On Saturday, July 10, 2004, my cousin and I drove from Ciechocinek to Czestochowa, to attend a celebration of her grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary. Ciechocinek is a spa and resort town about 200 kilometers northwest of Warsaw, Poland. Before the trip began, she had to stop by the aesthetics studio (a type of spa) she manages, which lies near the market square, adjacent to the town’s main bookstore. We set off early in the morning in her elegant Peugeot 206, along with her purebred West Highland terrier. It was a hot, sunny day, and we were headed southwest, toward Lodz, the second-largest city in Poland. A superhighway system has yet to be built in Poland, which means that most driving takes place on two-lane highways, where passing plodding trucks or cars is fairly perilous, requiring superb driving skills.

We had to drive through downtown Lodz to reach the southern highway exit. I saw the beautifully restored palaces that had once mostly belonged to Jewish factory owners. The city had been heavily Jewish before World War II. The Poles have respected the city’s Jewish heritage, remembering the holocaust, for example, in very solemn ceremonies memorializing the destruction of the Lodz Ghetto by the German occupiers. For several years, Lodz has also hosted an arts festival, “The Dialogue of Four Cultures”—Polish, Jewish, German, and Russian. Before 1939, most of the Jewish population in Poland had been better off economically than the broad mass of the Polish Christian peasants—most of whom had been immured in abject poverty since time immemorial.

We continued toward Piotrkow Trybunalski, an historic town that had served as the seat of Poland’s Royal Tribunal for hundreds of years. Turning eastward, we traveled 80 kilometers to reach Zarnow, a small town whose earliest building (the church) dates back to the tenth century. Zarnow is where my cousin’s grandparents live, in a modest house of a few rooms. I was told that, when her grandparents were digging a well, they encountered a wall of rock that might have been a remnant of early medieval walls. Unfortunately, with an overstretched government budget, in a country that is—outside of Warsaw and a few other large centers—subject to considerable, often grinding, poverty, funds for exploratory archeological digs are very limited.

We quickly loaded her grandparents into the car, which was a rather tight fit for four people and an increasingly nervy dog, and our discomfort increased when her grandmother began to suffer from motion sickness. Nevertheless, we persevered and finally reached Czestochowa about 4 P.M. Her family—including her mother, sister, and one brother—lives in a fairly large house with an extensive yard, on the outskirts of the city.

Leaving the dog tied up in the yard, we had to rush by car to the famous Jasna Góra Pauline monastery complex, where a commemorative ceremony was scheduled at the main sanctuary, before the famous icon of the Black Madonna. This was the first time I had been to the shrine.

We drove around the monastery walls to the huge parking lot at the back, at which we were fortunate to find a parking spot. I noted that various small shops selling devotional materials had been built right into what had once been the fortress walls of the monastery. Even in the short time we were there, we saw a fair number of large tour buses coming up the drive. We walked through a large gate-tower toward the main chapel where the Black Madonna resides. My cousin’s grandfather had put on his partisan fighter veteran’s uniform decorated with many medals. He had been severely wounded in the fighting during the war, and his first wife had been killed by the German occupiers.

The buildings are actually rather small and intimate, not the ponderous and overwhelming facades you would expect at such a world-famous site, although one of the sharp steeples of the monastery can be seen from virtually anywhere in the town.

As we walked into the sanctuary, we noticed a marriage ceremony being conducted directly before the Black Madonna. The icon always has a jewel encrusted robe for public viewing, so it looks rather different from the unadorned painting. The priest, his attendants, and the young couple were obscured and separated from the main crowd in the chapel by a huge ironwork grille that looks somewhat like an iconostasis in an Orthodox church.

Pilgrims were continually streaming into the sanctuary and joining in the ongoing prayers and canticles of the wedding service.

Unfortunately, it turned out that we had mistakenly arrived about 15 minutes too late, as the anniversary commemoration had been allotted little more than 15 minutes. Disappointed, we participated in the prayers and singing.

