St. Stanislaus
of Szczepanów

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

Stanisław was bishop of Kraków when he was killed in 1079 during a conflict with King Bolesław II. The earliest surviving chronicle records that bishop and king fell out, that the bishop died violently, and that the king left Poland. Later chroniclers supplied the fuller martyr narrative received in Catholic tradition. His relics were translated to Wawel Cathedral around the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the shrine at the center of the nave became a 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 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.

The fuller narrative familiar in Polish Catholic 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 hagiographies were written more than a century after the death and 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. They preserve the received martyr tradition without becoming eyewitness testimony.

Around the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, his relics were translated from the place tradition identifies as Skałka to the cathedral on Wawel, where the shrine became the center 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 May 8. 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 May 8 a procession still goes out from Wawel to Skałka, led by the archbishop of Kraków. In the twentieth century that procession took on renewed public weight under Primate Stefan Wyszyński and Archbishop Karol Wojtyła, joining devotion to the bishop-martyr with the Catholic defense of conscience under hostile political power.

Stanisław is venerated as a bishop-martyr who did not abandon the demands of his office in conflict with royal power. The earliest chronicle is spare and the later Catholic tradition is fuller; Wawel receives both in a shrine placed at the center of the cathedral, before the tombs of kings.