The Southern border of Poland with Slovakia contains wonderful unspoilt scenery and justifies detailed exploration by car and on foot over as many days as you can spare during a holiday to Poland – or even a journey for its own sake. The geography of the area has meant that a special culture has been developed and at least partly maintained.

A major outward manifestation of this is the many wooden churches which dot the area. The road system is complicated as it follows valleys in and out of the Carpathian foothills – and the difficult-to-remember and pronounce (to non Poles!) region and village names make tracing a route even more complex.

There are many more churches than the 9 inscribed on the WHS list and to find and see all of them would require many hours of poring over a map and many hours of driving. Some of the best e.g. Binarowa and Sekowa (photo) are in the “Beskid Niski” region near Gorlice (Poland’s “Oil town”).The churches are set in meadows and shady forests. Most have steep roofs which reach near to the ground, creating an overhang under which peasants who had travelled many miles to arrive on the Saturday evening ready for early Sunday mass could sleep! The interiors range from the simple to the quite ornate. We found services going on in some of them. All in all it was a very pleasant part of a visit to Poland.

Although the WHS list is perhaps in danger of saturating the market for groups of Central European rural churches (there are also 3 sets in Romania with potentially more to come from the Tentative Lists of Hungary and Slovakia!) I wouldn’t argue against the inclusion of this group. You wouldn’t go to “Southern Little Poland” just to see these churches but, if you are there, you should try to see at least 2 or 3 of them.