Kościół pw. Świętego Kazimierza Królewicza, Kraków

The Church of St Casimir the Prince is a Baroque Franciscan Observants church and monastery on Reformacka Street in Kraków’s Old Town. Rebuilt after the earlier friars’ church burned, it was consecrated in 1672. Its façade reliefs, St Casimir painting, historic death bell, and burial crypts reveal the community’s long history.

This is the Church of St Casimir the Prince, the Franciscan Observants’ convent church and monastery on Reformacka Street. Its Baroque character means it belongs to the dramatic, richly decorative style that swept Europe after the Renaissance. On the façade’s gable, notice the shallow arched recesses containing reliefs of St Casimir, St Anthony, and St Peter of Alcantara.

The friars’ first Kraków church was finished in 1640, but it burned during the Swedish Deluge. They moved here in 1658, after Kraków’s castellan Stanisław Warszycki gave them a small manor. Bishop Mikołaj Oborski blessed the foundation stone of the present church in 1666, and consecrated the completed building six years later.

Inside, the main altar carries a crucifix, following the Observants’ rule. At the first side altar on the left is an image of the church’s patron, St Casimir, painted between 1660 and 1670 and attributed to the Gdańsk artist Daniel Schultz. The building also holds an unusually intimate reminder of monastic life and death.

Beneath the church are crypts where about a thousand people, friars and laypeople alike, were buried from 1672 onward. On the monastery wall, the small bell beneath its wooden canopy was founded in 1750 and once sounded when someone close to the community was dying.