The Dominican church of St Thomas in Krakow in the light of written sources

The Church of Saint Thomas in Kraków, now non-existent, was located within the Dominican monastery compound in the vicinity of the Church of the Holy Trinity. It was liquidated with the consent of the Holy See in 1567. Information about it had featured in monastery sources from the seventeenth century, and their content was recorded in Kraków historiography in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, new data was brought to light thanks to archaeological, architectural and historical-artistic research on the monastery-church complex of the Kraków Dominicans. Attempts were made to precisely determine the location of the former Church of Saint Thomas, its appearance, purpose, and time of construction. Hypotheses varied greatly: from supposing it to have been a Romanesque, preDominican church, to dating it to the second half of the fifteenth century (after a fire in 1462). The aim of the present article was to revisit and analyse the written sources concerning the church in question. The analysis included a breve of Pope Pius V from 1567, a document of nuncio Julius Ruggieri from 1568, a description by Arnolfo Prężyna in his seventeenth-century work “Prothocollon,” systematically compiled mentions from the books of resolutions of the Kraków Dominicans from the seventeenth century, previously unused notes from the records of the Kraków consistory from 1530–1537, and entries in the records of the Kraków cathedral chapter from 1553–1554. As a result of the analysis, it was established that the church was named after Saint Thomas Aquinas, and not Saint Thomas the Apostle. It was built of brick, in Gothic style. It was located next to the Church of the Holy Trinity at the entrance gate to the cemetery, and the tradition of the place closely links it with the later Dominican house and pharmacy at number 474 (66) in Stolarska street. The author hypothesizes that the church could have been built after 1456 on the initiative of the provincial Jakub from Bydgoszcz, in connection with the development of the Dominican studium generale, serving as a home and a chapel for the students. This hypothesis requires further verification.