Holy Cross Basilica in Warsaw: Chopin’s Heart and What to See

Standing on the Royal Route at Krakowskie Przedmieście 3, the Basilica of the Holy Cross (Bazylika Świętego Krzyża) is one of the churches most tied to Poland’s national memory - above all as the resting place of Fryderyk Chopin’s heart.

Chopin’s heart

Chopin died in Paris in 1849 and his body lies at Père Lachaise, but his last wish, as tradition records it, was that his heart return home. In 1850 his sister Ludwika Jędrzejowiczowa smuggled the heart, sealed in a glass jar inside an oak box, across the border into Poland. It was placed in the church where the young Fryderyk had played the organ. The present monument by Leandro Marconi was unveiled in 1880 in the second pillar of the left nave, bearing the words of St Matthew: For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. When the church was destroyed during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the relic was secured and taken to Milanówek; it returned on 17 October 1945, the 96th anniversary of the composer’s death. Every anniversary, Mozart’s Requiem - the same music played at his Paris funeral - sounds in the basilica.

Reymont’s heart and the national pantheon

The same pillar holds the heart of Władysław Stanisław Reymont, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Peasants, who died in Warsaw on 5 December 1925. His heart, kept in a silver urn, was immured on 5 December 1929 with permission from Pope Pius XI; his body lies in the Avenue of the Meritorious at Powązki Cemetery. The grey granite plaque by Zygmunt Otto reads simply that here lies the heart of Władysław Reymont.

John Paul II and Primate Wyszyński

The left nave also holds the Chapel of St John Paul II, consecrated on 18 May 2014 and recalling his 13 June 1987 meeting with Polish artists in this church. It was John Paul II who raised the church to the rank of minor basilica on 21 January 2002. A white-marble monument to Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, the Primate of the Millennium, carries quotations including his 1954 declaration that he loved his homeland more than his own heart and a fragment of his Holy Cross sermons of 13 January 1978.

The historic organ

The choir holds a 58-voice 19th-century organ, restored in 2009-2010. The young Chopin played an earlier instrument here, and Stanisław Moniuszko, father of Polish national opera, lived in the parish.