Saint Hyacinth of Poland

Saint Hyacinth Odrowąż was a priest of the Order of Preachers. He received the habit from the hands of Saint Dominic, who designated him to spread the Order in Poland. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on August 15, the day of his death, and in Poland his memorial is kept on August 17.

He was born at the end of the twelfth century, according to tradition at Kamień Śląski, into the powerful Odrowąż family. The exact year of his birth is not known. He was a relative of Iwo Odrowąż, bishop of Krakow, and became a canon of the cathedral of Krakow. Later accounts speak of his studies in law and theology in Krakow, Prague, and Bologna, but sources from his own time do not confirm this.

In 1220 or 1221 he was in Rome with Bishop Iwo. There he met Saint Dominic and, together with Ceslaus, entered the Order of Preachers, receiving the habit from the hands of the founder himself. For a time he lived at Dominic’s side in Bologna. On the way to Poland the brothers stopped at Friesach in Carinthia, where new candidates entered the Order. In 1222 Hyacinth arrived in Krakow, and Bishop Iwo gave the Dominicans the church of the Holy Trinity, which became the Order’s first house in Poland.

The Martyrology records that, with Blessed Ceslaus and Henry the German, he preached the Gospel in Bohemia and Silesia. He founded new friaries and reached as far as Kyiv, where a Dominican house was established. Pius XII, in a letter for the seventh centenary of his death, recalled his zeal for prayer and penance, his devotion to the Mother of God, and how, as a herald of the Gospel, he went to the neighboring lands to the east that had not yet received Christianity. John Paul II called him the apostle of the Slavic lands, which he traveled from Gdańsk to Kyiv.

Many stories about him come from tradition. The oldest Life was written nearly a hundred years after his death by a Dominican of Krakow, Stanisław the lector, and it describes mainly miracles. According to a sixteenth-century account, when the Tatars attacked Kyiv, Hyacinth was saving the Blessed Sacrament, and the Mother of God asked him to take her statue as well. That is why he is depicted with a monstrance and a statue of Mary. Polish folk tradition also links him with pierogi, hence the Polish exclamation “Święty Jacku z pierogami” (“Saint Hyacinth with pierogi”).

He died in Krakow on August 15, 1257, on the solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He was buried in the church of the Holy Trinity, where his relics rest in a chapel of their own. Pope Clement VIII canonized him on April 17, 1594, in the Vatican Basilica.