The Black Madonna loved me into Eastern Catholicism

There’s a lot of mythology that surrounds the Black Madonna. As Father Pablo (who is on location in Poland) has also discussed today, legend has it that she was written by St Luke the Evangelist as part of a series of icons depicting Mary. The story is that she was found in the Holy Land and brought to Constantinople. The tale then is that she was transferred to Belz, a town in contemporary western Ukraine, as a gift from Constantinople to the king of Galicia (which is western Ukraine); for this reason, I have heard her called on occasion ‘Our Lady of Kyiv-Belz.’ What we do know at this point is that when Galicia (as well as much of Ukraine) was absorbed in the fourteenth century by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a Polish nobleman transferred her from Belz to another part of Poland, but as the myth goes, the horses stopped in front of the Monastery of Jasna Góra in Częstochowa, and she’s been there ever since.