Parish Church St. Mary Magdalene

When parishioners in Mikaszówka built their wooden church in 1907, they installed a copy of Poland’s most revered icon, the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, in the main altar. Then they covered it with a painting of St. Mary Magdalene, the church’s patron saint. This curious layering remains today: two Marys, one visible, one hidden beneath. The twin-towered church, raised by the village’s first priest and local families in this borderland region, features deer antlers among its interior decorations, a nod to the surrounding forests that have long defined life here.

The church sits a short walk from the Augustów Canal, the 19th-century waterway that once linked the Vistula to the Neman and briefly made this remote pocket of forest and marsh feel like a shipping route to somewhere. Mikaszówka’s parish was carved out of the diocese in 1907 for a population that has only shrunk since, and the surrounding gmina now counts its congregants in the low thousands, spread thin across villages that mostly outnumber their residents in trees. The Madonna underneath keeps her silence. The saint on top keeps an eye on parishioners.