Czestochowa Poland's Black Madonna

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Klasztor Paulinow has come a long way since its pious beginnings in 1382. A soaring baroque structure housing several small churches and basilicas, the monastery is also home to pierogi stands, cheap lodging, nonstop music—well, drumming—gift shops and thousands of jubilant pilgrims, giving it the feel of a Catholic Club Med.

Visitors of any faith can stay at Dom Pielgrzyma im. Jana Pawla II, or John Paul II Pilgrim’s House, which looks like any other hotel except for the giant crucifix on the wall and the colorful mural of the late Pope John Paul II downstairs. A monk can book your room at the Pilgrim’s House over the Internet.

Czestochowa is easily reached by a three-hour train from Krakow. The preferred method of transportation by most visitors, however, is far more grueling. On a hot summer day in 2003, my husband and I made the half-hour walk from the train station in gritty downtown Czestochowa up the Avenue of Our Lady to the gates of Jasna Gora, where we encountered a Polish youth group marching gaily through the gates.

“Long walk, isn’t it?” we asked. “Yes,” they agreed. “We walked straight from Warsaw.”

My husband and I watched, humbled, as the flag-waving, hand-clapping, drum-beating group collapsed on the lawn, prostrating themselves as a loudspeaker belted out prayers from the monastery roof.

Visiting Czestochowa as a tourist is both a moving and alienating experience. The pilgrims far outnumber the sightseers, and while the monastery’s atmosphere is friendly—even ecstatic—its significance, true to Polish form, is contingent on faith. The walls of the Chapel of Our Lady, where the icon is held, are lined with the discarded crutches and wheelchairs of those pilgrims the icon has healed. The Black Madonna is veiled and unveiled in an elaborate ceremony held several times a day. Other than its jeweled frame and age-blackened face, it doesn’t look particularly spectacular.

The view of the Madonna is different, however, on one’s knees. I walked into the Chapel during mass, an incomprehensible sermon that only confirmed my distance from my own Polish ancestry. I joined what seemed to be a line of people waiting to see the icon. Strangely, those in the front seemed unusually short. My husband gestured at the crutches on the wall, and we thought we understood.

By the time we reached the front of the line, we realized that these visitors from Poland, Brazil, Spain and seemingly every other Catholic country were walking on their knees over the hard marble floor. They began to sing in many languages, “Czerna Madonna,” “Schwarze Madonna,” “Black Madonna.”

We circled the nave, the priests immobile and enraptured, the icon heavy with a nation’s burden. I felt like a fake, a religious dilettante, as I sang along, but it was impossible not to be affected.

Every great figure of Polish history has made the pilgrimage to see the Black Madonna. The newly elected Pope John Paul II preached there at the beginning of the Solidarity Movement in a thinly veiled anti-communist appeal. Lech Walesa flew here the day after his inauguration, as the first president of a democratic Poland, to thank the Black Madonna in person.

The exhibits in the monastery’s museum serve as a who’s-who of the Polish nation—the founding document of King Jagiello, the pen of Henryk Sienkiewicz, the sword of Jan Sobieski and Walesa’s Nobel Prize. The exhibits are housed not in the ancient capital of Krakow or the modern capital of Warsaw, but here at the monastery, where they would be protected. They are a testament to Poland’s history as it was and as it has been imagined, a self-conscious reworking of its tragic past.

Today, the visitors are less prestigious but just as devout. Nuns number in the dozens, followed closely by priests and monks. The sheer variety of pilgrims is astounding, ranging from haughty, Gucci-clad Italians to Polish teenagers who would challenge Britney Spears for the slutty, Catholic schoolgirl look. Poles from around the nation stay in the Pilgrim’s House if they can afford it and in makeshift campsites outside the monastery if they can’t. These campsites are cheerful shantytowns marked by crumpled banners and giant paper-maché veils.

These modern-day pilgrims are a new kind of visitor for Czestochowa, one for whom the icon speaks more of triumph than of tragedy. Klasztor Paulinow traditionally served as a symbol of protection for a beleaguered nation; its miraculous icon is said to have kept everyone from the Swedes to the Soviets at bay. Today, in relatively prosperous Poland, the Black Madonna is an extraordinarily self-sufficient pilgrimage site run by modern monks who resemble less their modest forbearers than they do their Polish-American progeny, Martha Kostyra Stewart.

Unlike many religious sites in Europe, Czestochowa is alive. People don’t visit to take in the faded glory of a nation’s past, as in France or Austria, but to affirm their homeland’s current value. This is no roped-off St. Stephen’s or tour-heavy Notre Dame; this is religion in action—nationalism and pilgrimage fostered by sincere belief. The churches, icons and exhibits housed on Jasna Gora may be relics of Poland’s past, but they are ones made meaningful, for the pious believer or the respectful observer, by pilgrims of the present.

Sarah Kendzior has traveled to more than 25 countries.
She is currently studying Turkic languages at Indiana University.

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