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How much truth is there to it? Let's start with a short introduction to Saint Hyacinth himself (if you're easily bored with biographical details, please skip this paragraph). Jacek Odrowąż (pronounced ''<small>YAHT</small>-seck aw-<small>DRAW</small>-vawnsh''), to use his Polish name, was born around 1183 in Kamień, Silesia, in the affluent Moravian-Silesian Odrowąż family. His uncle, Iwo Odrowąż, was a bishop of Cracow and a chancellor at the court of Leszek the White, Duke of Cracow, so it comes as no surprise that Jacek was educated at the cathedral school of Cracow, under the tutelage of Wincenty Kadłubek. Once ordained priest, Jacek continued his studies at the University of Bologna. During his visit to Rome, he met Domingo de Guzmán, or Saint Dominic, the founder of the Dominican Order. By the time he returned to Cracow, he had become a Dominican friar himself. On his way back he founded a new Dominican monastery everywhere he stopped – in Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and finally in Cracow, at the Holy Trinity Church. He would later work as a missionary in Prussia and – what matters to us – in the homeland of pierogi (or the ''ruskie'' ones at least), that is, in Rus, in the years 1228–1233.
Our chief source of knowledge about Jacek is the hagiography penned by Lector Stanislaus at the Holy Trinity Monastery, entitled ''De vita miraculis sancti Jacchonis'' (''The Miraculous Life of Saint Hyacinth''). Written with for the purpose of presenting the case for his canonization, the work is focused more on the miracles attributed to Hyacinth than on the details of his earthly life. Interestingly, neither the biographical, nor the miraculous part, contains any mention of pierogi.
Fortunately, religious people have the acquired skill of reading between the lines what the author never wrote. Just as you can interpret the Purgatory or the Trinity out of the Holy Scripture, so you can read pierogi out of Saint Hyacinth's CV. Father Tomasz Gałuszka, a Dominican from Cracow, will show us how: