Exploring Urban Religion in Poland: The Urban Religion Archive and the Religion Urbanity Mapping Project
Natalia Zawiejska (PI, Religion Urbanity Mapping Project), Jagiellonian University, Kraków
We started the Religion Urbanity Mapping (RUM) project[1] in 2021 with a dual focus. First, to rethink the concept of urban religion; and second, to apply this reframed concept in exploring the relatedness of religion and urbanity in the post-socialist CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) context. To date, the latter focus has been overlooked by urban studies and in the study of religion.
The team proceeded with experimental research that brought together religious studies, anthropology, urban sociology, urban studies and digital humanities. Our research was conducted in three cities: Kraków, Lublin and Gdańsk, representing their three regions in Poland. Their idiosyncrasies are traceable to the late eighteenth century and annexation of Polish territory by the neighboring imperial powers, into three partitions. Poland, due to this enforced partitioning, was erased from the European map until 1918. Kraków was annexed by the Habsburg monarchy (Austria), Lublin was absorbed into the Russian Empire and Gdańsk was in the orbit of Prussian influence.
These regional divisions are still present in sociopolitical geography. Even given those differences, the socialist era following the Second World War, formally lasting until 1989, was a significant modernization project that unified most Polish cities. This assumption was our starting point. Consequently, we looked at the cities we chose as our data source, not with a comparison principle but to gather data which allows common logics of urban religion to be distinguished, despite local differences. The gathered data constitute the Urban Religion Archive (URA). Far from being a simple repository, the URA is a cognitive and heuristic tool, which we employed in theorizing urban religion and its particular logic in Poland.
The URA comprises data collected through 15 month of research and consists of over 22,000 records which we call religious icons, exemplifying urban religion. Iconic religion (Knott et al. 2016) was the starting point in defining what kind of data were collected. During the research we gathered religious icons located in what we term the Street: the urban public space, approachable and available to the urban public, thus a common urban place. Markets, streets, paths, urban meadows, non-places but also hybrid spaces – with their blurred, unobvious lines between public and private – from Roman Catholic churches opened during the day for the urban public to images on walls within private apartments yet visible from street level, crosses on shop and post-office walls, audible prayers and chants arising from informal gatherings which were invisible from street level. Focus on urban public space assumes interrelatedness of different urban publics and it assumes urban public space being a common urban imaginary horizon.
Each icon in the URA is a point or line, with the latter considering the case of mobility: a pilgrimage or tram trajectory, a protest march. Lines, however, also represent icons that may be perceived as a line: for example, stations of the way of the cross distributed across public space, St James trail signs. This leads to other important consideration on data gathering, on its fluidity, context relatedness, mistakes and incompleteness, pointing to situation dependency and cognition capacities. Crucial in these regards was the figure of the data collector, who we termed the detector. Our team of nine detectors, with three researchers working in each city, were initially tuned to recognize religious icons in urban spaces through weekly seminars and with meetings to consider the team project. We assumed that the detectors are common Street users but also that they share the same culture and similar local social imaginary, with most of them born and brought up in Poland. However, detectors were also schooled through team discussions, team arguments in our exchanges about particular detections and in consultations with informants to recognize icons that were outside detectors’ cultural competences. Varying individual features of detectors – character, perception patterns, cognition capacities – we assumed to represented the average Street user’s experience.
Detectors were asked to gather all possible religious icons in their respective cities for consideration, by following three protocols. We divided the researched cities into sectors and mapped them systematically, street by street, from their paths to their parks and markets, within the cities’ administrative borders. In some cases, we also included airports (in Kraków and Lublin), which are formally outside the city limits, as well as trajectories of some activities that crossed and recrossed city limits, as was the case of Extreme Way of the Cross event in Kraków. We also took every opportunity to act as Street users and detect religious icons during daily activities dwelling in that city, whether on the way to school or work, the shop or cinema, or during leisure walks. Finally, on a weekly basis we screened available media information, searching for event announcements, and then documented events we recognized as religious icons or those with religious affordance.
As Volkhard Krech has shown, religious icons are dependent on context and on interpreter (Krech 2016), and we put ourselves in the role of interpreters who may consider particular signs as iconic. At the same time, misrecognitions, mistakes and missed recognitions occurred, as is the case for average city dwellers. The latter instances of oversight are also environment dependent: ivy leaves that blanket crosses in the summer have fallen in winter; stained-glass images over doorways are visible at night though during the day they may be easily missed; for those walking on one side of a street, icons set high over somebody’s head are not visible. Means of transport matter, too. We mostly used walking as our method but to reach distant quarters we also moved by bikes and buses and cars.
We resolved to document religious icons that some city users may not interpret as such, including some signs, inscriptions and gestures that are unobvious; concurrently, we are convinced that some of these same icons we missed or did not recognize at all. Most important, as Krech underlines the fluidity of the semiosis process, a given sign may exist at different interpretative levels of meaning (Krech 2016). Our resulting URA contains a vast collection of religious icons that may be differently marked with religion for different people when connected with ascriptions of differing social functions, from tourism to work, protest, health, education and business.
