Here All Is Poland

On 10 April 2010, Polish President Lech Kaczyński and First Lady Maria Kaczyńska were killed in an airplane crash outside the city of Smolensk in western Russia, where they were flying to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Soviet massacre of over twenty-one thousand Polish prisoners during the Second World War. Eight days later, the president and his wife were laid to rest beneath the Krakow Cathedral on Wawel Hill, an ancient necropolis of Polish kings and queens and the most prestigious burial site in all of Poland, where only six other meritorious, non-royal national figures have been enshrined since the demise of the Polish monarchy in the late eighteenth century.The decision to bury Lech and Maria Kaczyński in Poland’s highest national pantheon sparked an emotional debate about its symbolic appropriateness and underscored the question of how such burial decisions are actually made. It also raised a whole host of questions about the historical significance and pantheonic function of Wawel—the “bedrock of sacred memory for the Polish nation,” as Stanisław Staszic put it in the early nineteenth century—in modern Polish consciousness. Until now, these questions have received surprisingly little attention beyond Polish historians of Krakow. Here All Is Poland excavates and builds upon the extant scholarly discourse of Wawel to plot the evolution of a pantheonic funeral tradition over two hundred years, thus providing a context and a clue for interpreting the historical significance of the 2010 burial.

The Wawel Cathedral has long since transcended its original function as a burial site for Polish monarchs and become a living monument to the preservation of national heroes of all kinds, including military leaders, literary bards, and statesmen. Yet, as Petro Andreas Nungovitch demonstrates, the process of 'Wawelization' has always involved fractious, antagonistic campaigns to implant particular symbols on the bedrock of sacred Polish memory, as seen most recently with the interment of President Lech Kaczyński and his wife beneath the cathedral in 2010. Nungovitch offers a valuable guide to the shifting sands of Polish martyrology and a reminder of the multiplicity of narratives at play in Polish national history., Petro Nungovitch has illuminated the history of one of Europe's most fascinating cultural landmarks: the Polish pantheon of national heroes entombed in the crypts of the Wawel Cathedral in Cracow. This is the first serious scholarly study in English to focus on this important subject, which is crucial for thinking about the history of nationalism and the history of memory and commemoration, in Poland above all, but also in modern Europe more generally. This book should be read by anyone interested in the history of Eastern Europe, the dynamics of historical memory, or the construction of modern nationalism.

Petro Andreas Nungovitch earned his PhD from New York University.