Alerted by the slow tolling of church bells just before 10:00 pm (2000 GMT) Saturday, by mobile telephone SMS messages, or even the wail of what sounded like an air raid siren, people left their homes, night spots and workplaces to converge on churches to pray for "their" pontiff.

John Paul II, 84, died at 9:37 pm in his private apartment at the Vatican.

On hearing the news, Wieslaw Wykret, 45, set off on foot from the village of Zagornik for Wadowice, 10 kilometers (six miles) distant. Four hours later, he had arrived in the southern town where the pope was born Karol Wojtyla on May 18, 1920.

"I came in spite of illness," he told AFP in the early hours of Sunday at Wadowice's Notre Dame basilica, a stone's throw away from the house where Wojtyla was born.

Poles admired the pope for embracing the weaknesses of mankind as he battled with illness in the latter years and especially months of his life.

They revered him also for his role in helping free them and much of the rest of central and eastern Europe from communist rule.

Polish Nobel peace laureate and former president Lech Walesa urged the world not to "waste" one of the most important achievements of John Paul II -- that of reuniting Europe.

"During the pontificate (of John Paul II), the era of huge divisions, of communist systems, was relegated to the past," said Walesa, who founded the communist bloc's first free trade union, Solidarity, in 1980 -- two years after Wojtyla was elected pope.

"A new era has been inaugurated -- that of globalisation and an enlarged European Union," he said.