In the URA, one can locate an empty meadow, a torn-off sticker on a drainpipe, a blot on a wall, a tramcar, as well as a New Pagan summer-solstice ritual, a Corpus Christi procession and preaching on a main street. Each of these detections was first situated on the map, and then evaluated during the weekly meeting of our team. Icons were documented visually, some with additional video and audio files. They are now named, with contextualizing descriptions that follow, which should be treated as the invitation for further reflection and investigation. Finally, the icons were categorized.
This categorization of the collected religious icons now allows the URA to be browsed through. Given icons are assigned varied categories: religious affiliation, type of materiality (Body, Building/Place/Space, Object/Image, Name, Inscription, Religious activity/Practice/Event, Shrine/Small architecture, Temple/Place of worship), type of observances (when relevant), organization and structure (Institutional, Lived, NGO/ASSOC/Enterprise, Not applicable), Political/Worldview (Left-wing, National, State/Local administration, Other/Not applicable), Economy (Entertainment, Religious branding, Tourism, Not applicable, Non-specific/Other), Art (Contemporary, Popular, Traditional, Creative, Not applicable), Temporal (Cyclical, Ephemeral/Temporal/One-time, Permanent), Sphere (Private, Public, Semi-public), Visibility (No, Unclear, Yes), Character (Activism/Mission, Charity, Cloth, Commemoration, Ecology, Education, Healing, Inactive, John Paul II, Medical, Multicultural, Not applicable, Protest, Spiritual, Xenophobic/Racist/Anti-Semitic, Virgin Mary, Work). Through these and other categorizations and through a textual database, it is possible to browse each of the three cities, sorting the icons in various groups, orders and patterns. These manipulations allow icons to be aggregated in groups that divert from established categories, such as a particular religion or group, and hierarchies – in the URA, each religious icon is represented by its single point or line, whether it is a Roman Catholic church building or a single poster, protest gathering, sticker or public rosary. This allows how religion is enacted in the city to be explored, along with how it becomes an urban infrastructure, beyond hotspots and institutionalized authority.
Figure 1. URA lines filtering through the text database (Zawiejska et al. 2025).
Figure 2. URA points filtering through categorizations (Zawiejska et al. 2025).
Figure 3. Celtic cross on a right-wing nationalist sticker [A new day rises over Poland!]. URA categorization: Religion – Various; Materiality – Object/Image/Picture; Character – Xenophobic/Racist/Anti-Semitic; Art – Creative, Temporal – Ephemeral/Temporal/One-time (RUM Project, Zawiejska et al. 2025).
From a bird’s-eye perspective, the URA shows saturation, distribution and relatedness of religious icons in the context of urban form. Through aggregating procedures – for example, when one chooses to sort an icon according to the ‘Protest’ or ‘Work’ character or ‘State/Local administration’ feature – its attachment to a particular religious tradition recedes in interest and what remains are patterns in which particular religious icons interlink and relate with each other and with the city. This reveals how they emerge as infrastructures mediating social lives. These patterns we call logics. Thus urban religion, in our understanding, is less a particular religion or religious group operating and located in the city, yet it needs to be seen as part of the city’s intrinsic logic.
As has been suggested by Steven Lanz (Lanz 2018), this is an approach to urban religion as religion of the city, which we take further following Helmut Berking and Martina Löw (Berking and Löw 2008) by asserting urban religion as at once one urban logic and a part of those logics. Urban religion, comprising numerous, interrelated religious icons, can be operationalized as a religious field constituted through relations, configurations of power and hierarchies between various religious icons, while merged in the same urban context and managed by the same intrinsic city logics. Each religious icon and their aggregates, while assembling materialities, spaces, affects, ideologies and transregional flows, are rooted in shared urban patterns. These patterns emerge as both sensorial and semiotic. Therefore urban religion also has to be understood as an urban imaginary, emerging from enactment and embodiment of urbanity. Urban religion, as an urban logic, when foregrounded as a principal analytical lens, offers fresh insight into and a new narrative about the city, its transregional connectivity and sociopolitical change. Consequently, we argue, urban religion reveals socio-religious logics that continue to be overshadowed by dominant discourses and hegemonic practices. In Poland, for example, the latter practices include cases which narrate religion in terms of multiculturality, or which claim domestic urban space as secular, or pronounce the overrepresentation of Islam or include Judaism as part of contemporary socio-religious diversity.
Figure 4. ‘Still Standing’ commemorative performance next to KL Płaszów, the former German labour camp in Kraków. URA categorization: Religion – Judaism; Materiality – Religious activity/Practice/Event; Organization form – NGO/ASSOC/Enterprise, Character – Healing, Education, Commemoration; Art – Creative; Economy – entertainment; Temporality – Ephemeral/Temporal/One-time (RUM Project, Zawiejska et al. 2025).
