Parish church of Kainach bei Voitsberg

The parish church of Kainach bei Voitsberg, often called Kainach parish church, is the Catholic parish church of the parish of Kainach, located in the municipality of Kainach bei Voitsberg in western Styria, Austria. The church, dedicated to St. George, belongs to the pastoral area of Voitsberg in the diocese of Graz-Seckau.

The origins of the church probably date back to the 11th century, when it was built as a filial church of the mother church of Piber and the St. Lambert's abbey. However, it is first mentioned in a document in 1245 in a listing of the branches of Piber. In the course of the 14th century Kainach developed into an independent parish. At the transition from the 15th to the 16th century there was a church fire, the exact extent of which is unknown. In the course of the 16th century the church was expanded and rebuilt, whether in the course of the fire is not clear. In the first half of the 18th century, the previous church was replaced by a new building, incorporating the remains of the previous building. Only the old church tower was preserved. In the course of the Josephinian reforms, the St. Lambert's abbey, to which the church had been incorporated until then, was dissolved in 1786. Since 1812 the diocese of Graz-Seckau has provided the parish priests in Kainach, and from 1973 to 2021 the parish was co-cared for by the Sisters of Charity of the Holy Cross.

The parish church of Kainach is a baroque gallery pillar church. It has a late Gothic steeple with a spire, which rises above the nave in the west. Around the church there are numerous gravestones, some of which are embedded in the church wall. They are the remains of the old cemetery, abandoned in 1900, and represent a regional historical testimony. All altars in the church were made in the 18th century in the workshop of Balthasar Prandtstätter. A special feature is the brick music matroneum, into which a wooden gallery, the so-called Schmiedenchor or Schmiedenkotter, was inserted at the base of the vault at the request of the Kainach scythe smiths in the 18th century.

The entire structure, along with the remains of the former cemetery, is a listed building.^[1]