Being very tired, I ducked out to the church situated directly beside the sanctuary chapel to admire the magnificent Baroque altar. My near exhaustion tempered my appreciation of the uplifting beauty of the holy site.

Jasna Góra has had a very long history among the Poles. Its central fame derives from the time of the so-called Deluge. In July 1655, Sweden—then a militant, aggressive, Protestant power invaded Poland from the north, quickly seizing most of the country. Poland (in union with Lithuania) was, at that time, a large, sprawling, but poorly organized state whose borders stretched to Riga in the northeast and Kiev in the southeast. It had been wracked by the Dnieper Cossack rebellion and continual wars with Muscovy. On November 18, 1655, the Swedish general Miller laid siege to the recently fortified monastery with 3,000 soldiers, against a garrison of 170 soldiers, 20 noblemen, and 70 brothers. The indomitable Fr. Augustyn Kordecki decided to resist, despite being massively outnumbered. After 40 days of siege, the Protestant Swedes had failed to take the “fortress of Mary” and abandoned their efforts. The failure of the siege was seen as a miracle brought about by the Virgin Mary’s intercession, and it galvanized resistance to the Swedish occupation across all of Poland. On April 1, 1656, the Polish king, Jan Casimir, proclaimed the Virgin Mary the Patroness and Queen of Poland.

In their rising against Russian domination of a weakening Poland, the Confederates of Bar (including Casimir Pulaski, who would later become a hero of the American War of Independence) seized and then defended the sanctuary between 1769 and 1772. Named after the small southeastern town where they had initially gathered, the Confederates of Bar —who referred to themselves as “soldiers of Mary”—have been dubbed the “Polish Jacobites” by some historians. Although their political aims were rather confused—commingling sincere patriotism and a resistance to reforms that the Polish political system at that time desperately needed—the Confederates set an example of self-sacrifice for future generations. Crushed by the czarist Russian armies, they were one of the first of many generations of Polish freedom fighters who would end up in exile in Siberia or other remote regions of Russia. The Partition of Poland by Prussia/Germany, czarist Russia, and the Habsburg Empire extended from 1795 to 1918-123 years of foreign occupation.

Adam Mickiewicz, the great Polish national poet who was one of the central creators of Romantic and modern Polish nationalism, mentions Mother Mary and Jasna Góra near the very beginning of his great lyric poem “Pan Tadeusz.” One of the three books in the famous Trylogia of Polish author Plenryk Sienkiewicz (winner of the 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature for his novel on Christians in Nero’s Rome, Quo Vadis) deals with the Swedish Deluge (Potop), and much of the narrative is focused on the siege of Jasna Góra. One of the last official acts of Pope John Paul II—which had obviously been planned before the onset of his terminal illness —was the delivery of a letter to the prior of Jasna Góra on April 1, 2005, along with some new “crowns” for the Black Madonna icon.

An anniversary banquet was served back at the house at 8 P.M. I savored all of the delicious food—pork cutlets and roast beef, washed down with mineral water and some celebratory champagne. There were about 15 people at the large table, including cousins from various branches of the family. There was a separate table for the children in an adjoining room, and the Westie enjoyed tidbits given to him from the dinner table.

Joining in the boisterous conversation at the table, I was told by my cousin’s grandfather (obviously with some exaggeration) that theirs was a ducal family renowned in Polish history. I needled a young male cousin about the brand of mineral water they were serving, which was being hawked on Polish television at that time by Cindy Crawford, who says four words in Polish during the entire commercial.

The conversations continued at a rapid clip until about 11 P.M., when my cousin drove me to the Ibis Hotel in Czestochowa, as there was no room left at the house. 1 checked into the hotel, thanked my cousin profusely, and made my way to my room. After a long, hot shower, I quickly fell asleep in the comfortable bed, having enjoyed one of the longest and most eventful days of my life.