The crypt of the Wawel Cathedral on Wawel Hill in Cracow had long been a site of royal burials. As of the fourteenth century Polish kings found their final resting place there. After the partitions of Poland, there was no more royalty to grace this site. Yet that was not the end of the usefulness of this site. This hallowed space was reinvigorated by people we would call nationally conscious Poles (a subset of Polish speakers at this time; the vast majority of ethnic “Poles” were nationally unenlightened peasants who did not perceive themselves as being Polish). It was nationally active Poles who sought to bury illustrious leaders of the nation there, to create a new “royalty” of sorts.
This paper examines the uses, and abuses, of the translation/reburial of non-royal Polish bodies in the Wawel crypts over the space of a century. This trend began in the early nineteenth century, with the reburial of two major military figures, Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Prince Jozef Poniatowski during a brief period of local autonomy. The push to rebury the remains of a different type of Polish leader—Poland’s great literary bards—resumed in the last third of the nineteenth century, the period of Galician autonomy. At this time plans were drawn up for the translation of the remains of Adam Mickiewicz, brought to Cracow finally in 1890. Last but not least, another military hero—Marshal Jozef Pilsudski—made his way to the Wawel Hill in independent Poland after his death in 1935. The accounts of these reburials and the concomitant contestation tell us as much about the constellations of power as about the figures being honored and the way their life stories and achievements were recast to provide Poles with appropriate national role-models.
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