Antoni Jackowski

Geography as a field of research in Kraków first developed in the middle of the 19th century. The Faculty of Tourism at Jagiellonian University was the first to create a large program in pilgrimage research between 1936 and 1939.
The politics of the next five decades hampered the development of the program, with full-time studies beginning in the 1980s. The geography of religion program focused on research on the global nature of pilgrimages. Key research interests included historical and spatial issues and their effect on infrastructural, social, and economic changes at centers of religious worship as well as in surrounding regions and countries.

Jasna Gora in the first days of September 1939.Facts and legends

The article discusses the issue of the so-called ‘Jasna Gora lie’, which appeared on 2 September 1939 in the Polish and world media. The initiators of this undertaking were well aware of the importance of Jasna Góra and the miraculous image of Our Lady of Czestochowa in Poland, as well as of the role it played in the process of cementing national consciousness. The relayed message conveyed false information that the Germans had demolished the sanctuary and profaned the miraculous icon. News quickly leaked out to the international public opinion. The news from Czestochowa was featured in French, Belgian, Swedish, Italian and American newspapers on the front pages. The Germans reacted very quickly to the outbreak of world outrage. This matter was personally supervised by Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda of the Third Reich. As a matter of urgency, on 4 September he sent to Czestochowa the famous American journalist Ludwig ‘Louis’ Paul Lochner, who was to testify that the monastery of Jasna Gora was undamaged and that the miraculous icon was still available to the faithful. At the same time, Goebbels’ propaganda showed the Germans as a noble and civilized nation that took holy places under their special care. Most historians believe that the provocation was prepared by the Germans themselves. The author of the article proposes a hypothesis that the Polish authorities could have been behind the Częstochowa rumor. Perhaps the tragic news from Częstochowa was supposed to raise the morale of the society, especially Polish soldiers. In the early days of the war there was yet another, half-legendary event. It was related to the attempt to destroy the monastery and the city by the German air force. For this purpose, three squadrons of combat aircraft took off on 1 September from the Pawelwitz Airport (today’s Pawlowice, part of Wroclaw), heading for Częstochowa. None of them ever reached the target. From the beginning of the war, there was a related social message about the ‘miraculous defence of Czestochowa’.

The presented events caused the fact that in the early days of World War II Jasna Gora was at the centre of interest of almost the whole world. Afterwards, the Germans were very careful to retain the image of the monastery as a normally functioning sanctuary. It was mainly owing to this incident that Jasna Góra managed to go through the period of
occupation with relatively little losses.