Wawel is a place, an idea, and a national symbol. It is a hill on the left bank of the Vistula River in Krakow, Poland. It is a castle that served as the primary seat of Polish monarchs throughout the medieval and early modern periods. It is a cathedral and it is a royal necropolis. It is also a Polish national pantheon and a fundamental part of the Polish national imagination. It is this last identity—Wawel as a modern national pantheon—that most interests Petro Andreas Nungovitch. The subject of Nungovitch's book is what he calls “Wawelization,” the process of selecting meritorious non-royals for burial at Wawel and for induction into the national pantheon.

The first several chapters of the book concentrate on the nineteenth-century partition period when Poland did not exist as a country. The partition era is so important to Nungovitch because it was then that Wawel was transformed from a royal necropolis to a national pantheon. There have been just seven non-royal or pantheonic burials at Wawel during modern times, and Nungovitch describes each of them in his book. The first two non-royals enshrined at Wawel (the subject of Chapter 2) were the revolutionary heroes Józef Poniatowski and Tadeusz Kościuszko in 1817 and 1818 respectively. The decades after these burials saw Wawel's status as a symbol of the Polish nation grow. In Chapter 3 Nungovitch describes how in published histories of Krakow from the mid-nineteenth century, as well as in contemporary poetry, literature, and guidebooks to the city, Wawel was used to evoke the very essence of the Polish national spirit. The 1869 re-burial of King Kazimierz the Great at Wawel (the subject of Chapter 4) further enhanced Wawel's importance to Polish nationalism. Chapter 5 focuses on the burial at Wawel of poet Adam Mickiewicz in 1890, and with Chapter 6 Nungovitch moves into the twentieth century. His subject there is Stanislaw Wyspiański and his relationship both to Krakow, the city of his birth, and to Wawel, the focus of much of his artistic imaginings. It is, after all, a line from Wyspiański's 1903 play Liberation—“Here is All is Poland”—that has served as such a powerful metaphor in Wawel discourse and that so clearly associates Wawel with an all-encompassing Polish national spirit. The fourth and fifth pantheonic burials at Wawel took place during the Second Republic: of the poet Juliusz Słowacki in 1927 and, in 1935, of Jòzef Piłsudski, statesman and father of modern Polish independence. These are the subject of Chapter 7, which also outlines—though too briefly—Wawel's occupation by the Nazis during the Second World War. I would have liked Nungovitch to explore how the profound indignity of occupation shaped subsequent Wawel symbolism. The penultimate chapter focuses on Wawel during communist times, when the authorities maintained an ambivalent attitude toward such a powerful symbol of Polish history.

The last two of the seven pantheonic burials at Wawel happened since the fall of communism, and these are the subject of the book's final chapter. Władysław Sikorski, the Prime Minister of Poland's wartime government-in-exile until his death in 1943, was buried at Wawel in 1993, and President Lech Kaczyński together with his wife, Maria, were buried at Wawel in 2010. The presidential couple were among the ninety-six people who died when their plane—which was carrying a delegation to a commemorative event for the 1940 Katyń massacre of Polish military officers and others by the Soviets—crashed near Smoleńsk. In unpacking this last pantheonic burial, Nungovitch brings us full circle, as his book also begins with the Kaczyński funeral. Indeed, as he tells us, the inclusion of the Kaczyńskis in the national pantheon was the impetus for writing this book in the first place.

As Nungovitch shows throughout his book, Wawelization has been determined primarily by the elite secular and religious authorities who have had and continue to have authority over Wawel, and as such regular Polish people have not been directly involved in choosing who gets included in the national pantheon. Not surprisingly, regular people are also largely absent from Nungovitch's book as well. Perhaps their roles in and attitudes towards Wawelization—with all that this implies—will be the subject of another work on Wawel, one sparked by the considerable insights that Nungovitch's book offers. Here All is Poland marks an important contribution to the scholarship on the history of modern Polish identities and national myth-making, and it provides us with rich examples of how Polish national memories are imagined, constructed, and contested. This is a very readable and richly detailed book.