The first Polish Dominican was Jacek (Hyacinth) Odrowąż, also known as the Apostle of Slavs and Apostle of the North. A chapel with his relics has been one of the most popular places of devotion to saints in Kraków.
The tradition situates the late Baroque chapel in the place of the mediaeval cell of the Dominican Church, where the world’s best-known Polish missionary (whose figure Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini placed on the colonnade surrounding St Peter’s Square in the Vatican) spent the last years of his life. Born in 1183, St Jacek Odrowąż was the first Pole to join the Order of Preachers founded by St Dominic in Toulouse in 1216 to “fight heresy and schism”. A member of a wealthy Silesian family, Jacek studied in Paris and Bologna before becoming a canon of the Kraków Chapter. He met the founder of the new apostolic order during his journey to Italy. In Rome he accepted from him a Dominican habit, and devoted his life from that moment on to missionary work. On the way back to Poland, Jacek organised monasteries in Friesach (Austria), Prague (Czech Republic), Wrocław and Kamień Śląski, and, in 1222, the first Dominican Monastery in Poland by the Church of the Holy Trinity in Kraków. In the following years he went with apostolic missions to various dioceses in Poland and Bohemia, but also to Rus’ and Prussia to return to Kraków in 1243. He preached, listened to confessions, and devoted himself to prayer and ascetic practices.
St Jacek, canonised in 1594, is one of the greatest miracle workers among Polish saints. The monk was believed to have the assistance of the Blessed Virgin, whom he saw in revelations, in the entreating of graces, in healing, and in resurrections. A legend speaks of the saint fleeing from Kiev from the Tatars. As the fleeing priest was taking a monstrance with him, an alabaster figure, representing the Blessed Virgin with the Infant Jesus, asked him to be saved from desecration as well. By a miracle, the massive monument became light enough for the monk to carry it easily to Kraków. Moreover, he crossed the River Dnieper without so much as wetting his toes (on a spread cloak). St Jacek is also believed to have brought pierogi (dumplings) to Kraków to feed them to the poor, over whom he extended special care. He is also rumoured to have resurrected a poor woman’s cow and a poor man’s horse, and also raised corn after hailstorms, saving people from hunger in this way. The saint died on the day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, on 15 August 1253. The testimonies of Blessed Bronisława and Bishop Jan Prandota have been recorded: on that day they both had visions of St Jacek entering the heavens, assisted by the Mother of God.
His grave in the Dominican Church in Kraków soon became famous for miracles: this is where barren women prayed for progeny, the sick were healed, and evil spirits left the possessed. The altar and sarcophagus in the Chapel of St Jacek date back to the 17th/18th centuries, and the Baroque paintings on the walls of the chapel present the life and miracles of the saint.

Another place of special veneration in the Dominican Church is the Chapel of Our Lady of the Rosary. It is to her intercession that the Polish victories in the battles against Turks in the 17th century are assigned, notably the famous victory of King John III Sobieski over the army of Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha at Vienna in 1683. The miraculous painting is a 16th-century copy of the image of Our Lady of Snows in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.