Polish piety touches things one (read: a middle-class white American like me) would not normally associate with the word "piety," including the architecture.

A common feature of most houses (in Lipnica and the immediate surroundings, anyway — and I would assume in most villages) is a little enclosed shelf in the gable of the house, designed to protect a small statue of Mary or Jesus, more commonly the former. Sometimes, in older houses, it's simple a silhouette of a goblet— presumably the Holy Grail?

The Polish term for these architectural features is "kapliczka" — a chapel, in other words. This naturally is at odds with most English speakers' sense of what constitutes a "chapel," and seemingly at odds with what a Pole might think of as a "chapel" — a small building intended for religious purposes. There are certainly a lot of those kinds of chapels here. Curious that Polish doesn't make such as differentiation.

At any rate, the question becomes one of purpose. A friend denied at first that these were simply outward shows of piety. "So do these things supposedly protect the house?" I asked rhetorically. "No, of course not, but they show . . ." A small pause and a smile.