Renaissance Pole who rejigged God's universe

Letter from Torun: If you take one thing home from Torun, said my Polish friend, let it be this. It is a tin of the gingerbread for which the town is famous, but the soft, sweet and spicy biscuits are not its only attraction.

The turreted skyline of this Hanseatic town winds giddily around the tin, recalling Torun's time as a stronghold of the Teutonic Knights, its capture by the rampaging Swedes and then the Prussians who ruled here for 123 years until the first World War.

With contents devoured and a candle placed inside the tin, the windows of the buildings glow and stars shine over the rooftops of the town, twinkling reminders of a son of Torun who, as the local saying goes, "stopped the sun and moved the earth".

So reads a marble and gold plaque at the birthplace of Nicolaus Copernicus, whose revolutionary theory that the earth was not the fixed point at the centre of the universe, but just one of several planets orbiting the sun, was condemned by an outraged papacy.

He was born into a wealthy merchant family in 1473 as Mikolaj Kopernik but, like many men who went to study and work in Renaissance Italy's great centres of learning, it is by a Latinised version of his name that he became best known.

And Copernicus was the archetypal Renaissance man: doctor of medicine, local administrator, commander of a castle in its defence against the Teutonic Knights, monetary expert and translator of Greek poetry into Latin, he was nothing if not versatile.

Amid the many demands on his time, Copernicus treated stargazing as a hobby, but one which took up an increasing amount of his time as he developed the theory that would win him repute as the father of modern astronomy and lay the crucial foundations for successors like Galileo, Kepler and Newton.

After studying at what is now the renowned Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Copernicus continued his education in northern Italy, focusing on law and medicine at colleges in Padua, Bologna and Ferrara.

Copernicus was in his 30s by the time he returned to Poland, settling in an area near the Baltic coast where his uncle was a bishop and, when not working on political, ecclesiastical or financial business, he spent his nights making celestial observations with the naked eye, a century before the first telescope was built.

Over three decades, Copernicus compiled the empirical evidence, devised the theory and made the calculations that would fill De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), the work that dismantled the ancient Greek dogma of a geocentric universe and put the sun at the heart of our solar system.

Fear of ridicule from his scientific peers and condemnation from the church almost prevented Copernicus from publishing his magnum opus but, as legend has it, he was given a first edition of the book as he lay on his deathbed in 1543.

Although he was born and lived most of his life in modern-day Poland, Copernicus probably spoke German in daily life and may have had German ancestors - facts that prompt regular German claims that he was not a Pole at all.

That raises hackles in Poland, which was occupied by Germans for centuries and has also had to endure French claims to famous Poles like Frederic Chopin and Marie Curie.

It was with a tinge of national pride then, that archaeologists last year announced the discovery of Copernicus's skull beneath the cathedral in Frombork, the quiet Baltic town where he died.

Police forensic experts used the skull to create a computer image of its owner and it bore a strong similarity to the Copernicus depicted on 16th century portraits. Historians say they are "99 per cent" certain that it is the astronomer's skull, but only DNA tests could prove it.

Frombork and Torun now share claims on Copernicus, father of modern astronomy and destroyer of a cosmology that was staunchly defended by the church.

Strange then perhaps, that Torun is now famous for also being the hometown of Radio Maryja, a broadcaster beloved by millions of listeners and derided by critics for filling Polish homes with the homilies of an anachronistic "folk Catholicism".

The station helped the conservative government to win power last year, by telling its mostly elderly audience whom to vote for after they had attended Mass on election Sunday.

The pious Radio Maryja may seem to have little in common with the iconoclastic Copernicus, but they shared at least one thing.

Both incurred the wrath of the Vatican: the astronomer for rejigging God's universe and Radio Maryja for venturing into politics occasionally veering towards anti-Semitism.