Saints Peter and Paul’s Church, Kraków, Lesser Poland, Poland, Europe

The Church of Saints Peter and Paul in the Old Town district of Kraków, Poland is a Roman Catholic, Polish Baroque church located at ul. Grodzka 54 street. It was built between 1597-1619 by Giovanni Maria Bernardoni who perfected the original design of Józef Britius. It is the biggest of the historic Churches of Kraków in terms of seating capacity. Since 1842 it serves the Catholic All Saints parish. The facade of Saints Peter and Paul Basilica was constructed with dolomite. It resembles that of the Church of Santa Susanna in Rome by Carlo Maderno, but also, it contains similarities with the facade of the main Jesuit church of Il Gesù. In its niches are statues of Jesuit saints: Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, Aloysius Gonzaga, and Stanisław Kostka made by Dawid Heel. Above the main portal, there's the emblem of the order of Jesuits with saints Sigismund of Burgundy and Ladislaus I of Hungary. The very top of the facade is adorned with the coat of arms of the Vasa dynasty since king Sigismund III Vasa was the founder of the church. The church interior has a broad, single-nave with two aisles consisting of chapels, as well as the transept with a dome at the intersection, and a short rectangular chancel around the altar, with semicircular apse covered with a hemispherical vault. In front of the Church-grounds there are several plinths with raised sculptures of apostles designed by Kacper Bażanka. They were made with Pińczów limestone, and completed in 1722 by Dawid Heel. Today, in place of the original 18th century statues, which were very much damaged by acid rain, there are contemporary copies made of the same material by Kazimierz Jęczmyk. Every Thursday inside the Church, demonstrations are held of the longest Foucault pendulum in Poland (46,5 m), suspended for the popular display of the Earth's rotation. Named after the French physicist Léon Foucault, the experimental apparatus consists of a tall pendulum free to swing in any vertical plane. The actual path of the swing appears to rotate; while in fact the plane is fixed in space, but the Earth rotates under the pendulum once a sidereal day. It is a simple and easy-to-see proof of the Earth's movement. The pendulum weights 25 kg and is fitted with the red laser marking a clock face at the floor. It takes about an hour to notice a significant difference in its path, and the explanation is provided in Polish. The history of the pendulum at the Church is several decades long. For the first time, it was hung in 1949 on the initiative of professors Kordylewski and Horbacki. It was put on display again in 1991 on the anniversary of the arrival of Mikołaj Kopernik in the city. However, the renovations two years later required that the pendulum be taken down. In 2000, said Dr Henryk Brancewicz, astronomer at the Jagiellonian University, a local daredevil clambered from the outside and again hung the string in the telescope of the dome.