A masonry church from 1885 on the site of a wooden plague votive church, with a cemetery founded in 1784.
St Mark's Church in Żywiec is a masonry church from 1885 on Sienkiewicza Street, behind the former County Hospital, in the parish of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It was preceded by a wooden church from 1591, and a historic cemetery has survived around it.
The first, wooden church was built in 1591 as a votive offering for the end of a plague that had struck the town. It was raised on a plot where a cross, the “Boża Męka” (Passion of God), dated 1584 stood. In 1664 the church received its first polychrome, the work of Fabian Sobinowicz, and in 1708 an altar of the Blessed Virgin Mary, endowed by Andrzej Komoniecki, was set up in it. Because of its poor technical condition it was rebuilt in masonry in 1885. The money came from collections and bequests from the deceased, and the residents who worked without pay gained the right to a free burial in the churchyard. In a niche of the tower an early Baroque wooden bas-relief of St Mark was placed.
The present altar is Neo-Gothic, with sculptures of the Risen Christ, St Anthony of Padua and St Mark the Evangelist. A painting of St Mark from 1834 by Teodor Stachowicz hangs here, as well as fifteen epitaphs from the 19th and 20th centuries. The former Classicist candlesticks went to the Żywiec City Museum, and the wings of a Gothic triptych from 1445-1450 to the National Museum in Kraków. On the gallery stands an organ from 1895 by Gebrüder Rieger, renovated in 2020.
The historic cemetery was founded in 1784 and closed at the beginning of the 20th century under Austrian sanitary regulations. In it stand the Neo-Gothic tomb chapel of Fr Tomasz Czapela from 1907 and a stone sculpture of St Joseph with the Child, endowed in 1797.
About a kilometre from here is the Holy Cross Church, and a little further on the co-cathedral of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Chinese House.
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