The Cosmopolitan Review discusses the Year of Chopin in Poland, marking the 200th anniversary of Frederyk Chopin’s birth, and what he might think of life in today’s free Poland:

There’s much to celebrate, starting with the 200th birthday of Poland’s most famous exile, Frederic Chopin, born in Żelazowa Wola, just outside of Warsaw. We join the festivities bearing gifts of poetry, prose and a guide to Chopin events worldwide. In CR’s first fiction, Eva Stachniak transforms her readers into aristocratic guests at a salon in Paris in the company of Polish exiles, among them, Chopin himself.

Were the composer alive today, would he accept an invitation to give a concert at Warsaw’s Soviet-built Palace of Culture and Science? Would he dance in the Palace’s hip club Kafe Kulturalna? Or would he side with Minister of Foreign Affairs Radek Sikorski, who is suggesting Poland “demolish its own symbol of communist misrule”?

This year also marks the rehabilitation and reburial of Copernicus, labeled a heretic long before Galileo was ever hit with that charge. From the AP via Yahoo! News: Astronomer Copernicus reburied as hero in Poland

Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer whose findings were condemned by the Roman Catholic Church as heretical, was reburied by Polish priests as a hero on Saturday, nearly 500 years after he was laid to rest in an unmarked grave.

His burial in a tomb in the cathedral where he once served as a church canon and doctor indicates how far the church has come in making peace with the scientist whose revolutionary theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun helped usher in the modern scientific age.

Copernicus, who lived from 1473 to 1543, died as a little-known astronomer working in a remote part of northern Poland, far from Europe’s centers of learning. He had spent years laboring in his free time developing his theory, which was later condemned as heretical by the church because it removed Earth and humanity from their central position in the universe.

His revolutionary model was based on complex mathematical calculations and his naked-eye observations of the heavens because the telescope had not yet been invented.

After his death, his remains rested in an unmarked grave beneath the floor of the cathedral in Frombork, on Poland’s Baltic coast, the exact location unknown.

On Saturday, his remains were blessed with holy water by some of Poland’s highest-ranking clerics before an honor guard ceremoniously carried his coffin through the imposing red brick cathedral and lowered it back into the same spot where part of his skull and other bones were found in 2005.

A black granite tombstone now identifies him as the founder of the heliocentric theory, but also a church canon, a cleric ranking below a priest. The tombstone is decorated with a model of the solar system, a golden sun encircled by six of the planets…

I had visited his home in Toruń, Poland, and the church in which he was baptized. I found the juxtaposition with the on-going closings and desecration of historic churches throughout the United States to be amazing. The R.C. Church was wiping out churches 100 to 150 years old, and here I stood in a church that predated 1473. I will never be able to show my children the churches their grandparents were baptized in. They have all closed.