Hill of the Blessed Bronisława

Bronisława (c. 1200-1259) was a Premonstratensian nun and mystic beatified by Pope Gregory XVI. She came from the noble Odrowąż family, from the town of Wielki Kamień in the Land of Opole. Her mother is believed to belong to the Gryfici clan, related to the founder of the monastery, Jaksa Gryfita. Having entered the convent in the district of Zwierzyniec, she devoted all her life to it. During the first Tartar (Mongol) raid in 1241, Bronisława miraculously saved her life, hiding away together with the other nuns in the nearby forests. Blessed Bronisława has been venerated since the 14th century. Her cult is connected to the Sikornik Knoll, known also as the Hill of Blessed Bronisława, as the tradition believes that she settled and died there. The people of Kraków believed her to be their advocate during natural disasters and outbreaks of pandemics, and her relics are kept in that Premonstratensian Church. On the 500th anniversary of her death, a chapel was built on the crown of the hill where her hermitage is rumoured to have been in 1854. It was soon destroyed by the Austrians, who fortified the Kościuszko Mound and it was replaced by a chapel designed by Feliks Księżarski in 1856-1861, a textbook example of the picturesque, romanticist neo-Gothic that is preserved to this day.

Walking towards the mound and the chapel, along aleja Waszyngtona, turn your attention to the picturesque little bridge over a former military tract. It was one of the first two-level crossings in and around Kraków (1855). The little bridge owes its “devilish” fame (and name) to the legends about the fiend that lurks around it on some nights.