Roman Catholic Church

The Roman Catholic Church or as we, Irkutsk residents, call it - the Polish Church, is the only example of Gothic in Irkutsk. The capital did not see the need to create a temple for exiled foreigners, they say there are too few Catholics in the city, and it is a pity to have money from the state treasury. Then the townspeople began to donate to the construction of the temple themselves. One of the main patrons was Count Julius Pompeevich Litta, a native of Italy. Construction began in spring of 1825. A one-story wooden building with wings was erected on the purchased lands. But the church in the name of the Ascension of the Mother of God did not last long, a fire in 1879 destroyed the entire building.

The parishioners again decided to rebuild a new, already stone, church at their own expense. The rector of the church, Priest Krzysztof Shvermitsky, started a stormy fundraising activity. The project of the temple in the late Gothic style was made by engineer Jozef Tamulevich (Ivan Fomich). The temple cost 63,000 rubles. Construction was completed by 1884.

Initially, the organ was not considered and a harmonium produced by Storn and Clark was discharged to the church in 1896 from Warsaw.

During the Soviet era, the Roman Catholic Cathedral miraculously survived - it was expropriated into state ownership and given over to the East Siberian Newsreel Studio. The church, restored in 1978, houses the organ hall of the Irkutsk Regional Philharmonic, for which the German company Alexander Schuke designed a concert organ.