The research project entitled “The Stained Glass from the Years 1800–1945 in the Roman Catholic Churches of the Archdiocese of Katowice and the Diocese of Gliwice”, has been carried out at the Art History Institute of the Jagiellonian University since the end of 2018, and is funded from a research grant awarded by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education within the National Programme for the Development of the Humanities. Its completion is scheduled for 2023. This project continues a similar survey, entitled “The Stained Glass from the Years 1800–1945 in the Roman Catholic Churches of the Metropolises of Cracow and Przemyśl”, that was conducted from 2012 to 2017.

The project is supervised by Professor Wojciech Bałus, and the main authors are: Dr Tomasz Szybisty and Joanna Utzig. Apart from them, the research team consists of: Grzegorz Eliasiewicz, Irena Kontny, Bartłomiej Makowiecki and Kamila Twardowska. Organisational support is provided by Justyna Kamińska.

The aim of the project, which is part of an international undertaking under the auspices of the Corpus Vitrearum, a worldwide organisation working on the research on stained glass, is a possibly detailed survey, recording and initial scholarly research of stained glass from the period 1800–1945 surviving in sacred buildings on the area of the Archdiocese of Katowice and the Diocese of Gliwice. The research has been carried out along two parallel tracks, encompassing, above all, a first-hand recording of stained glass (photographs and measured drawings) and archival surveys conducted in Church and state archives, as well as in museums and local offices of the heritage board, in the press and various collections related to the work of particular stained-glass designers and manufacturers.

Results of the survey will be published in the abundantly illustrated volumes of “The Stained Glass from the Years 1800–1945” book series, inaugurated in 2014 with a volume on stained glass in the churches of the Cracow deaneries, and in an Internet database.

It should be noted that Poland is the first member of the Corpus Vitrearum to have launched and carried out a systematic, comprehensive survey of stained glass dating from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.