Figure 5. Quote from John Paul II on a Kornice Foundation billboard [Renew the face of this Earth!]. URA categorization: Religion – Roman Catholicism; Materiality – Object/Image/Picture; Organization form – NGO/ASSOC/Enterprise, Character – Activism/Mission, Charity, John Paul II; Art – Creative; Economy – Entertainment; Temporality – Ephemeral/Temporal/One-time; Political – National (RUM Project, Zawiejska et al. 2025).
Figure 5. Men’s Rosary procession. URA categorization: Religion – Roman Catholicism; Materiality – Religious activity/Practice/Event; Organization form – NGO/ASSOC/Enterprise, Character – Activism/Mission, Virgin Mary; Art – Creative; Economy – entertainment; Temporality – Cyclic (RUM Project, Zawiejska et al. 2025).
Figure 6. Our Lady of Perpetual Abortion sticker. URA categorization: Religion – Roman Catholicism; Materiality – Object/Image/Picture; Organization form – not applicable, Character – Protest, Virgin Mary; Art – Creative; Temporality – Ephemeral/Temporal/One-time; Political – left-wing (RUM Project, Zawiejska et al. 2025).
The URA foregrounds the urban religious field as an important cognitive, managerial and organizational urban structure and imaginary. Operations across the URA – scrolling, zooming, filtering – along with spatialized analyses of the URA map, reveal these complex mediation patterns between the religious field and urban formations. Our research conducted in the three focus cities and the utilization that followed of the URA as an analytical, heuristic tool, has shown us the insufficiencies of urban-religious epistemic models that are Western- and Global South–centric for analyzing religion in urban contexts in Central and Eastern Europe. Local CEE logics of urban religion evade explanatory models devised for and rooted in those other regions. For example, in our research, we observed that protest, absence, commemoration and taboo are more adequate categories for characterizing local urban religion and socio-religious practices and change than ones commonly applied in analyzing religion in those other regional models, including diaspora, FBO and heritage. Comprehensive results of our research on CEE urban religion will appear in the book I have co-authored with Łukasz Stypuła (working title: Urban Religion and the Post-socialist City: Archives, Icons, Logics and Spatial Transformations).
The RUM Project and the URA App are considered a digital humanities publication with an ISBN number, published by the Jagiellonian Library and Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Below are links to the RUM Project webpage containing detailed information on the project and an introduction to the URA, with glossary and explications of chosen categories and user’s manual – also available on the YouTube channel.
The URA App is available in Polish and English, and works on desktops and on mobile devices. However, larger screens are more convenient for browsing through the URA.
URA App (Kraków):
RUM Project webpage: https://rum.uj.edu.pl/en/
URA user’s manual: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTtsugXFHAc
To cite the RUM Project: Zawiejska, Natalia, Łukasz Stypuła, Radosław Piskorski and Aleksandra Jasińska (2025). Religion Urbanity Mapping: RUM Project. Kraków: Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Biblioteka Jagiellońska. ISBN: 978-83-67127-62-2
To cite the URA App: Zawiejska, Natalia, Łukasz Stypuła, Radosław Piskorski and Aleksandra Jasińska (2025). Urban Religion Archive App, URA App. In: Zawiejska, Natalia, Łukasz Stypuła, Radosław Piskorski and Aleksandra Jasińska. Religion Urbanity Mapping: RUM Project. Kraków: Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Biblioteka Jagiellońska. ISBN: 978-83-67127-62-2
Note: All photo copyrights belong to the Jagiellonian University.
References:
Berking, Helmuth, and Martina Löw, eds. 2008. Die Eigenlogik Der Städte: Neue Wege Für Die Stadtforschung. Interdisziplinäre Stadtforschung, vol. 1. DFG-Rundgespräch, Campus.
Knott, Kim, Volkhard Krech and Birgit Meyer. 2016. ‘Iconic Religion in Urban Space’. Material Religion 12 (2): 123–136. https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2016.1172759.
Krech, Volkhard. 2016. ‘What is “Religious Icon”?’ In The Urban Sacred: How Religion Makes and Takes Place in Amsterdam, Berlin and London. Exhibition catalogue, edited by Susanne Lanwerd. Metropol-Verlag.
Lanz, Stephan. 2018. ‘Religion of the City: Urban-Religious Configurations on a Global Scale’. In Religious Pluralism and the City: Inquiries into Postsecular Urbanism, Helmuth Berking, Silke Steets, Jochen Schwenk. Bloomsbury Academic.
Zawiejska, Natalia, Łukasz Stypuła, Radosław Piskorski and Aleksandra Jasińska. 2025. Religion Urbanity Mapping: RUM Project. Jagiellonian Library, Jagiellonian University.
[1] Project financed by the National Science Centre in the OPUS 19 program no. 2020/37/B/HS1/02363; Agreement no. UMO-2020/37/B/HS1/02363.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
urbrel (October 27, 2025). Exploring Urban Religion in Poland: The Urban Religion Archive and the Religion Urbanity Mapping Project. Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations. Retrieved September 10, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/151mt
