Following the Trail of Polish Places of Power

grobowiec-w-rapie-fot-wojciech-wojcik-forum-0436451911.jpg, default, The tomb of the von Fahrenheid family in Rapa ('pyramid' in Rapa), photo: Wojciech Wójcik / Forum, Following the Trail of Polish Places of Power

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Across Poland, there are spots thought to emanate special energy. They regularly attract those searching for a spiritual experience and the Earth’s chakras, but they’re worth visiting even for those without esoteric inclinations. These ‘places of power’ have fascinating histories of cultural blending and transformation.

The older and more mysterious, the better. All around the world, places of power are mostly areas that hold relics of past civilisations, preferably structures whose purpose hasn’t yet been discovered by archaeologists. It’s no wonder, then, that Poland’s most famous places of power date back to pre-Christian times. These sites of early Slavic culture, largely erased through Christianisation, had been largely forgotten until they were re-discovered by the Romantics in the 19th century. For them, these unearthed traditions constituted a mysterious, long-forgotten heritage. To quote Maria Janion:

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The uncanny Slavdom, at the same time foreign and familiar, is a sign of a split, a repressed unconscious, a maternal element, native rather than Latin.

Trans. AP

Mount Ślęża

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Cult statue called 'Bear' at the top of Góra Ślęża, photo: Mieczysław Michalak / Agencja Gazeta

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Among the stories of early Slavdom that have been preserved is that of the sculpture called ‘Bear’ on the top of Mount Ślęża. Although Latin missionaries didn’t treat Slavic mythology with particular respect (to put it mildly), and they ruthlessly erased the testimonies of past beliefs, the pagan sanctuary on Mount Ślęża was such a significant place of worship that as late the reign of Bolesław Chrobry (992 to 1025), the chronicler and bishop Thietmar of Merseburg noted with disgust that ‘despicable pagan rites’ kept taking place there. On Mount Ślęża there was an open sanctuary surrounded by a stone bank, filled with numerous stone statues – a part of which remains today. Their stylistic variety causes us to suspect that they were created in stages and by different artists. The coarse, stocky figure with four paws, considered to be a representation of a bear, has been associated with Celtic and Wendish culture – the latter is currently thought to be the most accurate association.

Although Slavic ceremonial statues are often found at the bottom of lakes and rivers, where they were drowned as past beliefs were being eradicated, the ‘Bear’ was preserved and remained on view. It was found near the village of Strzegomiany in the mid-19th century, and a few decades later it was transported onto the top of the mountain. As is so often the case, plans were made to erect a Christian place of worship where pre-Christian beliefs were once celebrated. The harshness of Ślęża, however, turned out not to be conducive to the building of an Augustinian monastery, which was supposed to be raised there in the 12th century. As a result, the convent was moved to nearby Wrocław, and a chapel was built on Mount Ślęża only four centuries later.

Łysa Góra (Bald Mountain)

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Holy Cross, Benedictine monastery, Sanctuary on the Holy Cross, Photo: Marek Maruszak / Forum

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The place of worship on Łysa Góra was taken over with much less difficulty, and the mountain’s name was changed to Holy Cross. According to a legend, the Benedictine monastery on top of the mountain was funded by none other than Bolesław Chrobry, even though the cloister was established a few generations later, probably sponsored by Bolesław III Wrymouth and his guardian, Wojsław of House Powała. The reason for Łysa Góra’s fame as a place with power are records of the presence of pre-Christian cults, although they’re not as well-preserved as those of Mount Ślęża. According to the notes of Benedictine monks from the 16th century, three Slavic deities, named Lada, Boda, and Leli, were worshipped on Łysa Góra. Jan Długosz, in turn, provides the names Świst (Whistle), Poświst, and Pogoda (Weather). Today, all that remains of the worship of these pre-Christian deities is an unfinished sandstone bank, most probably marking the area of the sanctuary, likely dating back to the period between the 9th and 11th centuries. The Slavic trinity of uncertain names was then replaced by the Christian Holy Trinity. Nevertheless, the early history related to the 12th-century Romanesque temple was also lost in the dark abyss of the past when, mid-13th century, the Russian-Tatar army drove away the monks and destroyed their archives.

That convent, however, picked itself up a few decades later, thanks to the Holy Cross Wood relics brought by Władysław I the Short. They drew hordes of pilgrims to Łysa Góra, including consecutive monarchs – Władysław Jagiełło spared no expense expanding the monastery, and also pilgrimaged there right before the Grunwald campaign in 1410. Łysa Góra constituted an important place of worship for centuries, even though its alleged supernatural energy didn’t manage to protect the shrines from subsequent waves of destruction. The development of the pre-Christian sanctuary was disrupted by the adoption of a new faith. Then, the first Benedictine archive became the victim of the Tatar army. The church that followed, rebuilt in a Baroque style, along with a collection of Russian-Byzantine paintings created by artists brought over by Jagiełło, was consumed by a fire at the end of the 18th century.

