History of English Churches in Switzerland – Pontresina
History of Holy Trinity English Church, Pontresina
Of all the churches the English built in the Swiss Alps, the one judged the finest no longer exists. Holy Trinity, Pontresina, stood for ninety-two years in the Engadine and was pulled down in 1974 to make room for municipal flats.
The Engadine season
The second half of the nineteenth century brought prosperity to the Upper Engadine. The railways carried travellers most of the way, and where Thomas Cook’s tours from 1863 kept to the more accessible regions, individual travellers pressed on to Pontresina for its quiet, its scenery and its restorative climate — and for the chance to climb in the eastern Alps during the golden age of alpinism. Guesthouses and hotels were extended or built for them, and with them came a new local economy of mountain guides, hotel staff, coachmen and shopkeepers. Baedeker and Murray supplied the practical information; what actually drew people were the travelogues, memoirs, articles and letters that visitors published in the British press, extolling the Engadine and Pontresina in particular.
As the numbers grew, so did the expectation of somewhere to worship. The Museum Alpin Pontresina describes the pattern exactly as it played out across Switzerland: hoteliers offered “chapel rooms” on their premises and often gave land for a church building; the churches were paid for by the British themselves and almost always designed by British architects; and the Church of England appointed seasonal or full-time chaplains to serve them. By 1914 there were more than twenty-one English church buildings in Switzerland.
Services at Pontresina began in 1865, taken by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel’s chaplain from St Moritz, who came over to hold them.
The church
In 1880 the plans were entrusted to Richard Popplewell Pullan, at that time one of the best-known architects and archaeologists in England. He designed most of the interior furnishings as well as the building.
Holy Trinity was consecrated on 19 August 1882 by the Bishop of Bedford, before fourteen clergy and five hundred people. Schniewind records that a daughter of Queen Victoria, whom he names as Princess Christiane of Schleswig-Holstein, was among the ladies who decorated the new church for the occasion.
The judgement on what Pullan built is not ours. Dr André Meyer, former President of the Swiss Commission for Built Heritage Conservation, considered Holy Trinity Pontresina the most important of the English churches in Switzerland, with one of the most beautiful interiors of the late nineteenth century.
A church and its season
The Revd J. W. Ayre served as chaplain through the summers from 1877 to 1891. A church library opened in 1883, kept at the Hotel Kronenhof, the leading hotel for English visitors. From 1895 Presbyterian services for British and American visitors were held in the village church every Sunday morning in July and August, so that by the end of the century the small resort was supporting worship in several traditions at once.
In 1921 Sir Henry Lunn bought two hotels in Pontresina with five hundred beds between them, and through his Church Travellers’ Club brought out large numbers of young people each year to Pontresina and other Swiss winter resorts. The expectation was that this would establish the village as a winter destination; the summer months nevertheless remained the high season.
Holy Trinity was the largest hall in Pontresina, and from 1957 the municipality had permission to use it for evening concerts during the Engadine Concert Weeks. Among the British visitors of the earlier era had been the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan, a regular at Pontresina.
Demolition
In February 1968 the church was sold to the municipality. The building was by then in bad condition, and in 1974 it was demolished. An apartment building for municipal employees stands on the site.
It was not the only loss in the valley. Of the four English churches built in the Engadine, two survive — at St Moritz and at Scuol-Tarasp. Samedan’s church, built in 1872, came down in 1965; Pontresina’s, built in 1882, followed nine years later. Anglican services are still held at St Moritz through the winter season, and are advertised in the Pontresina hotels.
What survives
Enough remains to reconstruct what was lost. In 2016–17 the Museum Alpin Pontresina mounted an exhibition, Nineteenth-century British visitors and their church in Pontresina, researched over three years by the local historian Diane Conrad-Daubrah with the help of specialists in Switzerland and England. It displayed furnishings, artefacts, stained glass and textiles lent by the Rätisches Museum in Chur and the Kulturarchiv Samedan, alongside a model of the church and reduced-scale reproductions of its doors, altar and east windows made by Lukas Pfammatter — and a sequence of photographs of the interior, shown to the accompaniment of Sullivan’s music.
Date of first Chaplaincy: Services from 1865, held by the SPG chaplain at St Moritz
Church dates: 1882–1974 (consecrated 19 August 1882; demolished 1974)
Patron: Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
Hotel: Hotel Kronenhof, which housed the church library from 1883
Current Status: Demolished; an apartment building for municipal employees occupies the site
Sources
Museum Alpin Pontresina, Nineteenth-century British visitors and their church in Pontresina: personalities, tradition and architecture 1860–1900 — exhibition text, 25 November 2016
Paul Schniewind, Anglicans in Switzerland, Past and Present (pp. 126–127)
Further Reading