Monuments and places of memory

The heart of Stary Sącz has beaten behind these walls since 6 July 1280, when Duchess Kinga gave the town and 28 villages to the Poor Clares. The Gothic sandstone church was consecrated in 1332 by Bishop Jan Grot, and in its chapel rest the relics of the saintly foundress, watched over by a limewood figure of c. 1470.

At the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries Cardinal Radziwiłł had the walls raised and pierced with loopholes, and Jan di Simoni rebuilt the convent in stone. The interior dazzles with the Baroque: the “Tree of Jesse” pulpit of 1671 and the marble altars from the workshop of Baltazar Fontana. The sisters came through the Josephine suppression, the fire of 1764 and two wars – and they pray here to this day.

The parish church remembers the days when, in 1299, the parish priest Jakub styled himself plebanus de Antiqua Civitate. It was originally dedicated to St Elizabeth and St Margaret – Kinga’s aunt and sister. Fire visited it many times: after Ścibor’s raid in 1410, in the great fire of 1644 and in the disaster of 1795.

Each time the townsfolk raised it from the ruins. The tower was built by Paweł Beber (though some date it earlier), and in 1679 Jan Głowiński built the organ that still sings today during the “1679.org” festival.

Almost a hectare of cobblestones – some 1,250,000 stones after the rebuilding – with two streets leaving each corner, as befits a town laid out on Spiš and Hungarian models. The square was marked out in Kinga’s day, and its regular shape came with the second charter of 1357–1358.

A town hall once stood here – of masonry from 1750, with a tower and market stalls – but the fire of 1795 consumed it and it was never rebuilt. What remains is the well of 1848, the lime trees of 1877 and the low, single-storey houses that make this one of the most beautiful squares in Lesser Poland.

The only masonry house to survive the great fire of 1795. Its walls are a metre thick and its floor is laid with river cobbles. And the name? Some say it comes from the tanners’ pits, others from a lock-up. Between the wars the Steireich family ran a wine bar here.

Since 1956 the house has held the collection of the shoemaker Józef Paszkiewicz, and since 1976 the Seweryn Udziela Regional Museum. Here you will find mementoes of Ada Sari and Fr Józef Tischner.

The Friars Minor came here in Kinga’s own lifetime – twelve brothers in the western part of the town, beside the church of St Stanislaus. It is to their pen that the medieval life of the saintly duchess is attributed.

The Austrians dissolved the friary step by step: in 1786 the church was handed over to colonists, in 1813 the granary was taken over for salt, and in 1814 the last brothers departed. In 1831 the town bought the granary and set up its town hall there, while the church and friary housed a court with a prison.

Roch and Sebastian were invoked against the plague – small wonder that their chapel stood on the edge of the town as early as the late 16th century. The present little stone church with its apse was funded by Abbess Anna Lipska and Samuel Łapka in 1643–1644.

Since 1783 the old cemetery has spread around the church. Here lie Fr Józef Leopold Kmietowicz, the historian Szczęsny Morawski and the composer Jan Joachim Czech, and close by stands the mausoleum of the Poor Clares.

Jews were late to settle in the town of the Poor Clares – as late as 1799 not a single one lived here. In 1876 a wooden prayer house went up, and at the beginning of the 20th century a brick synagogue designed by Józef Kostański and funded by Baruch Holländer.

During the occupation the Germans devastated it, and the community that had prayed within it perished in August 1942. Today it stands abandoned – a silent witness, entered in the register of historic monuments.

The town had campaigned for the college since 1894 and got its way on 5 October 1903. It undertook to put up a building and to contribute 1000 złr a year. Classes were held at first in the town hall, and from 1925 in the new building, which was named after Jan Długosz.

Generations of teachers for the Sącz region came out of these walls. Among the victims of Katyń and Kharkiv were 23 officers who had graduated here – a plaque of 2010 commemorates them.

In 1893 the lawyer Edward Szayer and the apothecary Julian Fijałkowski called together 30 people and founded a “Sokół” nest. The building was designed free of charge by the architect Zenon Remi, and its foundation stone was laid on 15 May 1907.

After the First World War the town’s first cinema opened here, and for many years the building was home to the Ada Sari Centre of Culture and Art. Here people trained body and spirit, staged plays and watched films.

On 16 June 1999 more than 600,000 people gathered on the Stary Sącz meadows, and John Paul II proclaimed Kinga a saint: “Do not be afraid to be saints.” The wooden altar was designed by Zenon Andrzej Remi of Zakopane, and its mensa originally rested on blocks of salt from Bochnia.

The altar was meant to go to Nowy Sącz, but Mayor Kuczaj objected and Bishop Skworc decided that it should stay. Today it is the only papal altar preserved where it first stood, with a museum and a pilgrims’ house.

Legend has it that the water gushed forth here at Kinga’s bidding. Scholars see in it rather a memory of the Młynówka, a channel led from a pond below Miejska Góra – but pilgrims still come with their bottles.

The brick shrine of 1779 replaced a wooden one. Bound up with this place is the healing of Prof. Marian Starczewski in 1974, recognised as the miracle needed for the canonisation.

This wooded hill (420 m above sea level) towers over the town from the west. Men once searched here for the castellan’s stronghold – in vain. Instead, a cholera cemetery of 1831 and a wayside shrine of 1931 survive on its slope.

For a quarter of a century a ski jump operated here, and since 2021 the “Forest Pier” (Leśne Molo) has wound among the trees. The wooded site covers some 113 ha in the buffer zone of the Poprad Landscape Park.

Where gravel was dug in the days of the Polish People’s Republic to build Nowa Huta, nature has reclaimed its own. The pits grew over, and beavers made their home in the water.

In 2018 the architects of the 55Architekci studio laid a boardwalk some 400 m long through the site, with two observation hides. The design won the Witkiewicz Prize, and people flock here – 1800 came in the first week of June 2019 alone.

In 1915, in the municipal cemetery on Węgierska Street, the Austrian architect Gustaw Ludwig designed a plot for those who fell in the Great War. Graves from the Second World War were later added to it.

It is a quiet corner of remembrance, known to few visitors. How many soldiers rest here has still not been established.

On 17 August 1942 the Jews were ordered to assemble at the market ground. Lorries carrying the old and the sick turned off towards the Poprad, to the copse at Piaski. There 95 people were shot. The rest were driven to Nowy Sącz and deported to the Bełżec extermination camp.

In the woods above the river a memorial stands over the mass grave. Every year on 17 August the townspeople come for the Roll-Call of Remembrance.

The first “Sącz” lay not where the market square is today, but a few kilometres away, in the northern part of Podegrodzie. On a promontory cut off by a ditch stood Zamczysko, which burned down at the turn of the 11th and 12th centuries. About 600 m to the south rose the larger stronghold of Grobla.

It was at Grobla that the castellans of Sącz held office. Its timber-laced rampart was rebuilt at least four times, and at the foot of the stronghold, by St James’s church, a settlement grew up below the walls – hence the name Podegrodzie.

Before the Piasts arrived, the lords of the basin had their fortress above the Dunajec. The multi-part hillfort at Naszacowice covered some 15 ha – it was truly vast. Its rampart was raised in several phases, and layers of burning bear witness to a stormy past.

Archaeologists from the Jagiellonian University, led by Jacek Poleski, dug here from 1983. They found objects from the Avar, Great Moravian and Old Hungarian worlds – a sign that the routes across the Carpathians were in use long before Kinga.