Church of Mary

A flight of 33 steps – Christ’s age when he was crucified – leads to the squat, 50m-wide façade of the Church of Mary, its palatial appearance underwritten by the complete absence of towers. The side entrance takes you into the square cloister running around the church, lined with chapels and Stations of the Cross; the walls are densely adorned with folk paintings of Mary and old votive pictures. In the chapel west of the main altar you’ll find a relic of one of Poland’s modern saints, Zygmunt Gorazdowski (1845–1920), a native of Polish Lwów (now Lviv in Ukraine) who fought in the 1863 uprising, despite severe pulmonary problems, and later become a pioneering priest, author and educator. He was canonised in 2005.