Świebodzin’s statue of Jesus: sacred space or tourist destination?

I have been visiting western Poland for the past quarter of a century and more, partly for personal reasons, partly to do research especially on politics and identity in what until WWII had been a German region. My base while there has been Świebodzin, a small town of about 21,000 people situated roughly in the centre of the province of Ziemia Lubuskie, approximately between Frankfurt an der Oder and Poznań. It has become known in the last few years for the gigantic statue of Jesus Christ it has acquired in the image of Christ the King. Acknowledging my ethnographic duty in relation to this extraordinary object, which suddenly appeared in what has become my second home town, I realized I had to delve more deeply into the background of its planning and construction, as well as add religion to my portfolio of research topics in this intensely Catholic area. My sense of duty in this respect has led to a number of articles from my pen, the fullest of which can be found at https://dspace.lu.lv/dspace/handle/7/48904. Given that tourist interest in the statue seems greater than religious activity at the site, it especially raises issues of what we mean by sacred spaces.

The statue was planned and erected between 2005 and 2010 and is bigger, it is claimed, than the much older and more famous statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is said to be 33 metres high, one metre for every year of Christ’s life, while the crown that surmounts it is supposedly three metres high, one metre for every year of Christ’s ministry. It is tempting to dismiss it, as many of the local population do, as the vanity project of a particular local priest who was also a builder, active in building and restoring churches in the area before the statue was even thought of. However, others in the town support his activities as having given the world a worthy monument to “Christ’s mercy” (a reference to the Second Encyclical of Pope John-Paul II).

The existence of giant statues of sacred figures, found throughout the Christian world, as well as in certain other religions, raises questions of what we mean by sacred spaces. Such spaces often seem ancillary to formal sites of worship and veneration, rather than being intrinsically sacred in themselves. Moreover, their interest to those who visit them is frequently touristic as much as religious, despite this generally being at variance with the motives of those responsible for bringing them into existence. This can certainly be argued to be the case for the Świebodzin statue.

The wider context of the statue’s creation is the continued strength of Catholicism in Poland and its connection with Polish national identity. Although statistics report declining church attendance in Poland, the country is still seen as an exception, even in Catholic Europe, for its high levels of attendance. Historically Poland is the major success story of the Counter-Reformation, where, in the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church managed to snuff out incipient Protestantism; it has been closely associated with Catholicism as a nation ever since.

In practice the statue is very largely a free tourist attraction, and most visitors appear to treat it as such. In the main they are Polish, though there are frequent German visitors, even whole bus loads. One local churchwoman remarked that the German visitors are mostly tourists, but that most of the pilgrims are Poles. However, pilgrims come from other countries too, including some from as far away as Mexico, many of them clearly genuine believers, as some of these Mexicans climbed up the hill to the statue on their knees. What most visitors do, though, is limit themselves to walking up the steps to the statue, strolling around its base taking in a pleasant but not particularly striking view of the surrounding area, taking photos or selfies, possibly using the toilets and examining the souvenir shop, and walking or driving away again – about all one can get out of a ten- or fifteen-minute visit, assuming one is not particularly interested in the religious messages, the angels, the fourteen stations of the cross, etc., or has a particular reason to offer prayers there.

The fact that the statue is not connected with any miracle, unlike other sites, may be one reason for its relatively low salience as a religious object. Admittedly, according to one story the late Sylwester Zawadzki, the builder-priest, claimed that Christ had appeared to him in a dream to ask him to build the statue, though the dream story may, in fact, have originated in a throw-away comment he made to a journalist on the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborca. In an alternative account, certain priests in the eastern town of Tarnów had the idea of erecting a statue there, but the bishop turned it down as too expensive and impractical; the idea coming to Zawadzki’s ears, he took it up for Świebodzin. There is little doubt that the statue was built on the cheap, with local contractors having their bills treated as “donations” when they presented them to Zawadzki, workers on a nearby motorway being induced to help out in exchange for wine and sausages, and prisoners on day release being encouraged to contribute too (one of them promptly absconded). Even more scandalous to many (and possibly illegal), in accordance with his wishes before his death in 2014, Zawadzki’s heart was buried in the base of the statue, where it now exists as a shrine in its own right. As Zawadzki himself supposedly said, his heart had been in the project metaphorically, therefore it should also be there physically.

Ultimately it might have been the attitude of the Catholic hierarchy that has prevented the statue from becoming a site of major religious importance like Częstochowa in central Poland. While the hierarchy did not oppose Zawadzki and eventually played a full part in the statue’s consecration, its support of it always seemed lukewarm at best. That might change now that Zawadzki has died (in 2014) and the Catholic Church has formally taken over the site. At present, though, not much seems to be planned beyond finishing the ancillary buildings. Meanwhile the statue itself had to be repaired when a large gash appeared in its base. Compared to its chief rival in Rio, this Jesus is clearly struggling to attract the same attention.

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In 2017 Dr Robert Parkin retired from a lectureship in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, where he is now an Emeritus Fellow. Originally interested in tribal populations in India and their systems of kinship and marriage for his doctorate, as well as having a sustained interest in kinship more generally ever since, his presence in Berlin in 1989 while its famous Wall was being breached and finally removed altogether made him realize the ethnographic potential of Eastern Europe, to which the Wall had hitherto acted as a barrier, though never an impenetrable one. He has also taken an interest in the French school of anthropology and its history, and in the emergence of regional identities in Europe in the context of European unification. In addition to Poland, he has done shorter periods of ethnographic fieldwork in India, the UK, Brussels and the Aosta valley (north-west Italy). https://www.isca.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-robert-parkin