St. Stanislaus
of Szczepanów

The bishop of Kraków killed in 1079, whose shrine still stands at the centre of the cathedral

Stanisław was bishop of Kraków when he was killed in 1079 during a conflict with King Bolesław II. What the surviving sources agree on is short: the bishop and the king fell out, the bishop died violently, and the king left Poland. Everything richer than that comes from chroniclers writing a century or more later. The cult, by contrast, is fully documented. His body was brought to the cathedral on Wawel, the shrine at the centre of the nave became the focus of Polish devotion, and Pope Innocent IV canonized him at Assisi in 1253.

Almost nothing survives from Stanisław's own lifetime. He was born at Szczepanów in Lesser Poland around 1030 and became bishop of Kraków in 1072. The only near-contemporary account, written a generation after his death by the chronicler known as Gallus Anonymus, is deliberately brief: it condemns both a "traitor bishop" and a violent king, and declines to explain the quarrel. Historians have read that silence as caution rather than ignorance.

The fuller narrative familiar in Polish memory, in which the bishop rebukes the king for his conduct, excommunicates him, and is cut down at the altar, comes from Wincenty Kadłubek and from the two lives written by Wincenty of Kielcza in the thirteenth century. These are hagiographies rather than reports, composed while the canonization was being pursued, and they carry the miracle stories, including the raising of a man named Piotr to testify in a land dispute, that later shaped the saint's iconography. Presenting these as eyewitness history overstates what the sources can carry.

What the record does establish is the cult. His body was brought from Skałka, the church outside the walls where tradition places his death, to the cathedral on Wawel, where the shrine became the centre of the building and of a national devotion. Innocent IV canonized him at Assisi in 1253, and from 1254 his feast was kept in Poland on 8 May. In the seventeenth century King Władysław IV commissioned a silver reliquary coffin for the relics; that coffin was destroyed by Swedish troops during the wars of the 1650s and replaced about 1670. It is the coffin under the baroque canopy in the middle of the nave today.

Stanisław became the patron of Poland and, through the coronations held at Wawel from 1320, a saint whose shrine and whose monarchy were physically bound together. Each year on the first Sunday after 8 May a procession still goes out from Wawel to Skałka, led by the bishop of Kraków. In the twentieth century that procession took on public weight under Primate Stefan Wyszyński and Archbishop Karol Wojtyła, which is worth naming plainly: the cult has carried political meaning as well as devotional meaning, and it did so most visibly within living memory.

Stanisław is venerated as a bishop who did not survive his own office. That is the whole of what the earliest source will support, and it is enough. The cathedral on Wawel is arranged around his grave rather than around the kings buried near it, and a pilgrim who understands that has understood Catholic Kraków.