In the meantime, the monastery was plundered by the Swedish, Hungarian, and Saxon armies. What was preserved for quite a long time, however, was the cloister’s function as a prison, into which it was transformed by the Russian authorities under partition – and so it remained throughout the interwar years. Today, the place boasts layers of relics from the consecutive historical periods, from the pre-Christian bank to the late-baroque church with artwork by the classicist painter Franciszek Smuglewicz.

Odry

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'Stone Circles' nature reserve in Odry, photo: Jacek Łagowski / Forum

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Pre-Christian burial places, here exemplified by Pomeranian stone circles, are often deemed ‘places of power’. In Poland, the most famous of these burial sites are the ones in Odry, which are also the second biggest stone circles in Europe. In the reserve established in the 1950s, there are 12 circles in total, as well as a few dozen mounds in which around 600 graves have been found, with ornaments and ceramics from the Roman Empire inside. These burial sites have been associated with the culture of Goth peoples, who probably arrived in the regions from Scandinavia in the second half of the 1st century AD.

According to some researchers, the circles were meant to precede the establishment of necropolises. There’s a suspicion that they served as places of assembly and religious worship, the latter of which included human sacrifice. Nowadays, the stone circles constitute an inconspicuous local attraction and a place of pilgrimage for chakra-seekers. However, the first pilgrim-tourists who selected the Odry stone circles for their destination were the Nazis, who considered the place a relic of a ‘pre-Germanic’ culture and a proof of the immemorial Germanness of the Vistula Pomerania.

Tum under Łęczyca

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The three-nave collegiate church in Tum near Łęczyca, photo: Radek Jaworski / Forum

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The explorers of local places of power enjoy visiting the most precious Romanesque heritage buildings. One of them is the collegiate church in Tum under Łęczyca. Under the collegiate’s floor, remains were found of an older stone construction, one believed to have been a Benedictine abbey, a pre-Romanesque basilica, or a bishop’s or prince’s residence dating back to the 11th or early 12th century. Regardless of the shape and purpose of the original structure, Tum now boasts a monumental basilica with three naves and two towers, consecrated in 1161 and built during the period of the Duchy of Poland.

However, the architecture itself also reflects earlier history, including the reign of Kazimierz I the Restorer and the Holy Emperor’s protection, which was linked to an influx of German clergy, mostly Benedictines, as well as of Rhenish architectural styles. In Tum, we can find their traces in the layout of the collegiate, but also in the subtle sculptural details of the tympan with Madonna and Child, as well as in the column heads, which constitute a clear allusion to antiquity. Today, the raw stone mass complemented by delicate stonework is one of Poland’s most prominent Romanesque architectural landmarks, which we largely owe to post-war reconstruction.

Wawel

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Tourists in the place where, according to legend, the Wawel chakra is located, photo: Jacek Bednarczyk / PAP

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The unquestioned king of Polish places of power is the so-called ‘Wawel chakra’. Though Wawel is probably the most popular of Polish attractions, the history of the local chakra is tied to a period earlier even than the establishment of the royal necropolis or Zygmunt’s Chapel. Standing by the banks of the Wisła River in Kraków, Wawel Hill served a key political function as early as the 9th century. On top of that, it also quickly gained religious significance. At the time, the place where Wawel Cathedral currently stands was occupied by a Romanesque cathedral funded in the late 9th century and a three-nave Saint Gereon’s Church. It is the latter church (mistakenly called a ‘chapel’ by chakra-seekers) that contained the spot allegedly emanating special energy, already famous during the interwar period. Today, in the Courtyard of Stefan Batory, only the outline of the now non-existent church is visible.

As the fame of the Wawel chakra grew, so did our knowledge about the relics hidden under the newer layers of the architectural palimpsest of Wawel. A large portion of the Romanesque and pre-Romanesque parts of the castle was only discovered during archaeological excavations in the 20th century. Many of these discoveries were made thanks to Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz, who served as Wawel’s conservationist for years. He also contributed to the architecture of the place by designing a monumental, classicist-modernist canopy over the entrance to the crypt of the First Marshall Józef Piłsudski. In 1917, having encountered the traces of a small stone rotunda from the late 10th or early 11th century, Szyszko-Bohusz designed a reconstruction, which is now the best-preserved part of Wawel dating back to that historical period. The discovery of the Virgin Mary rotunda (later known as Saint Felix and Adauctus Rotunda) was, according to the architect-conservationist himself, his most prominent achievement. He went as far as to show it off in his villa in Przegorzały, whose spatial layout alludes to the reconstruction.

Tykocin

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Synagogue in Tykocin, photo: Wojciech Wójcik / Forum

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Not all Polish chakras are related to pagan beliefs or the oldest Christian places of worship. Another popular place of power is the Great Synagogue in Tykocin, Podlaskie Voivodeship, dating back to the mid-17th century. The Jewish community began settling in the town slightly more than a century prior. By the 1740s, Tykocin was already a flourishing centre of trade and learning, and the wooden place of worship was replaced with a monumental, late-Renaissance synagogue. The synagogue was partly rebuilt in a baroque style after a fire in the next century. It’s called ‘great’ for a reason – it was the second biggest synagogue on Polish land after the one in Kraków, and it is also where Poland’s oldest Jewish cemetery lies. Shortly after the synagogue was erected, the Swedish army marched through Tykocin.

