Kath. Pfarrkirche hl. Lambertus, Suetschach

The Catholic parish church of St Lambert stands at the south-eastern edge of Suetschach, a village in the municipality of Feistritz im Rosental in the district of Klagenfurt-Land, Carinthia. It belongs to the deanery of Ferlach/Borovlje in the diocese of Gurk-Klagenfurt and is listed as a protected monument. A church is recorded here as early as 1364, though its core walls date from the first half of the 13th century. The building began as a Romanesque choir-tower church, with the nave and tower basement surviving from that period. In the 15th century the nave was vaulted and a new west tower added, while later Baroque alterations and early 20th-century changes followed a fire in 1911. The roof was re-shingled in 1995. Inside, the high altar from the mid-18th century shows a seated Madonna flanked by bishops Peter and Paul, while a late Gothic wooden figure of an apostle from the early 1400s was brought here from Matschach. The church also holds a life-size Pietà group from the early 1700s and a set of Slovenian Stations of the Cross in the Führich tradition, whose inscriptions in old Slovenian were painted over during the Nazi era and later restored. Above the entrance is a fresco of St Lambert attributed to Peter Markovič, bearing the Slovenian words ‘hl. Lambert, schütze unsere Pfarre’. The surrounding village of Suetschach sits in the Rosental valley, where the church remains a quiet focus of local life.