Heresies at Wawel Castle in the 19th century

This text is a short study of the 19th century heresies at Wawel Castle. The 19th century is a special period for the occupied, dilapidated Wawel Castle - that central point on the map of Poland. This was the time when national identity was shaped and the Poles’ secular religion, called Polonism, was born. Wawel Castle’s rank rose simultaneously with the Castle’s physical degradation. Heresies had their share in this process. What were the heresies discussed here? They were the acts of desacralization which took place in the 19th century on the Poles’ holy hill of Wawel. Those acts were carried out by invaders (also Christians, who nevertheless desecrated the sacrum) and by Poles themselves, those Poles who abandoned Catholic rules and national sanctities. The heresies have been sorted into two groups: those related to Christian symbolism, like the ideological and material desecration of temples on the hill, and those centered around national sanctities, like the degradation of secular space, sacrum to Polonism. During the resanctification of Wawel Hill, new heresies were born as the boundaries between Catholicism and Polonism got blurred. The rebuilding projects of Ludwik Stasiak and Stanisław Szukalski can be seen as examples of such heresies. When discussing these, an important question arises: should we talk about heresies performed on the Wawel Hill or to the Wawel Hill? The article proves that political and social considerations were the principal source of the aforementioned heresies, as their doctrinal nature was mostly propaganda. The answer to the question of whether heresies could be creative that the article provides is affirmative: they played a major part in the process of mythologization of Wawel - the religious and patriotic centre of Polish identity.