Standing near the Basilica of St. John the Apostle is this two part memorial.
The left side, adorned with bronze reliefs and a crown of thorns, is the Golgotha of the East (Pomnik Golgota Wschodu), unveiled in 2003 by the local artist Wiesław Piechówka. It is dedicated to the victims of the Katyn massacre and those deported to the Soviet interior during the Second World War. Small stone plinths at its base act as silent anchors, each bearing the name of a site, namely Siberia, Katyń and Charków, where thousands of Polish officers and civilians met their end at the hands of the terror regime of the Soviet Union.
In 2015, the memorial was expanded to include a second granite wing on the right, dedicated to the Smolensk air disaster of 10 April 2010 which killed 96, including the country’s President. The design, by the same local artist, uses the negative space between the two halves to form a symbolic cross, visually linking the original 1940 tragedy with the crash of the presidential plane seventy years later.
It’s one of the cleverest put together monuments that I’ve seen, with no shortage of meanings that might not be evident at first glance.