The Palaeozoic inlier of the Holy Cross Mountains (HCM) offers an insight into the Variscan deformations of rocks occurring at the contact between the south-western margin of the Precambrian East European Craton (north-eastern Poland) and the accretion zone of the exotic Variscan terranes (Sudetes). In the presented view, the HCM area was consolidated in the late Neoproterozoic, after the accretion of the Sandomirian orogen to the Baltica palaeocontinent, with a later Caledonian strike-slip displacement of the Małopolska crustal block. After the Devonian stabilisation within the Laurussian Rhenohercynian shelf, the region was subject to Late Devonian–early Carboniferous extension at the junction between the Rhenish Through and the Pripyat-Dnieper-Donets Rift system. The Variscan deformations of the HCM Palaeozoic rocks developed during the mid-Carboniferous inversion of an intra-cratonic basin, induced by orogenic stress transferred by the relatively rigid Małopolska Block onto the late Precambrian to early Carboniferous Łysogóry high-subsidence basin depocenter.