Presidential Palace cross
memorial in Warsaw, Poland
The Presidential Palace cross (also known as the Smolensk Cross, Polish: krzyż smoleński) is a wooden cross which was erected as a memorial to the 96 casualties of the 2010 Polish Air Force Tu-154 crash. It was first moved to a chapel in the Presidential Palace on 16 September 2010 and, on 10 November 2010, was again moved, this time to St. Anne's Church, Warsaw, where it currently resides. The cross was controversial, provoking debate in Polish society and media about the issues of separation of church and state, politics, religion and patriotism.
History
The cross was erected spontaneously by a group of Polish Scouts on 15 April 2010, five days after the plane accident. Among those killed in the crash was Polish President Lech Kaczyński of the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party. Soon after the presidential election, in July 2010, the new Polish president, Bronisław Komorowski, from the more centrist Civic Platform (PO) party, requested that the cross be moved to nearby St. Anne's Church. The move was supported by the Scouts who erected the cross in the first place and the archbishop of Warsaw, but criticized by certain groups, as the issue gained notoriety in the Polish media.
The cross was to be moved on 3 August but this caused increasingly vocal protests from the PiS supporters, known as the "defenders of the cross" (pol.
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This entry incorporates text from “Presidential Palace cross” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.