On August 26 Poland keeps the solemnity of Our Lady of Częstochowa, the Black Madonna enthroned above the high altar of the Jasna Góra monastery at Częstochowa. The icon was given to the Pauline monks in 1382 by Ladislaus of Opole, who had brought it from Bełz in Ruthenia. It shows the Virgin with the Child on her left arm, her right hand indicating him — the Hodegetria pattern of Byzantine iconography.
Two parallel scars cut the Virgin's right cheek. They date from 1430, when raiders in the Hussite wars stripped the shrine and slashed the panel; the restorers at Kraków could not make the wounds hold paint, and the marks were cut back into the surface as part of the image. Poland reads them as the icon's own share in the country's history.
In November 1655 the Swedish army of Charles X reached Jasna Góra during the invasion Poles call the Deluge. The monastery held out for forty days under Prior Augustyn Kordecki against a far larger force, and the defence turned a losing war. On April 1, 1656, in the cathedral at Lwów, King John II Casimir made the vow that proclaimed the Mother of God Queen of the Polish Crown. Clement XI crowned the icon with papal crowns in 1717, the first coronation of its kind outside Rome.
Jasna Góra is the destination of the walking pilgrimages that converge on Częstochowa each August, the largest of them setting out from Warsaw two weeks before the Assumption. Karol Wojtyła came as a student, as archbishop of Kraków, and three times as pope. The silver-and-ebony screen before the icon is raised at dawn to a fanfare of trumpets and lowered at night.
