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Hundreds of thousands of Polish people gather as they bring candles and flowers in front of the presidential palace in Warsaw.

Church bells tolled hourly, candles flickered on the streets and flowers carpeted centre-city plazas as tens of thousands Poles braved a bitter spring wind to greet the coffin of president Lech Kaczynski, a day after his death in a plane crash that also killed dozens of the country's politicians and military leaders.

Mr. Kaczynski's body, among the first to be recovered and identified from the accident site in western Russia, was driven slowly past silent throngs of people on Sunday who lined the route from the airport to the ornate presidential palace in the heart of the capital.

As the official limousine went by, a few bystanders tossed roses and tulips in its wake.

The president, his wife and 86 other passengers were on their way to a memorial service for the 22,000 Poles executed by Soviet forces 70 years ago in and around the forest of Katyn, near Smolensk.

Their plane, an aging Tupolev Tu-154 operated by the Polish Air Force, clipped a stand of barren trees as it attempted to land in heavy fog Saturday morning. Everyone on board, including eight crew members, was killed.

Among those killed were Mr. Kaczynski's wife, ministerial staff members, 15 members of parliament, the commanders of all the branches of the armed services, the Central Bank presidents, historians of the Katyn massacre and several bishops and priests.

A week of mourning was declared. Radio stations played dirges. Department stores usually open on Sundays closed for the day. On state television, images of the motorcade and the smouldering wreckage of the plane were broadcast in black and white.

One scene was replayed again and again.

When Mr. Kaczynski's flag-covered coffin was carried out of the military plane and onto the tarmac at the Warsaw airport, it was placed on a table on a red carpet. The first to approach it was the president's identical twin brother, Yaroslaw, who was also his political comrade-in-arms and head of the president's nationalist party.

He sank to his knees, bowed his head and knelt before it.

The mood was especially sombre in the city's many churches, where mass was celebrated almost hourly.

Mourners came in a steady stream to the Field Cathedral of the Polish Army at the edge of Warsaw's Old Town, kneeling to set candles and bouquets of spring tulips at the doorstep before settling in the hard wooden pews to pray.

The bishop of the cathedral, Tadeusz Ploski, was one of those on the doomed plane and also the chief Catholic chaplain of the Army.

"I feel like God took the people who were really concerned about Poland and left the rest," said Romana, an elderly woman who was tending the sputtering candles on the church steps.

She was reluctant to give her last name, although Bishop Ploski had presided over a special service for her 50th wedding anniversary last year. "It could make problems for me because I have connections to the military," she said.

A lot has changed over the last 20 years, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and full Polish independence. But suspicion of the Russians and their motives dies hard.

Russian aviation officials have said that the pilots of the doomed Polish plane disregarded the advice of Smolensk controllers to abandon their attempt to land at the fog-bound rural airport. Romana was not convinced.

"Poland has been buying planes from Russia for 30 years," she said, "and whenever there's a crash, they always say that it's pilot error and nothing to do with the plane. A lot of people are thinking there's something going on here, but nobody wants to say it out loud."

Poland has a parliamentary system of government and the president has little say over how it is run. Senior officials took pains during the day to reassure the public that the country was stable and the machinery of state was still running.

Pawel Gras, a government spokesman, said the next-highest ranking military commanders had already moved into position as acting chiefs of the Army, Navy and Air Force. An interim director of Central Bank has been appointed, and the speaker of the parliament has assumed the post of acting president.

No date for the president's funeral has been set.

President Kaczynski, elected in 2005, was seen as a polarizing figure in Polish politics, a fervent nationalist whose relations with Russian and German leaders were stormy. His party lost control of the government in parliamentary elections in 2007.

But he had been a familiar figure through all of the key moments in the country's modern history, starting with his involvement in the Solidarity movement that challenged Communist rule in the late 1980s. For many people, Mr. Kaczynski's death was a closing of a chapter in their own lives.

"It's a piece of my history, of our history, that has gone," said Jozef Fabianowicz, a 72-year-old retiree dressed in his Sunday best for a visit to the military cathedral. "I was in Solidarity, too, here in Warsaw. So it's like I've lost some of my history."









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