Postwar Habsburg tolerance allowed Silesian Protestants to build peace churches outside city walls.

Evidence

Bohemia, along with Silesia, became a crown possession of the Habsburgs in 1526. This roughly coincided with the onset of the Reformation in Central Europe, and much of Silesia became Protestant before the Counter-Reformation swung the pendulum back again with great vigor at the end of the century. Religious conl ict heightened during the Thirty Years’ War and resulted in the decimation of the province and much of its population. Some measure of tolerance appeared in the aftermath of so much destruction; although the Habsburgs decreed that most of the province was to be Catholic, Protestant communities in Schweidnitz [ Ś widnica], Jauer [Jawor], and Glogau [G ł og ó w] were permitted to construct “peace churches” ( Friedenskirchen ), so long as they were outside the city walls and not built from stone. The church in Glogau sank into ashes with the rest of the city in 1945, but the churches in Schweidnitz and Jauer remain to this day as half-timbered architectural marvels; their Renaissance-style interiors are dominated by multitiered galleries, where Protestants from distant regions once gathered together to celebrate services (the Schweidnitz Friedenskirche could accommodate 7,500 worshipers). — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East, 266