The monastery of Jasna Gora at Czestochowa, and the icon it guards, known as the Black Madonna, is the most important religious site in Poland and one bound very tightly to Polish national identity.
The Black Madonna
The icon, a dark-toned image of the Virgin and Child in the Byzantine manner, was brought to the Pauline monastery at Czestochowa in the late fourteenth century; legend attributes it to St Luke, though it is a later work. Its face bears two scars, traditionally explained by a Hussite raid in which the image was slashed. The image became the focus of intense Marian devotion, and its history fused with the nation's: after the monastery withstood a siege by Swedish forces in 1655, a moment remembered as miraculous, the king proclaimed the Virgin, as Our Lady of Czestochowa, Queen of Poland.
Nation and faith
Through the partitions of Poland, the Nazi occupation and the communist decades, Jasna Gora served as a symbol of Polish endurance and of the Church's resistance, and devotion to the Black Madonna became inseparable from Polish patriotism and Catholic identity. The bond was reinforced by the pontificate of the Polish pope John Paul II, who venerated the image.
Pilgrimage
Great numbers of pilgrims arrive each year, a substantial share of them walking for days in organised groups from across the country, which is the characteristic form the devotion takes here; the walking pilgrimage from Warsaw is a national institution. The icon is kept behind a screen that is lowered and raised at set points in the daily round, and the moment of its unveiling, announced with a fanfare, is what most pilgrims have come for. Jasna Gora remains an intensely active shrine and the spiritual centre of Polish Catholicism.