Ward Goes to Poland, Churches

Ward recently took a trip to Poland and occasionally does a guest post here about his trip.

St. Mary's Basilica, Krakow. 

I don't pretend to understand the religious history of Poland, but I did learn a few things on my trip.  We saw a number of churches and cathedrals that had changed throughout history, to and from different religions as the ruling countries changed. At the end of the post, I tried to do a brief summary, if you're interested in a little more detail.*

The Polish constitution allows for religious freedom, but over 70% of the population identifies as Roman Catholic (7% say they do not identify as having a religion, the 0.4% are various Protestant religions). And because Christianity is considered an important part of Poland's history and culture, it is taught in schools. 

Currently, religious education is 2 hours/week, but a proposal is to cut it back to 1 hour/week and not count the grade in the GPA. Not everyone is happy about that, and we saw protests against the change. I found all of this very interesting because it is so different than our treatment of religion that we are familiar with in the US. 

The protest we saw for Solidarity in Warsaw. Our guide said that it was about the issue of cutting back on religious education in the schools, among other things.

Most everywhere we went, we saw beautiful churches and cathedrals. I had to Google the difference between them:

A church is a general term for any Christian place of worship, while a cathedral is a church that serves as the seat of a bishop and is the main church of a diocese. A basilica is a church designated by the pope for its historical and architectural significance, and a chapel is a smaller place of worship that typically does not have a permanent congregation or priest.

Here are a few of the churches and cathedrals we visited.

This is St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Wroclaw. It is a Cathedral because it is the Bishop's church, and is the seat of the Archdiocese of Wrocław. 

St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Wroclaw

Brass model of the cathedral. We saw a lot of these brass models outside many of the churches.

Inside St. John's Cathedral. Every time, I was impressed with the grand, tall, open space.

Next, we saw St. Elizabeth's Church in Wroclaw.

The tower was originally 130 meters (425 feet) tall, but was destroyed by fire. When rebuilt, it is now only 91 meters (300 feet) tall.

St. Elizabeth's Church official name is the Garrison Church Military and Civil Parish of St. Elizabeth. I think it got that name as part of the de-germanification of Poland at the end of WWII. This church was originally built in the 14th century. The old stone plaque is in German because this had been a Lutheran church since 1525. It was Lutheran until the end of WWII, then became a Catholic Church. The more recent sign (in Polish) has mass schedules. 

Inside St. Elizabeth's

Next, we visited Kraków. Kraków was the capital of Poland for many years before Warsaw became the capital. This was because the King had made an alliance with Lithuania, and Warsaw was more central in the new kingdom.

Very pretty St. Mary's Basilica in Krakow's town square.

St. Mary's Basilica at night on the town square, which is active both in the daytime and at night. 

In Warsaw, we visited Holy Cross Church, which is famous because

Frederick Chopin's heart is buried in a crypt here. He died in Paris, but told his family he wanted to be buried in Poland. It was too hard to bring his whole body back, so his sister cut out his heart and brought it back to this church in Warsaw in a jar filled with cognac, approximately 1850. 

The church is also really pretty (but they are all pretty) and supposedly has a splinter of the original cross. 

The Holy Cross Church, with a painting by Canaletto in the mid-1700s of the same church, and a photo below of the church after the devastation of WWII.

You can't tell from the photo, but the interior of the church burned to the ground, so the church is just a shell at this point. 

We went off the beaten path to visit the town of Lomza, where there were church records of my ancestors. It was very interesting to see descriptions of marriages and births.

The Cathedral of Saint Michael the Archangel at Łomża. We met with a records specialist here who helped us find and decipher family records. Some were written in Russian and some were written in Latin.

The next day, we went to Miastkowo, which is a small town with the parish church nearest to the village of Czartoria, where my family was from.

Here we found more records, but there was no one to translate them for us, so we took pictures, hoping to find someone to translate them later. We also saw several family names in the church cemetery.

One afternoon, we toured Krakow's Jewish District. This district was named Kasimierz after King Kasimir III, who, in 1335, formally declared the area, then a suburb of Krakow, a town where Jews and ethnic Poles could peacefully coexist. That happened until WWII.

Notice the white wall on the right-hand side of the picture. The top of the wall is street level. The white building with the green roofs is a synagogue that was built below street level because Jewish synagogues were not allowed to be taller than any Catholic church.

We saw more beautiful churches, both inside and out. And they made me wonder about the money and labor that went into creating them.

*I tried to boil down the very complex religious history in a few words below. I think I got the general points right.

Roman Catholicism formally began in Poland in 966 AD and has been the predominant religion in Poland since then. Other Catholic religions (Greek and Russian Orthodox) have a part in the history of the country and have current populations.

While the borders changed (frequently) with Germany, Austria, Prussia, Russia, Czech, and Hungary all exerting dominion over Polish territory at some time over the last several centuries, the dominant religions of those countries extended into Poland. 

Also, the Protestant Reformation affected Poland, with Lutherans (mostly from Germany) and Calvinists (from Switzerland) coming to and staying in Poland.

In the Middle Ages and into the Enlightenment period, Poland was relatively more tolerant of religious diversity than most of the rest of Europe, so there was an influx of people of different religions (Baptists, Moravians, Jews, etc.) looking to settle there to practice their religions in peace.