Kościół pw. Najświętszego Serca Pana Jezusa, Kraków

The Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is a convent church of the Sisters of Charity, folded into its monastery buildings so completely that it is almost hidden from Warszawska Street. This protected historic building stands on Kleparz, in Kraków’s Old Town district. It was built between eighteen sixty-nine and eighteen seventy-one, replacing the Church of Saints Simon and Jude, which was demolished in eighteen seventy-one.

The monastery complex keeps the church from presenting a grand street façade. Filip Pokutyński designed it in Neo-Romanesque style, a nineteenth-century return to the solid, round-arched language of Romanesque medieval churches. Beyond this discreet exterior is a single-nave church: one main interior space, crossed by a transept, with a small sanctuary ending in a semicircular apse.

The building also holds a quieter memorial below ground. In its crypt lies Bishop Ludwik Łętowski, the founder who made the monastery possible. So this concealed church preserves not only nineteenth-century architecture, but also the burial place of the man behind the community here.