In the aftermath of the First World War, partitioned Poland regained its independence. As the young nation attempted to delineate its new borders and defend them from threatening Others, in particular the atheist Soviet Russia, the symbol of the cross came to denote an ethno-nationalist vision of the country’s future. Focusing on three highly controversial monumental crosses erected in the contested Polish–Lithuanian/Belarusian/Ukrainian borderlands, I show how Catholic symbols in the service of the emerging nation-state helped to legitimate Poland’s claim to the multi-ethnic territories of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania and communicated military dominance and moral supremacy over Lithuanians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Jews, who had come to be symbolically excluded from the national fold.

The rise of right-wing populism, which followed the 2010 Smolensk catastrophe and laid the groundwork for the country’s recent shift towards illiberal democracy, coincided with a surge in the use of religious imagery. Catholic symbols thus came to dominate mainstream expressions of national pride and belonging. The conflict around the so-called “Smolensk cross” planted in front of the Presidential Palace in Warsaw and for six months fiercely defended by a group of the late President Kaczyński’s supporters provides an entry point to investigate the populist instrumentalization of Catholic symbols. The Smolensk cross defenders, protesting against the new, democratically elected, liberal president, Bronisław Komorowski, harnessed the symbol to frame an essentially partisan conflict in terms of a Manichean fight between good and evil. At the same time, pro-secularists, who opposed the presence of the cross at the seat of the country’s executive power, subversively hijacked the symbol to unsettle and provoke, enabling a carnivalesque “rite of reversal.”

In the early socialist period, a spectacular and uniquely Polish form of protest was born – the “defence of the cross.” At this time, as a secularization program known as “decrucification” was causing tensions between the socialist authorities and the Catholic Church, mass outdoor religious events emerged as a platform to voice protest against Communist rule. The most iconic and violent demonstration of this kind was a “defence of the cross,” which took place in the model socialist metropolis of Nowa Huta in 1960 and transformed into bloody street riots against the Communist authorities. The story of how the “defence of the cross” established itself as a popular form of anti-systemic protest in Poland also provides a window onto how women in particular devised creative modes of nonconformist behavior in the gray zone between religiosity and rebellion.

In the transformative decade marked by the rise of Solidarity (1980–1989), the cross came to serve as a source of metaphysical legitimation for the growing opposition movement. Used to imply the “sacred” nature of anti-Communist mobilization, the symbol of the cross became not only a default signal of anti-Communist politics, but also an extremely popular motif that came to dominate both Solidarity’s visual culture and Poland’s memorial landscape. Solidarity used the symbol to mark spaces of anti-Communist dissent, mourn workers killed in standoffs with the police, and foster a rift in the popular mind between “the nation” and the Communist rulers, portrayed as “anti-nation.” Three case studies illuminate how the symbol was instrumental in both solidifying and challenging this boundary. Communist attempts to hijack celebrations held at the foot of the Poznań Crosses in commemoration of the workers’ rebellion of 1956, Solidarity’s campaign to rebrand May Day using Catholic symbols, and the project to display the symbol of the cross during the fortieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising throw into relief the contradictory nature of the symbol in the late socialist period

The different deployments of the cross in Polish history suggest one commonality. Political actors reach for the cross when they demand radical change or need to legitimize a new political project. Whereas in the 1860s the cross was used to mobilize the general public for the idea of freeing the serfs and incorporating the peasants into the national collective, after Poland regained its independence in 1918, it wasemployed to legitimize the new and volatile state border, which ran through a contested multi-ethnic territory. Whereas in early socialist Poland the cross served to rally anti-Communist dissent, during the Solidarity decade it became a unifying symbol of a politically eclectic social movement and a synecdoche for its various demands to reform the system. Finally, whereas after 1989 the cross was employed to solidify the new post-transformation political order, in 2010 it was used to mobilize populist voters as a symbol of “the real Poles” pitched against “the elites.” In each of these political articulations, the symbol of the cross embodied novel, rebellious, and revolutionary ideas, rather than the desire to conserve the old order and defend the status quo.

Set against the background of the last, and the most tragic, nineteenth-century Polish insurrection and the patriotic fever that accompanied it, the story of how the cross became a political symbol in Poland opens with the figure of the Jewish defender of the cross, Michał Landy, shot dead while carrying a crucifix during an anti-tsarist demonstration in 1861. After Landy’s death, the cross was first used to voice protest, mobilize action, and convey a strictly political vision – in this case, that of an interethnic alliance of the East-Central European nations subjugated by the tsarist regime rising in a joint struggle for freedom, equality, and emancipation.

In the immediate post-1989 period, the symbol of the cross remained a focal point both for the power-holding conservatives and for the anticlerical post-Communists and continued to define new frontlines of conflict. After the fall of Communism, as the Catholic Church in Poland regained its hegemonic position, the cross became a visual marker of the new political order and a metonymy for the legislative changes that sanctioned the Christian worldview in Polish public life. Examining the contexts in which the symbol intersected with politics, including the abortion debate, the anti-pornography campaign, and Poland’s lustration process, I argue that, during the ideological shift that deeply transformed the country, the cross came to function as a shibboleth for the national community, which now coalesced around a new set of values and rituals, and designated new Others. While the figure of the Communist continued to haunt the cultural mainstream and inspire bizarre purification rituals such as the public crucifixion of a regime journalist, Roman Samsel, in 1990, the symbol of the cross was also subverted to mock the Catholic Church and the political elites in satire.

The Introduction reconstructs the historical trajectory of the symbol of the cross, looking at its different political employments across the world and throughout different epochs. It also discusses the Turnerian cycle of “structure” and “antistructure” and its relevance for understanding how religious symbols work to bolster national discourses and become powerful tools to mobilize political action.