Pauline Church of the Holy Spirit and Paul The Hermit

The Church of the Holy Spirit on ulica Dluga sits on the edge of Warsaw's Old Town and has belonged to the Pauline order since 1707. It was built between 1707 and 1717 to designs by Jozef Piola and Karol Bay as a Baroque single-nave church, after a Gothic predecessor was destroyed in the Swedish Deluge. The annual pilgrimage to Jasna Gora in Czestochowa traditionally starts here - today one of the largest Marian pilgrimages in Europe, in some years drawing more than 200,000 walkers over 250 kilometres to the Black Madonna. In the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 the church burned out, and it was rebuilt after the war. It is still the starting point for the August pilgrimage, and the rest of the year a quiet Pauline parish church on a busy street.