However, unlike a few other key landmarks, the synagogue survived the Swedish invasion unscathed. Although partly destroyed and robbed completely, the building also managed to survive World War II, during which it served as a warehouse. The inhabitants of the town, however, were not so fortunate – a group of around two thousand people, which was almost half of all the townspeople, was shot by the Nazis in August 1941 in a forest next to the nearby village Łopuchów. The Great Synagogue was renovated in the 1970s and is currently home to a local museum.

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Interior of the synagogue in Tykocin, photo: Andrzej Sidor / Forum

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Rapa

The status of places of power has also been granted to spots much more modest and younger than Celtic mounds, such as the tomb of a Prussian family, built in Mazury at the beginning of the 19th century. The von Fahrenheid mausoleum’s reputation as a place emanating special energy stems from its pyramid shape. Baron von Fahrehnheid, who commissioned the tomb’s design, loved ancient Egypt. While the tomb is now described as ‘mysterious’, there was nothing exotic about the idea to raise a pyramid-shape mausoleum in a small Mazury village in 1811. Quite the contrary – the building perfectly fits the architectural and artistic current called ‘Egyptian Revival’, which flourished after Napoleon’s 1798 to 1801 campaign in Egypt. Napoleon’s army was accompanied by artists and researchers documenting ancient relics, which resulted in a boom for ethnographic orientalism.

Description de l’Egypte, released in many volumes beginning in 1809, included hundreds of prints and constituted an incredibly rich source of knowledge for artists and architects, as well as for the fledging field that was Egyptology at the time. Egyptian motifs sprang up all over European capitals. Everywhere from Paris through Rome to London, they were used in public buildings, orangeries, zoological gardens, and private townhouses. The traces of post-Napoleonic Egyptomania are even camouflaged within urban design. For instance, strolling through the centre of Szczecin, then a Prussian town, rebuilt in the 19th century, one may note the layout of its three squares and avenues (now known as Grunwald, Renaissance, and Gray Ranksi squares), which was meant to mirror the layout of the pyramids of Gisa and their location relative to the Nile.

All that considered, Egyptian motifs in tombs are by no means exceptional. Pyramid-shaped gravestones are to be found, for instance, in the Evangelical-Augsburg cemetery in Warsaw, Łaziska, or Piotrowice. In the Rakowicki Cemetery in Kraków, in turn, we can encounter a sphinx, sitting on the tombs of the Talowski and Paszkowski families. The name is no coincidence – the sphinx was designed by Teodor Talowski, one of the most colourful personalities in the history of Kraków architecture. Talowski used historical motifs with flair and panache, and rejected slavish reconstructionism in favour of flamboyant juggling of historical references.

The tomb in Rapa constitutes a structure much rawer than Talowski’s works, and it’s associated with another exceptional artist, the Danish icon of classicist sculpture Bertel Thorvaldsen. In Poland, he’s mostly known as the creator of two monuments in Warsaw’s Krakowskie Przedmieście – that of Prince Józef Poniatowski and the one of Mikołaj Kopernik. Privately, Thorvaldsen was an enthusiast of ancient Egyptian relics, which he collected along with Greek, Etruscan, and Roman ones. Although the pyramid tomb was placed in an inconspicuous location, Baron von Fahrenheid likely ordered it to be designed by none other than Thorvaldsen – and it wouldn’t have been the first commission that the artist received from this family.

Święta Woda (Holy Water) & the Białowieża Forest

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Święta Woda (Holy Water), the Hill of Crosses, Wasilków, photo: Ewa Maciejczyk / Forum

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The Cluny monk Rudolph the Bald observed that after 1000 AD, Europe ‘wrapped itself in a white cloak of churches’. Similarly, in the transitional time of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Święta Woda (Holy Water), a small town in Podlasie, wrapped itself in a (certainly period-appropriate) patchwork cloak of crosses. It is this Hill of Crosses that draws most attention to its place of power. The crosses form a thick forest reflecting the whole panorama of contemporaneous religiose sensibility – here we can find both an enormous number of modest, wooden crucifixes and a huge metal structure resembling a pylon. This has become yet another place of power, one related to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Sorrows, which is famous for its healing power.

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Simona Kossak with a herd of deer, photo: Lech Wilczek

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Simona ze stadem saren, fot. Lech Wilczek

The times of transformation were also a golden age of esotericism, so it’s not surprising that this period abounded in the announcements of new places with power being discovered. One of them is said to have been encountered in 1993 by three tourists in Białowieża. The spot was examined by dowsers and geomancers, and there was no shortage of theories claiming that the spot was previously home to a Slavic sanctuary, even though traces of it are more than dubious. The increasing popularity of this place of power was skilfully utilised by Simona Kossak, a biologist famous for her work in and popularising of environmental protection, who developed that land, creating an educational tourist trail with a name none other than ‘Place of Power’.

Originally written in Polish, translated by AP, Nov 2021

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