The Virgin Mary appears with the Christ Child amid sunflowers, wheat stalks, and wild herbs in the last of my featured Marian images from Poland in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection. This painted wooden sculpture is the work of Andrzej Wojtczak, one of three wood carvers who founded a school of folk art linked to the village of Kutno in the Polish heartland, featured in the new East European Wood Carvings page in the Schools of Sacred Art section. The once abundant forests of Eastern Europe were a rich natural resource for people living off the land, who not only crafted utensils for daily use but religious objects of lasting value like roadside shrines and holy figures for private devotions. In the modern era, foreign collectors with an eye for unusual craft pieces have joined city dwellers with a nostalgia for their rural roots in creating a new demand for traditionally-styled wood carvings from Eastern Europe, many of them on religious themes. Poland and its neighbors has taken in millions of refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine. Pray for Peace! (John Kohan)