Kule Cemetery in Częstochowa

Kule Cemetery lies on a small hill north of the centre of Częstochowa, on Cmentarna Street. It is an active Roman Catholic necropolis founded in 1882, entered in the heritage register. There are about a thousand gravestones from before 1939 here, including about a hundred from the end of the 19th century.

History of the necropolis

The cemetery was founded after the transfer of the former cemetery from the area of Fabryczna (today Mielczarskiego) and Ogrodowa streets, and the first burials took place two years later. Since 2019 it has been managed directly by the curia of the Archdiocese of Częstochowa; earlier it was looked after by the parish of St Sigismund.

Layout and buildings

In the middle of the cemetery stands the Neo-Gothic Church of the Resurrection of the Lord in the Mystery of Emmaus, built in 1898 as a cemetery chapel and rebuilt in the 1960s. Auxiliary bishops of the archdiocese rest in its crypt. Among the historic graves the family tomb chapels of the Kuczyński, Szaniawski and Nowiński families stand out. In the south-eastern part there is an Orthodox plot, to which graves from liquidated Orthodox cemeteries were moved in the interwar period. Next to it is a plot of Red Army soldiers with a monument.

War graves and commemorations

The cemetery holds the graves of soldiers from September 1939, of victims of the occupier's terror, including a collective grave of people shot at Apolonka near Janów in 1940, as well as the graves of soldiers of the First World War and the Polish-Soviet War and of veterans of the January Uprising. A Katyn monument and a symbolic grave of the victims of Katyn, Kharkiv and Mednoye stand here. People known in the city also rest here, among them the industrialist Julian Fuchs, Mieczysław Bolesław Hoffman, creator of the Hoffman Gardens, and the singer Janusz Gniatkowski.

Nearby

Historically linked to the cemetery is St Sigismund's Church in Częstochowa, whose parish ran it for a long time. It is about three kilometres from here to Jasna Góra.

Practical information

• Address: ul. Cmentarna 47, Częstochowa.
• The cemetery is active, so keep quiet and show respect to people visiting the graves of their loved ones.
• Information about guided visits is worth checking with the archdiocesan curia or the city museum.