Police have found two 18th-century statues that had been missing from a church for decades in a long-forgotten attic hidey-hole.
A priest at the church in the 13th-century St Florian’s Church in the village of Jesionowo in north-western Poland’s West Pomeranian Voivodeship region had asked cops to help find the missing Baroque treasures.
Video Credit: CEN
He had determined from local records the church was supposed to contain nine artworks, including four Baroque sculptures, two paintings, two goblets and a ‘paten’ mass plate.
But there was no trace of them inside the church and checks with former church officials determined they had not been since the early 1960s.
Then police found one former parish priest who remembered seeing some of them in the attic of the building in 1963.
They discovered the attic had been sealed off from the rest of the building around that time and they then set about opening up the old doorway.
Police officers and the current priest searched the two storey attic and found three baroque sculptures under the stairs.
Two of them turned out to be among the missing artworks. The 18th-century statues of angels, made of polychrome wood, stand 1.4 metres (4 ft 7 ins) and 1.2 metres (3 ft 11 ins) tall.
The third, a large 18th-century statue of Christ, sparked a further mystery as it does not appear in any of the records.
The police and the parish priest are still looking for other artworks missing from the church which include a 17th-century oil painting of the Crucifixion and another painting of the Last Supper, probably from a demolished Protestant altar.
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Story By: Bartosz Staszewski, Sub-Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Central European News
