Poland is a country that kept its faith when keeping it cost something. Through partition, occupation and forty years of Communist rule, the Church here was the place where a nation held itself together — and the shrine at the centre of that endurance is Jasna Góra, where the icon of the Black Madonna, scarred across the cheek, has been venerated as Queen of Poland since the seventeenth century.

Two of the modern Church's most influential figures came out of this landscape within a few miles of each other. Saint Faustina Kowalska received the revelations of Divine Mercy at Łagiewniki on the edge of Kraków, and the young priest who later canonised her, Karol Wojtyła, was born at Wadowice an hour to the south-west and served as archbishop from Wawel Hill. The Divine Mercy devotion that now circles the world was written down in a convent here, in a language almost nobody outside Poland read.

Forty miles west stands Oświęcim, where Saint Maximilian Kolbe gave his life for a stranger and where Edith Stein was killed. Across the border, Bohemia offers a different register: the Infant Jesus of Prague, a small wax statue in the Church of Our Lady Victorious that has drawn petitions for four centuries; the soaring Gothic of St Barbara's at Kutná Hora, built by the silver miners who prayed to her; and the ossuary at Sedlec, which is exactly what a medieval Christian meant by memento mori.