helped raise its walls, and its generous size reflects the crowds who once came to pray at the nearby healing spring at Grünbrunn. Inside, the four-bay choir is covered by an intricate net-rib vault whose ribs spring from delicate twisted colonnettes. A granite rose window, glazed in 1908, lights the north wall, while the south wall still shows the blocked-up west door of 1829. The neogothic furnishings added in 1909 include the pulpit by Josef Ignaz Sattler, its panels depicting Moses and the four Evangelists. The 1990 Osterleuchter by Robert Himmelbauer rises two and a half metres, its clay shaft carved with scenes from both Testaments. The nave, five bays long and divided into three aisles, is spanned by net and stellar rib vaults carried on octagonal piers. A painted Christmas canvas by Franz von Zülow shows the Nativity set against a view of Hirschbach itself. At the east end of each aisle stand side altars: a 17th-century Liebfrauenaltar on the south and, on the north, a Kreuzaltar rebuilt in 1983 around a 1520 Donauschule Pietà. The south portal, with its ironwork of about 1500, remains one of the finest late-gothic doorways in the region.