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 THE ORIGINS OF CRACOW century, to the Dominican Order, scarcely any traces remain worth recording—the crypt was only destroyed in recent times, the cellars and the walls of both refectory and dormitory are still Romanesque.

Beyond the original city walls, in the Central Square of to-day, just opposite Castle Street (Grodzka ulica) there was built, toward the close of the twelfth century, for the then suburb, on a plot of rising ground not discernible now, the little church of St. Adalbert (illustration 4). The walls, made of limestone and sandstone ashlars, have been whitewashed, so the bond of their masonry is only partly to be seen. The church was pierced by a bow-window on each side; to the south, it had a portal, of which the traces are yet visible on the wall. There is but one nave, with a cross-vault over the choir and a wooden ceiling over the body of the church. According to historical traditions, St. Adalbert preached here to the people of Cracow on his way to Prussia for a martyr's death; later on, St. Hyacinth (1223) and St. John Capistran (1453) are also reported to have preached in this church. In 1611 the building was renovated and thoroughly transformed by the Academician Valentine Fontana. Traces of originally Romanesque structure are also distinguishable in the churches of St. John, St. Florian, St. Nicholas, likewise in the convent church of the Premonstratensian nuns in Zwierzyniec (now an outlying suburb of Cracow), which has a Romanesque portal; but in all these the vestiges are so faint as hardly to deserve specifying.

An example of later Romanesque architecture, where use is made of brick besides ashlars, is extant in the convent church of the Cistercian monks, in the village of Mogila, east of Cracow. With these Cistercians, who came over to Poland from France in the twelfth century and built their abbeys in the course of the fourteenth, the use of the pointed arch makes its appearance in architecture, which marks the transition to Gothic style.

The bishops' residences and the Benedictine and Cistercian abbeys were, besides the princes' courts, the main channels through which the civilization of Western Europe spread in Poland.