In 1617 Piotr Wiesiołowski Jr. founded a small Catholic church in Białystok. In the middle of the 18th century the Braniccy, a family of magnates, had it rebuilt and refurbished; one hundred years later the residents of the town joined an initiative to rebuild and enlarge it. Yet, the middle of the 19th century were not the best of times to expect a favourable reply from the officials of the Russian Empire. The petition was turned down. Meanwhile the population of the town grew rapidly and so did the number of Bialystok's Catholic residents. It was obvious that their needs could not be met without the construction of another Catholic church. So in the middle of the 1890s Father Wilhelm Szwarc, Dean of Białystok, who gained a reputation for his enterprising spirit, commissioned the renowned architect Józef Pius Dziekoński to design a new church. It was to be situated on a hill amidst an long abandoned cemetery. Asked for a building permission, the governor's office came up with a categorical refusal. The projected church, they argued, was too ostentatious and its location threatened to eclipse Bialystok's Orthodox cathedral. The next round belonged to the Białystok laity, who during the Tzar's visit in 1897 tried to enlist his support for their long-standing request. As the follow-up from Petersburg was unequivocally favourable, the Białystok Catholics drew up another petition in which they asked that the new church be built in the Bojary estate. The officials of the Governor of the Grodno province (to which Białystok belonged) took their time over the request, but in the end the answer was disappointing. There would be no permission to build another Catholic church until the second Orthodox church had been built in town as well and in the meantime the Catholics may go ahead with enlarging their old church. Faced with the intransigence of the provincial authorities on the main point, the Bishop of Wilno decided to pursue their concesion with regard to the old church. In 1899 Mr Dziekoński drafted a new project, even more grandiose than the one he had made earlier. The enlargement was to cover-up an architectural legerdemain. Dziekoński left intact the corpus of then nave and put the extension, huge in size and majestic in form, in place of the old chancel. In early 1900 Grodno approved of the plans. The new church was one of the three replicas of St Florian's in the Warsaw borough of Praga. In the 1890s it was generally regarded as a model of the Vistulan-Baltic style. To build a replica of the church which was believed to embody a quint-essential Polishness, in Białystok, a cultural and ethnic borderland, was a highly significant gesture. The church towered over the town and thanks to its Neogothic form, logical construction and solid workmanship became something of a symbol in p land's eastern fringe. It belonged to the 'big cathedral' type, characterized by a huge with a massive transept and two slender towers rising from the façade, a longitudinal nave flanked by two aisles, cross vaults, an original structure of flying buttresses raised above the lean-to roofs of the aisles and plenty of distinct architectural details such as pointed arches, escarps, cluster piers, tracery and crow-stepped gables. The construction work started in 1900. The digging of the foundations was supervised by the local builder Jan Albrecht, while Wacław Wędrowski's building firm from Warsaw was contracted to do the bricklaying and construction jobs. Major building work was completed in 1907; by 1914 Father Szwarc could proudly survey an interior with the high altar, side altars, the pulpit and the organ. The principal burden of building and equipping the church was of course borne by the Białystok Catholics. The church was consecrated on 17 September 1905.