There is a church in the Polish foothills that has a ceiling like a field of flowers. The Church of the Archangel Michael at Binarowa, near Gorlice in Lesser Poland, was built around the year 1500 from larch and fir logs, in the Gothic style, with a steep shingled roof and a tower covered in wooden scales. From the outside it is a modest, dark country church. Inside it opens into an explosion of painted decoration, with vines, flowers and ornaments on the ceiling, scenes from the Bible and the saints on the walls, and a rich Baroque altar. The paintings date from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The church was listed by UNESCO in 2013 as one of the wooden churches of the Carpathian region, and it is one of the finest in Poland.
Wooden church building was a way of life in these hills. Timber was cheap, carpenters were skilled, and communities, Catholic in this village and Orthodox and Greek Catholic further east, built beautiful churches without stone. Many were destroyed by fire, war and neglect, and the survivors are precious. A marked route, the Wooden Architecture Route of Lesser Poland, links dozens of churches across the region, and you can ride it in a week, picking up a new village and a new roof every few kilometres.
The setting is gentle: green hills, orchards, streams and farms with long barns and haystacks, with the low wooded ridges of the Beskid Niski, the Low Beskids, to the south. Gorlice, the nearest town at around twenty-eight thousand people, has fuel, food and shops. It also has a place in the history of oil: in the mid-nineteenth century, Ignacy Lukasiewicz and his partners drilled some of the first oil wells in the world in this part of Galicia, and a kerosene lamp is a point of local pride. In 1915, the Gorlice-Tarnow offensive broke the Russian front, and many wartime cemeteries dot the hills, designed by Dusan Jurkovic.
The roads are small, curving and quiet, with some rough surfaces, but they make a delightful ride, particularly in May and June when the orchards bloom and again in September. Be sure to check opening times: churches are often locked, and a caretaker will open them on request.
Try a plate of pierogi ruskie, filled with potato and cheese, in a local inn.