They included the archbishop of Warsaw, the culture minister, two scientists and other officials. With a feeling of mystery hanging in the air, they worked in total concentration, mostly whispering, as they removed the heart from its resting place and carried out the inspection - taking more than 1, photos and adding hot wax to the jar's seal to prevent evaporation. Warsaw's archbishop recited prayers over the heart and it was returned to its rightful place. By morning, visitors to the church saw no trace of the exhumation.
Polish officials kept all details of the inspection secret for five months before going public about it in September, giving no reason for the delay. They are also not releasing photographs of the heart, mindful of ethical considerations surrounding the display of human remains, said Artur Szklener, director of the Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw, a state body that helps preserve the composer's legacy. However, to prove that the heart is in good shape, he showed The Associated Press photographs of the organ, an enlarged white lump submerged in an amber-colored fluid in a crystal jar.
He said he wishes that the exhumation had involved genetic tests on a small sample of tissue to determine the cause of Chopin's death.
Though Lagerberg and others believe that Chopin probably died of tuberculosis - the official cause of death - the matter isn't fully settled. He died and was buried in Paris in But in a romantic gesture to his homeland, his heart was put in a glass jar and smuggled into Warsaw, then under the rule of Imperial Russia.
Strangely enough, the Nazis allowed Chopin's heart to be put in safekeeping during the Warsaw Uprising. And since , it has remained in a crypt at the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw like a holy relic. After that, Chopin's pickled heart was mostly left to rest in peace until one night in , when a group of scientists got permission to briefly inspect the jar in the crypt, in an effort to determine the musician's cause of death.
They've finally released the results of their study, concluding that Chopin most likely died of complications from tuberculosis. However, as only his heart came back to the country, the choice was made to give it to the Holy Cross Church. This was where all the family celebrations had been held, it was the Chopin family's parish church and it was the most important church in Warsaw.
His relationship with the progressive writer George Sand, who changed lovers like pairs of gloves, was deemed a scandal by the church hierarchy. It was probably thanks to this that it survived the plunder of the church by Russians soldiers during the January Uprising.
In , and epitaph was finally ordered. However in the intervening years, people had forgotten exactly where the heart was. The current resting place of the heart in the Holy Cross Church. Eventually, a local journalist tracked it down to the crypt and the heart was moved to the main church with great honour. His heart stayed there until the Warsaw Uprising in when it faced its greatest danger. According to the wartime account of Father Alojzy Niedziela, a young priest at the Holy Cross Church, a German chaplain entered the church in early August and said that eventually the fighting would engulf the church.
There also exists a German newsreel film dated September 9, showing SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, accompanied by a unit standing to attention, giving the casket with Chopin's heart to Archbishop Antoni Szlagowski. Some stories claim that a German priest may have removed the heart from the church during the war, thus saving it from destruction. However, Home Army reports say that the heart was in their possession when they seized the church around August 23, and that it only fell into German hands when they regained control of the church a few days later.
Chopin experts have not been able to reconcile the conflicting accounts to this day. He toured and performed throughout Europe, eventually settling in Paris in During the winter of on the island of Majorca, Chopin fell ill.
As his illness got progressively worse, his lover, the French author Amandine Dudevant, who wrote under the name George Sand, took him to Marseille. He was diagnosed with consumption, which we now call tuberculosis. His health continued to decline, and he died in Paris on Oct. Taphephobia, the fear of being buried alive, was an obsession in the 19th century, and some coffins had alarms that could be activated from within.
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