A wooden chapel from 1756 in Rychwałd, built of 16th-century beams from a dismantled small church, beside the Marian sanctuary.
The wooden chapel in Rychwałd stands right next to the Marian sanctuary and is built of timber older than everything around it. The beams of its walls date from 1507 and the roof truss from 1508, because the chapel was put up from material from a dismantled wooden church. It belongs to the parish of St Nicholas in Rychwałd and lies on the Wooden Architecture Trail of the Silesian Voivodeship.
In 1658, in the wooden church in Rychwałd, consecrated in 1547, a painting of the Virgin Mary was recognised as miraculous and became an object of veneration. In the mid-18th century the growing number of pilgrims led to the building of a larger, masonry church, consecrated in 1756. The old wooden church was moved to Gilowice, where it stands to this day as the Church of St Andrew the Apostle in Gilowice. The chapel here was built from the material of another, older small church in Gilowice, from 1635, dismantled after the consecration of the new church in Rychwałd. The heritage register gives the year 1757 as its date.
The chapel is oriented and built in log construction, that is, of horizontally laid beams. The sheet-metal roof has a single ridge and is topped by a turret for a small bell, whose timber dates from 1796. By the east wall stood a figure of St John of Nepomuk with a small canopy. The interior has no furnishings.
The chapel was renovated in 1856. In 1958, when religion was removed from schools in the communist period, it served parishioners as a catechism room. In the following decades it was abandoned and fell into decay, and in 2011 another renovation began. The heritage register entry of 2022 followed an earlier entry from 1987.
Right next to it, about 200 m away, stands the Basilica of St Nicholas and the sanctuary of Our Lady of Rychwałd, so the chapel is easy to combine with a visit to the sanctuary.
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