St Mary’s Basilica

Apparently, a church becomes a Basilica when it has been blessed by the Pope…every day is a school day. Pope John Paul II was Polish and he blessed St Mary’s. His image was up in a few places in Krakow as he visited there. He also went to Auschwitz and he donated a huge candle that is in one of the rooms we visited yesterday.

Sue and I had a few hours before our flight home so we had a mooch around the shops and churches around the Old Town. I said I wanted to go in the Basilica so we did. We had been a few churches and they are absolutely beautiful, but St Mary’s was on another level. There are two towers and they are different heights, built by two brothers. One killed the other then felt so guilty he killed himself by jumping off the top of his tower. There is another story about the towers also…when the Mongols invaded a trumpeter was playing to warn against attack, he was ten seconds into playing when the story goes, a Mongolian archer let loose an arrow and it hit the trumpeter in the neck and killed him, hence the music was cut short abruptly. So…now a trumpeter plays ten seconds every hour on the hour and stops abruptly too.

We had cake and a drink and enjoyed the sunshine. It was 23° and glorious (it wasn’t nice to come back to ten degrees cooler).

I really enjoyed Krakow, it is a beautiful town and so clean. It has been a great few days….fun, interesting, sombre…with lots of laughs, good food and drinks and interesting history.