ABSTRACT
Introduction In this chapter, I will discuss the relationship between the urban space of Kraków, located in southern Poland, and the development in that city of the religious cult of the late Pope John Paul II, a canonized saint of the Catholic Church since April 27, 2014.EventhoughKarolWojtyławasborninthesmalltownofWadowiceand movedtoKrakówonlyin1938,attheageof18,inPolandtodayKrakówiswidely known as “the Pope’s City.” My special focus will be on how this city is lived as a space related to John Paul II, and how it reveals the various identities of people who use and create this urban space. Acknowledging that “city folk do not live in their environments; they live through them” (Orsi 1999: 44) and that the religiously and spirituallyimportantplacesmightbe“usedasmarkersofidentity”(EadeandKatić 2014: 8), I propose to enumerate three discourses related to John Paul II, which are framed within the cityscape of Kraków. Provisionally, I distinguish these discourses as “national,” “local” and “global”; in the subsequent parts of this chapter, I will discuss them in detail. Such discourses might be treated as parts of the “urban imaginary” and the local “urban mindscape,” understood as a “mental construct of thecity”anda“structureof thinkingaboutacity” (Bianchini2006:13-16). Religion and the Pope are included in Kraków’s (sub)urban imaginary. Popular discourses about the Pope are framed within the cityscape, while simultaneously formingandinfluencinghowthecityislivedbypeople,constitutingnewformsof devotionalization and spiritualization.
