Ďaleká cesta k farskému kostolu
A Long Way to the Parish Church

Summary/Abstract: Although the parish church is a frequent concept in domestic medievalist literature, it remains mainly within the framework of somewhat stereotypical ideas about the development of church organisation. Absent is a deeper reflection on what the parish church and the parish meant or could have meant in the different sections of the medieval period. At the same time, this is an interdisciplinary problem that affects art-historical research in many ways. The following text aims to offer a stimulus to such reflection. The first part of the paper outlines a brief view of the parish church as an institution that has been the subject of a long journey of historical development but which, despite its fundamental influence on the lives of people of all social groups, remained without a generally binding ecclesiastical-legal definition until the publication of the Code of Canon Law in 1983. The second part focuses on the issue of parish and branch churches. Many of these needed a justifying cause for their establishment, which most often was the long journey to an existing parish church. Specific examples are used to illustrate the highly differentiated functional content and interrelationships of the churches forming the so-called lower church organisation, i.e., the parish system. The intention is to show that this differentiated functional content is combined with an undefined period terminology, which ultimately also influences the archaeological and architectural-historical interpretations of the individual objects.

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