History and furnishings
The Marian chapel, predecessor of the present church and standing by the southern town gate next to the city-wall tower, is first mentioned in 1379. Of the originally Gothic church from the 15th century, first rebuilt in the 16th, the surviving elements are part of a rib-vaulted presbytery with a three-eighths polygonal close, a walled-up stone pointed-arch portal on the façade, and the bell tower with a walled-up two-light tracery window.
In 1629 the church was taken over by the Minorite friars, who built a monastery alongside it. In the second half of the 17th century the church was thoroughly rebuilt with the help of the Counts Vetter von der Lilie, who set up a tomb inside it. The bell tower was raised and the nave heightened and vaulted, with a choir loft added on the west side. Attempts in 1796 — a decade after the dissolution of the monastery under the Josephine reforms — to abolish the church too were unsuccessful. The greatest damage was suffered in the early 1940s, when the Gothic presbytery was shortened to make room for a road widening.
The bright and spacious interior is graced on the west by a choir loft with a wooden balustrade from the late 17th century. With its slender colonnettes, beaded strings and recessed decorative panels, it ranks among the few surviving early-Baroque balustrades in Slovenian Styria. During the Baroque renovation the church was also partly painted. On the triumphal-arch wall a fresco depicts the Glorification of St. Francis of Assisi, the order's founder. The niche of the Cross altar is decorated with little angels bearing the Instruments of Christ's Passion.
The late-Gothic rib-vaulted presbytery was once closed off by a wall with a painted high altar, which was knocked down when the road was widened. The present Neoclassical altar of the Virgin Mary, brought from the parish church of St. Bartholomew, was reworked and adapted to its new location in 1947. Of the lateral wooden altars dedicated to St. Anthony of Padua, St. Joseph, St. Florian and the Holy Cross — removed in the second half of the 20th century — only twelve statues have been preserved and are now placed at various points in the church. The statues, made at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, are among the few known works of the Maribor sculptural workshop of Franc Krištof Reiss († 1711), whose finest work is the altar in the chapel of St. Francis Xavier at Ptujska Gora.
During restoration works at the beginning of the 21st century, the church lost its original Baroque floor, into which four 17th-century tombstones had been set. The three slabs in the presbytery bore the arms of the Counts Vetter; the one in the nave belonged to the Minorites. Once a monastic church and now the town's Marian church, with its early-Baroque architecture, paintings and furnishings, it bears witness to the intensive patronage of the Counts Vetter von der Lilie — former owners of Slovenska Bistrica — and of the local Minorites; as a cultural monument of local significance it ranks among the more important sacred buildings in the wider Slovenska Bistrica area.