Polish President Lech Kaczynski has declared three days of national mourning after 27 Polish pilgrims were killed in a coach accident near Grenoble in the French Alps yesterday.
Mr Kaczynski visited the survivors of the accident at a Grenoble hospital with his French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy, last night.
President Kaczynski urged Poles to call off all entertainment during the mourning.
A concert by British rock singer Rod Stewart, which had been planned for tomorrow, was cancelled.
Organisers are to decide today whether to reschedule a concert by The Rolling Stones planned for Wednesday.
The coach, with 48 passengers and two drivers on board, was descending a steep and winding road between Gap and Grenoble when it crashed at around 7.30am Irish time.
The party was returning from the shrine of Notre Dame de la Salette, where the Virgin Mary is believed to have appeared to two children in 1846.
The Polish-registered vehicle smashed through the safety barrier on the side of the road and hurtled onto the banks of the river Romanche below.
It burst into flames as it came to rest beside the river and was gutted by fire.
Local people rushed to the scene and tried to put out the blaze with buckets of water.
The remaining 23 people on board were all injured, 13 of them seriously.
A Polish government plane carrying around 50 family members of the victims left for Grenoble from Szczecin in northeastern Poland this morning where most of the coach passengers were from.
A number of the injured were set to be on the return flight.
An investigation into the accident was meanwhile likely to concentrate on the condition of the Polish coach.
The stretch of road was prohibited to heavy vehicles unless equipped with electronic braking - a back-up decelerator - which cuts power to the engine.
Following the accident, the Polish transport ministry ordered a detailed technical control of all coaches used by Polish travel agencies.
