Bishop of Cracow Stanislaus (Stanisław) was murdered in 1079, most probably at St Michael’s Church on Skałka near Wawel. According to Gallus Anonymus’sChronicle (ca. 1113-1117), the bishop was a traitor (Latin:traditor) and thus he was punished with dismemberment by King Bolesław the Generous (later known as Bolesław the Bold). In the aftermath of these events Bolesław fled to Hungary and soon died. According to Wincenty Kadłubek’sChronicle, Bishop Stanislaus admonished the king for immoral deeds and finally cast an anathema on him. The king was so angered by this that he ordered his people to capture the bishop and he subsequently killed him with his own hands. The body of the bishop was quartered and scattered but God sent four eagles to guard the body of the future saint, which later became miraculously whole. This was taken as evidence of the sainthood of Stanislaus the Martyr.

The worship of Stanislaus grew gradually after the death of Bolesław the Wry-mouth and after the regional partition of the state in 1138. It grew even further in the 13^thcentury when efforts for Stanislaus canonization were taken and he was ultimately declared a saint on September 8, 1253 at St Francis Basilica in Assisi. A year later, on the 5th of May, the Pope’s decision was announced at Cracow Cathedral. According to tradition, the saint’s relics were ceremoniously placed on the altar thus inaugurating the official worship of the new saint. A list of miracles worked through Stanislaus’s intercession was sent to Rome in support of his canonization , including a story of Comes Piotr (Piotrowin) being raised back to life. being brought back to life. The magnate was believed to have sold a village to the bishop but after his death his family claimed the property back. So Stanislaus went to the cemetery to call the dead magnate to become a witness and led him by the hand to give evidence before the king. Also at that time, the Dominican Wincenty of Kielcza wrote his Minor Life Story of St Stanislaus and its reworked version, Major Life Story of St Stanislaus. These texts were revised and travestied , by this promoting the worship of the saint martyr.  At the end of the 13^th century, dukes from the Piast dynasty began to use the story of St Stanislaus for propaganda purposes. Based on Wincenty of Kielcza’s Major Life Story of St Stanislaus, they treated the miraculous reintegration of the martyr’s body as a metaphor of the partitioned Polish Kingdom. After the coronation of Władysław the Short in 1320, the worship of St Stanislaus began to be used as ideological legitimization of the new ruler’s royal title and to stress continuity of the monarchy.

National aspects of the worship of St Stanislaus were decisive for its development in the centuries that followed. As early as the 13th century, liturgical poetry referred to the bishop as the Father of the Homeland. The famous liturgical hymn authored by Wincenty of Kielcza begins with the invocation to Poland to rejoice for her glorious son (Latin:Gaude mater Polonia, prole fecunda nobilis!).

The importance of the worship of St Stanislaus in the reborn kingdom are best illustrated in penitential processions or rather pilgrimages to the Church of St Michael on Skałka, in which every Polish ruler (including Stanisław August Poniatowski in 1787) participated on the eve of his coronation. The first ruler known from historic accounts to have participated in the procession to Skałka Hill to entrust the kingdom to the care of St Stanislaus was Władysław Jagiełło in 1386. The king is believed to have called for the intercession of the martyr in the battle of Płowce in 1331. Jagiełło followed Władysław’s footsteps in his famous speech before the battle of Grunwald (Tannenberg) on July 15, 1410. The victory of Grunwald was highly important for the consolidation of St Stanislaus’s status of the patron saint of Poland. The fact that the standards captured at the battle of Grunwald were donated to the grave of St Stanislaus, was of particular importance as it raised Cracow Cathedral to the rank of a trophy church. The reign of the Jagiellonian dynasty marks the period of the greatest popularity of the worship of St Stanislaus. Every fiftieth anniversary of canonization was an opportunity to revive the worship of the saint. The partitions of Poland marked another important period in the history of worship of St Stanislaus. Once again, the veneration of the Cracow bishop became a patriotic symbol to unite the Poles over state borders and political divisions. This phenomenon may seem surprising as it was revived many times and continued in various contexts. In 1979 the Communist party authorities in the People’s Republic of Poland did not grant permission for Pope John Paul II’s first pilgrimage to his homeland to take place in May in view of the anniversary of the death of St Stanislaus, which was to be held the same month. In his note from the meeting with representatives of the Episcopate in February 1979, Kazimierz Kąkol – the head of the Department for Religions wrote: “over the years Cardinal Wojtyła was personally involved in the action of interpreting the personage of the bishop [St Stanislaus] in terms of dissidentism“. The Holy Father came to Poland a couple of months later and paid tribute to his predecessor both at his grave at Wawel Cathedral and the site of his martyrdom at Skałka Church. That visit was to change the history of Europe…