Basilica of the Holy Cross

Long before the present church, a roadside chapel dedicated to the Holy Cross stood on this site. The name is connected with the cross of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ; the church still remains an active Catholic church, and it received the honorary status of minor basilica only in this century. In the second pillar of the left nave, a marble plaque can be seen with Gospel words about treasure and the heart.

Behind the marble plaque in the second pillar of the left nave, the heart of Frédéric Chopin is walled up. His body lies in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery. The composer himself ordered that his remains be divided between the two cities.

Chopin left Warsaw in November eighteen thirty, intending to continue his musical career abroad. Soon an uprising against the Russian Empire began; it was then suppressed, and he never returned home. In Paris, Chopin earned his living mainly by giving private piano lessons. He rarely performed for large audiences, and a long illness gradually sapped the strength he needed for both concerts and teaching.

In the autumn of eighteen forty-nine, the dying thirty-nine-year-old composer asked for his body to be opened: he feared being buried alive. His heart was to be taken to Warsaw. Ludwika Jędrzejewiczowa, Chopin’s elder sister, who had cared for him in his final months, undertook to carry out the request.

After her brother’s death, Ludwika placed the heart in alcohol, in a sealed crystal vessel set inside a wooden box. She had to cross the border of the Russian Empire with a human organ. A popular legend claims that she hid the vessel beneath her dress, but historians have found no confirmation of this. What is reliably known is the main thing: at the beginning of eighteen fifty, Ludwika brought the heart to Warsaw.

At first, the box was kept in her home on Podwale Street; it was then moved to the catacombs of the Basilica of the Holy Cross. The choice was explained by the address: this was the parish of the Chopin family, standing beside the composer’s last Warsaw apartment. For nearly three decades, the heart remained below, without its present memorial.

Chopin’s younger sister, Izabella Barcińska, pressed for her brother to receive a dignified and public burial. She gave money for the epitaph, and the Warsaw Music Society held a benefit concert to raise the remaining sum. In eighteen eighty, the box was brought up from the catacombs and walled into the pillar. The plaque was inscribed with Gospel words: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Ludwika did not live to see that day; thanks to Izabella, her commission became a visible part of the church.

The Holy Cross in the name is the cross of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. A roadside chapel dedicated to it stood here as early as fifteen ten. The present building remains an active Catholic church, and Pope John Paul II conferred on it the honorary title of minor basilica in two thousand two.

In two thousand fourteen, specialists removed the box from the pillar and examined the vessel without opening it. The heart had been preserved; the lid was additionally sealed with beeswax and returned to its former place. Behind the marble plaque still stand wooden boxes nested one inside another, and inside them is the crystal vessel that Ludwika brought from Paris.