The story
In 1964 two art historians from Warsaw, Izabella Galicka and Hanna Sygietyńska, were surveying church furnishings in Kosów Lacki, a small parish east of the capital, when they noticed a dark, overpainted canvas hanging above a sofa in the priest's flat. It showed Saint Francis of Assisi in prayer, and they suspected the hand of El Greco, the Greek-born painter who made his career in Spain.
Restorers in Warsaw settled the question in 1974, when they cleaned away a later layer of paint and found the artist's own signature underneath. The picture is dated to the late 1570s and is usually described as the only El Greco in Poland. How it reached a country parish is still disputed. One family account traces it to an officer who bought it in Spain in 1808, another to a Warsaw antique shop in the 1920s.
For decades it was kept out of public view for safety. Since October 2004 it has hung in the Diocesan Museum in Siedlce, the church museum of the local diocese, alongside liturgical objects and sacred art from the region's parishes. Under church law it still belongs to the parish of Kosów Lacki, to which the canon who owned it left it in his will.
