Benedictine Abbey in Tyniec

This guide to the Benedictine Abbey in Tyniec, near Kraków, opens on July 30, 1939, as eleven Belgian monks climb the cliff above the Vistula to move into a monastery that had stood empty and roofless for over a century. It traces the abbey's earlier destructions: Tatar riders plundering the hill in 1260, Swedish troops burning it in the 1650s, and its founding around 1044, when a Polish prince sent Benedictine monks here to help hold a fractured kingdom together. Stand on the terrace and look down at the river those monks would have seen on their first day.