Paper short abstract:

Mourning John Paul II in Poland had a huge spontaneous component with whole streets converted into 'shrines'. The paper explores the mourning as enacting the national communitas with a special focus on its spatial aspects and its moral vs. political dimensions.

Paper long abstract:

Although the dying and the death of John Paul II were staged, it is not surprising that in Poland the mourning had a huge spontaneous component, including streets converted in shrines and changes in people's attitude toward the city space. Warsaw, considered by its inhabitants as a rather unfriendly town space, witnessed at that time a real invasion of people of its usually empty and expressionless streets. The period of mourning was also highly mythologized. The spontaneity of the mourning became discussed in the media. The efforts to give the whole thing a moral rather than political dimension were obvious. Some months after the JP II' s death during an artistic action called "T-shirts for freedom", dealing with problems of social exclusion, a T-shirt with the slogan "I didn't mourn the pope" was exposed in some art galleries; later in 2005 the exhibition was banned from the Lublin University. This paper will explore the mourning as enacting communitas with the special focus on its spatial aspects, as well as its moral vs. political dimensions referring to the Polish discourse on patriotism since the 1980s.