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On 3 August 1901, Stefan Wyszyński was born in the village of Zuzela, in north-eastern Poland. He became Primate of Poland in 1948 and held the office for 33 years, until his death in 1981. Those were the years when communism tried hardest to remake Poland and its people. The Church as a safe deposit…

Is it a good walk from Wąchock to Bodzentyn? Yes, but it’s a story walk, not a views walk. You’ll spend most of the day under trees, and nearly every kilometre has something to tell you. Where it fits The route is part of the Świętokrzyska Droga św. Jakuba, the Holy Cross stretch of the…

This picks up where my Seibo no Kishi post left off. I woke in a room beneath the church at Seibo no Kishi, the convent founded by St Maximilian Kolbe in Nagasaki. The morning bells rang at what I guessed was a 5 a.m. rising, then 5:40 for prayers and meditation, then 6:25, five minutes…

I have walked in Ireland, on Japanese islands and in the Holy Cross Mountains of Poland. The longer I walk, the more convinced I am that sacred places don’t all ask the same thing of you. Here is the clearest way I can put it: The Camino can be whittled down to a journey towards…

If you only have one day in the Holy Cross Mountains, this is the walk I’d give you. It has forest, the highest summit in the range, and a village at the end that still lives at its own pace. It’s an easy introduction to the region, and it shows you what makes this landscape…

Long before it was a Christian pilgrimage site, Łysa Góra, the “Bald Mountain”, had already taken hold of people’s imagination. Its wooded summit is strewn with huge stones, which folk tradition said were the ruins of a castle built by giants. It was almost certainly a pagan Slavic sanctuary when the first Benedictine monks arrived.…

Here’s a piece of trivia I love. The oldest known sentence written in Polish isn’t a royal decree or a prayer. It’s a husband offering to help his wife with the housework. The Book of Henryków Around 1270, Cistercian monks at Henryków Abbey in Silesia kept a chronicle of their lands, written in Latin. In…