Carice Milice 5 (Futog)
Roman Catholic Church of the Heart of Jesus with the rectory in Futog
The Roman Catholic parish was established in Futog as early as 1747. The old church in Futog (Novi) was built by the owner of Futog, count Hadik, in 1776 together with the rectory.
The court still exists today, while the church has been demolished. In its place, a new one was built in 1906/08 to meet the needs of the already growing German population at that time. Because of that, it was often called the “German Church”.
The construction was financed by the count family Kotek, in whose possession was the settlement and almost all the surrounding arable land with the use of the labor force of the locals who received certain privileges for it. The church dedicated to the Heart of Jesus, one of the most valuable neo-Gothic sacred buildings built on the soil of Vojvodina.
The dimensions of the church are: length 50 m., width 16.5 m., transversal nave is 28.53 m. long and 9.8 m. wide. The height of the nave is 17 m inside, and the height of the towers is 54 m.
An inscription in Gothic letters in Latin about the founder and the time of the construction of the temple is above the main entrance.
The designer of the church and the contractor was Budapest architect Ferenc Weniger (Ferenc Weninger). The temple is a long building with a main, heptagonal apse and two side, five-sided apses, so that they form a cross-shaped base. Two high bell towers flank the facade. It has two bells, one of which is 2060 kg, and the other 270 kg. The corners of the apse and the side walls of the nave are supported by counter forms. Two quadrangular rooms (sacristy and oratory) are attached to the sides of the main apse. They are entered through an external staircase, and through them there is communication to the main apse. Along the side walls and the side apse on each side is a smaller rectangular room, which is entered by an external staircase, and these rooms also have a connection with the main part of the temple. The main portal has stepped indented colonnades surmounted by a lunette and archivolts with a broken arch. The bell towers end with high narrow hexagonal pyramids. At the gable end of the nave, at the place where the five-sided roofs of the apse meet, there is a smaller tower finished with a six-sided pyramid of the same shape as the main towers and belfries, only proportionally smaller in size and decorative function. The church has large window openings. Represented are the following forms of neo-gothic construction openings – rosette, monophore, before and quadribiphore; they are arranged in a regular rhythm that logically follows the wall masses of the temple. All of them have well-preserved compositions of sacral themes made in the stained glass technique. There are 22 stained glass windows on the windows of this church – one on the rosette at the main entrance, six on the quadriforums of the nave, six on the side biforams (three each), five on the biforams of the altar apse and two each on the monoforms of the sacristy oratory. There are currently two written sources about the authors of the stained glass windows of this church. The first is a marble slab, located on the northern side of the inner wall of the sacristy, with the carved names of all the artists and craftsmen who participated in the construction and decoration of the church. Another, important source is the history book of the Futoska parish, which is kept in the archive of the Parish House of the church. The author of the stained glass is the Budapest stained glass artist Walter Gied and the Maybeck brothers.
Both outside and inside, all parts of the temple, all altars, the pulpit, and pieces of church furniture are made in the Neo-Gothic style. On the main altar is a painting with the inscription: Sanctos anetae in Davidu trinitass oil on canvas by Josef Ferenc Falconer. On the altar on the north side of the church is the composition Saint Anne teaching the Virgin, oil on canvas by Franz Falconer. Among the significant works in the church are: Crucifixion of Christ, St. Andrew, St. Francis, works by the already mentioned F. Falconer. A carved gilded composition of the crucifixion of Christ is in the sacristy. The treatment of the figures and the appearance of the stand support the manner and form of the 18th century. It has a precious relic, the body of Saint Eugene the Martyr.
The building of the Parish Court is a one-story, quadrangular building with characteristic plastic decoration on the main facade. Above the regularly spaced windows on the first floor are very shallow plastic ornaments in the shape of a flag with tassels (lambreken).
Below the middle window is an ornament in the form of a balustrade. The roof structure is a double-pitched tent covered with pepper tiles. The high elevations of the ridge roof and the wide areas indicate the old baroque type of construction.