EnglishChurch of Saint Michael Archangel
Taleigão, Goa, India
Religious Architecture
The Church of Saint Michael Archangel was founded in 1544 as one of the first parishes on the Islands under the charge of the Dominicans, and has pertained to the secular clergy since the 1770s. With its chancel on the east side, it faces rice fields even today reasonably untroubled by modern constructions. Until the 20th century the town was the most important in the entire region, even more so than Panaji. It extends behind and north of the church amid the coconut grove. West and north of the church is a large yard with a cross. This is a single nave church with tile roof, stone vaulted chancel without transept, high choir over the doorway sustained by arches, windows running high along the side walls, a tower on the north side aligned with the plane of the main façade, exterior galilee with three vaulted arches and a porched side door to the north. Standing out south of the façade plane is a projecting body with a tile roof, as if it were an unfinished tower, with an ornamented door. It provides access to a covered outside gallery that runs along the south side façade and distributes paths to various buildings now serving the parish. The door design seems older than the church’s other details: it comprises an arrangement of pilasters, wing panels and ball finials from the second half of the 16th century. This projecting body was perhaps the gateway to a Dominican priory. The decoration with very accentuated incised mouldings seen in the church’s galilee, on the high choir arches and pillars, triumphal arch and chancel barrel vault coffers seems to be work from the second half of the 17th century, if not even later, and indicates that the church was completely remodelled at that time, though keeping features of the older type: the tower, window placement, barrel vault in the chancel. That work may have caused the disappearance of an original false transept. Also in the 19th century, probably in the second half, the church was subject to extensive renovations. The redesigned sharp gable of the main façade most likely dates to that time, with its ogival decorative moulding and undulating skyline, along with the high altar of Gothic design, the wooden galleries along the walls at window height and the ceramic floor, which contains sepulchres dating to the 1880s.