XVIII amžiaus studijos / The Eighteenth Century Studies

The article analyses the Church of St Peter and St Paul, built at the end of the eighteenth century in Maliatsichy (present-day Belarus) at the initiative of the Archbishop of Mogilev, Stanislaw Bohusz-Siestrzencewicz (1731-1826). The study is based on a comparison of a well-known image of this church (more precisely, the Roman Basilica of St Peter, identified as the Church of St Stanislaus in Maliatsichy), published in Leonard Chodzka’s Parisian publication La Pologne, historique, littéraire, monumentale et illustrée, with the data from written sources. The article questions some of the assumptions made in the literature about this interesting architectural monument, which has not survived to the present day, and for the first time discusses the interior of the sanctuary in more detail and analyses its architectural and symbolic links with the original model - St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The conclusion is, that the Maliatsichy Church was conceived as a visual expression of Siestrzencewicz’s loyalty to the Roman Pope and as a symbol of the Belarusian Archbishop’s connection to the Catholic Church as a whole when forced to submit to the secular rule of the Russian Empire. It is possible that this church was also meant to express the unity of Roman and Greek Catholics under the Pope.