Patron of Wroclaw, or who is the man with Oder in his name?
Czeslaw Odrowąż has an unusual name and an unusual life story, connected, of course, with Wroclaw and the Oder River, although he didn’t appear in Wroclaw until he was well into his forties.
It all happened some 800 years ago.
In 1241, the city was approached by hostile Mongols, so the citizens of Wroclaw became hysterical. That’s when Czeslaw Odrowąż, the prior of a Dominican monastery, let the citizens into Ostrów Tumski (then still an island). Before fleeing the city, the Breslau citizens set fire to their houses and bridges, leaving nothing to loot. They took everything they could with them. The Mongols passed through empty streets, and failed to capture Ostrów Tumski. They left after a few days with a flourish and went near Legnica.
However, legend has it that the prayers of Prior Czesław Odrowąż during this siege summoned fiery bullets over Wrocław, and it was these that scared off the invaders. Even medieval chronicles contain such records. Some 700 years later, in 1963, Pope Paul VI declared him the patron saint of the city of Wroclaw. It went quickly.
T. Muszyński: Błogosławiony Czesław Odrowąż (1665)
There is also a story according to which Czeslaw Odrowąż resurrected a child drowned in the Oder River (supposedly after a week of death!).
He was also said to have miraculously crossed the Oder when he could not find a carrier to take him to the other side of the river. He simply threw his coat on the river waters and made his way across to the other side.
In the second half of the 17th century, King John III Sobieski’s son, Jakub Sobieski, settled in Olawa, located near Wroclaw. In 1713, Prince James and his two younger brothers, Constantine and Alexander, decided to carry out the beatification of this venerated man in Wroclaw in Rome. They succeeded… Prior Czeslaw Odrowąż became Blessed Czeslaw.
reconstruction of Blessed Czeslaw’s face
In 2006, anthropologists from the University of Wroclaw, led by Prof. Tadeusz Krupinski, undertook to reconstruct the face of Blessed Czeslaw, the Patron Saint of Wroclaw, which was possible thanks to the perfectly preserved skull stored in a Relic that had not been opened since 1715.
So the skull was scanned using a CT scanner, a copy was made, and then the muscles and other soft tissues were modeled. Based on anthropological features, it was determined that Czeslaw Odrowąż was a blue-eyed blond man with a light complexion and died at the age of about 55 to 65.
The reconstructed head of the blessed Dominican can be seen in the sacristy of St. Adalbert’s Church (Dominican Square).
Mail page StatekWroclaw.pl
