Churches & monasteries

Jasna Górka Sanctuary in Ślemień

Above the houses of Ślemień, on the wooded slopes of a hill with an optimistic name — Jasna Górka (Bright Little Mountain) — stands a church that pilgrims have visited for centuries. The sanctuary of Our Lady belongs to the parish of the Nativity of St John the Baptist in Ślemień and combines modest architecture with a history that features both a miraculous spring and an armed raid.

A miracle by the spring

The cult on the hill began, as tradition holds, with a highlander returning from a pilgrimage to Częstochowa in the mid-14th century. On a meadow called Kumorkowy Groń he dipped an image he had brought in a spring — and there Our Lady appeared. The news spread through the region, pilgrims arrived from distant places, and the water gained a reputation for miracles. In the 17th century a chapel was built.

The war of the parish priests and the return of the cult

The chapel's success displeased the parish priests of Rychwałd and Sucha: they armed themselves, raided the hill, filled in the spring and razed the chapel. The pilgrimages were forcibly redirected to the church in Rychwałd — and so it remained until the mid-19th century, when a resident of Ślemień, Józef Pochopień, funded a statue of Our Lady, still standing today, and a shrine.

The church of 1866 and its furnishing

The present church was built in 1866 through the efforts of Fr Antoni Antałkiewicz, who wished to mark the 900th anniversary of the Baptism of Poland. In the baroque altar with four columns, flanked by figures of St Casimir the Prince and St John of Kęty, hangs the image of Our Lady of Częstochowa — a 19th-century copy of the Jasna Góra icon painted on board by Błażej Luks, crowned in 2016 by Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz. The image is veiled by two sliding panels: one with St Anne, Joachim and Mary, the other with the Fatima apparition. Below the church there is a stone grotto in the shape of a tunnel with a figure of the Immaculate Conception and a spring regarded as miraculous.

In practice

The ascent of the hill is free; the walk from the centre of the village takes a quarter of an hour on foot. It is worth walking around the grotto with its spring and seeing the altar interior with the sliding panels used to veil the image on feasts.