The church was built on a pagan "field of the dead", where various burial urns and a certain "crown" were found; all the finds were carried off (stolen) by the Russians during the Seven Years' War (data from the Prussian archive).
Trempen is first mentioned on 13 August 1560. A church is mentioned in 1570. It was probably half-timbered. By 1582 there was already a resident pastor here. The last church was a massive building with a tower, consecrated on 1 November 1695. It was a plastered brick building, 28 x 12 m, with the chancel on the east and on the west a tower with mighty buttresses. In 1792 the tower received a new roof with a square lantern. The sacristy was added on the south, and on the north there was a second entrance. The interior of the church was restored in 1895. The altar, pulpit and confessional dated from 1700, the bells from 1617 and 1638.
Altar furnishings: a silver chalice of 1697, a silver jug and other items of the 17th–18th centuries.
As of 1947 the church was intact. The new settlers began carrying off the icons, altar furnishings and fittings. In 1961 an "ideologically committed" citizen threw a cable over the cross and pulled it down with a tractor.
After this event the church began to be actively demolished, and by 1964 only fragments of the walls remained.
In 1978 an attempt was made to level the hill with the remains of the cemetery with a bulldozer and lay out a recreation area there. But the believers among the population resisted.
Photos on this page: Bildarchiv Ostpreußen, bildarchiv-ostpreussen.de.
Translated from Russian with the help of AI (Claude, Anthropic), October 2026.
