Opactwo Cystersów w Sulejowie

The main church, consecrated in 1232, blends late Romanesque and early Gothic work and is dedicated jointly to the Virgin Mary and to Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury murdered in 1170, an unusual English dedication for a Polish Cistercian house. Its portal, carved around 1230, rises through stepped columns to a semicircular tympanum below a large eight-part rosette window. Tatar raids in the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries pushed the monks to wall the compound and raise a ring of towers, among them the Moorish, Abbot's and Music towers that still stand along the Pilica. The Cistercians were expelled when the monastery was dissolved in 1810 and did not return until 1986, when they reopened a priory inside the same walls.