A wooden cross erected in front of the Polish presidential palace in memory of the late president Lech Kaczynski is at the centre of a heated row between Catholics, secular Poles and authorities.

Boy scouts installed the large, wooden cross in front of the presidential palace in Warsaw on April 10, 2010, after former president Lech Kaczynski and 95 other people were killed in a plane crash near Smolensk, Russia. Since then, a small group of supporters of Jaroslaw Kaczynski – Lech’s twin brother – and his conservative Law and Justice party (PIS) have jealously guarded the makeshift memorial. The government has said that the cross would be better suited in a place of worship, rather than the public space it occupies, but to no avail: on August 3 several attempts to remove the cross were blocked.

On August 9, anti-cross protesters rallied in an attempt to remove the obstinate Catholics. A crowd of some 9,000 Poles answered the online appeals to defend the separation between church and state.

On August 12, a memorial stone was placed on a wall of the Presidential palace, but the gesture was not enough to appease Catholic fundamentalists. They immediately retorted that they would not part from the cross until a large official monument was erected in honour of Lech Kaczynski. Although the protesters were finally removed two days later, the cross itself remains in place.