ICONS, SMUGGLING AND MCDONALDIZATION OF CULTURE

Culture undergoes constant changes. Although today, Poland is an almost ethnically homogenous country, ages ago, the dialogue of cultures took place not only on the borderlines of the First Polish Republic but also in the then capital city of Cracow. In 1390, Slavic Benedictine monks who used Old Church Slavic language settled in the church of the Holy Cross in Krakow. Francis Skaryna (Francysk Skaryna), a pioneer of Belarusian printing and later the founder of the first printing house in Eastern Europe in Vilnius, published the first Cyrillic prints in the world in Cracow and in the early 16th c. also studied there. Poland was a great example of a multicultural society. In the early 16th c. the Catholics and the Protestants, the Jews and the Armenians, the Tatars and the Karaims lived in Poland. After the Union of Lublin, the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania formed one of the biggest countries in Europe at the time; it was inhabited by the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Ukrainians and the Belarusians. In the mid-16th c. Poland became a shelter for multitudes of religious dissenters in Western Europe, such as the Lutherans, the Calvinists, and other Protestants. Today it is useless to seek traces of such multiculturality in many museums. In museums which collect paintings related to the Eastern Orthodox Church, places of monuments connected with Polish culture are frequently occupied by late icons of mediocre artistic value smuggled from Russia. The article attempts to explain this phenomenon in the context of the transformation of modern museology.