Here All Is Poland

A Pantheonic History of Wawel, 17872010

By (author) Petro Andreas Nungovitch

Publication date:

13 December 2018

Length of book:

315 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498569125

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.

Here All Is Poland: A Pantheonic History of Wawel, 1787-2010, marks an important contribution to the scholarship on the history of modern Polish identities and national myth-making, and it provides us with rich examples of how Polish national memories are imagined, constructed, and contested. This is a very readable and richly detailed book.