Wawel Cathedral

Image: Wikimedia Commons

On Wawel Hill above the Vistula stands the church that holds Poland's soul: dedicated to Saints Stanislaus and Wenceslaus, it guards beneath a black marble canopy the silver shrine of Stanislaus, the bishop of Krakow martyred in 1079, whose relics drew King Władysław the Short to be crowned here in 1320, and after him nearly every Polish king. The Gothic cathedral consecrated in 1364 became the nation's necropolis, where Casimir the Great, Saint Queen Jadwiga, and heroes like Kościuszko rest, ringed by chapels crowned by the golden-domed Sigismund Chapel of Bartolomeo Berrecci, called the most beautiful flower of the Tuscan Renaissance north of the Alps. In the tower hangs the eleven-ton Sigismund Bell of 1520, rung only at the nation's greatest moments, and prehistoric bones hang by the door, said by old tradition to guard the church. Here a young priest named Karol Wojtyła celebrated his first Masses after his 1946 ordination; the world would come to know him as John Paul II.