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Post by Bonobo on Aug 4, 2008 19:30:46 GMT 1
Here`s an article about Krakow from Detroit Free Press.
Krakow thrives on medieval architecture and college town spirit
Stories and Photos by ELLEN CREAGER • Detroit Free Press • July 20, 2008
KRAKOW, Poland -- Completely enchanting. Worth every zloty. Gracious and romantic. Exciting. Complex. Historic.
If you stay in Krakow a day, you will wish you stayed a week. If you stay a week, you will wish you stayed two.
What's the attraction? Krakow is part college town and part delicious fairy tale.
It was from this beautiful region that hundreds of thousands of Poles emigrated to Detroit, Chicago and other American cities around 1900. They fled occupation, oppression, poverty and high taxes -- leaving this place to make their fortune in a new land.
But what a treasure the city is now. Go to see it, and you'll be a rare American doing so. Lacking the cachet of Italy, France or the United Kingdom, Poland got just 331,000 American visitors last year, which is a shame because Poland, which does not yet use the euro, is still one of the most affordable spots in Europe.
My favorite things about Krakow?
For an old city, it feels very young. Since Copernicus was an undergrad here at Jagiellonian University in the 1400s, Krakow has been buzzing with more than 100,000 students.
It is a 1,000-year-old city that has never been bombed. Occupied, yes. Defiled, yes. Scene of sorrows and evils, Nazis and Communists, yes. But its 14th- to 16th-Century landmarks -- its churches, medieval towers and grand, stunning market square -- have survived it all.
And there's more. Quaintly, a trumpeter plays a song every hour on the hour in the tower of a local church, just to let people know that all is well. The once bereft Jewish section of town, Kazimierz, has sprung back to life. The city has a huge castle. Delightful food. Classical music every night. And a local priest (Karol Wojtyla was his name, you may have heard of him) made good as pope.
But first, a bit of background.
European atmosphere
Krakow, the largest city in southern Poland, is nestled between the Ukraine to the east, Slovakia to the south and the Czech Republic to the west. It is not far from Vienna and Prague, and it has elements of these, plus touches of Italy, France, Sweden, Lithuania and Russia.
It is often included as a brief stop on quickie tours of eastern Europe. But Krakow, a city of about 800,000 people, deserves more time. I think it is better to just come to Krakow and base yourself here. Most people speak English. You have time to sit on a bench or wander slowly and just absorb the atmosphere.
Sit still, and you will notice the nuns and priests walking the streets in traditional dress. You will see the slightly unbalanced walk of British men in town for stag parties.
It also must be said: The women are beautiful in Krakow. Young and old, they wear beautiful dresses, feminine things, frilly skirts and strappy sandals. No sneakers. No khakis. No chewing gum.
And you will notice the amber jewelry in so many shop windows. It is not a gem, but a smoky resin from the Baltic Sea that is made into necklaces, earrings, magnifying glass handles, little boxes, all very mysterious.
A native's perspective
Americans who visit Krakow tend to come in groups, but I am here on my own with a local guide and hotel reserved for me by a good Polish travel agent back in Detroit (see sidebar).
My guide, Barbara Wloch, 35, takes me sightseeing part of each day. She shows me where the good ice cream is (Lody's on Starowislna. ) She tells me to bargain in the Cloth Hall main market, where sellers hawk amber jewelry, hand-made boxes, wooden toys, Christmas ornaments, lambskin rugs, chess sets and folk art.
The native Krakovian is trained as a lawyer, musician and translator. When I get gushy, she says that Krakow is not so remarkable, that there is a lot of bureaucracy, and people love to complain here. She said entrepreneurial culture is not growing fast enough -- many people can't get over their dependence fostered by decades of communism. She points out that millions of young people have left Poland for better jobs in places like England or Ireland. Life is not so great here, she says.
I have a hard time believing her, even though I do believe her. I try to tell her, look around you. Look at this place. This place has something better than money.
But she has seen it all her life, living in the shadow of Wawel Castle, walking these streets with their carriages and their 15th-Century architecture and the intellectual atmosphere. Maybe it's better somewhere else, she muses.
Much to do
My hotel, Senacki, is on a main street in the old town, which thankfully allows no cars. My room has white lace curtains at the enormous windows. They open up to the cobblestone street below. At night, I hear people strolling past and slips of music. By day, I see three weddings at the church across the street. Below is a lady with a cart, selling big flat bagels and pretzels for 1.20 zlotys each -- about 57 cents.
Three nights in a row, I go to a chamber music concert, each at a different hall nearby -- Vivaldi, Chopin, Mozart.
Several times a day, I stop and listen for the trumpet and am reassured.
I eat pierogi. Sit at sidewalk cafes. Wander bookstores. Visit lots of churches, including a must-see stop at St. Francis Basilica, with its Art Nouveau stained glass window depicting god, done by local artist Stanislaw Wyspianski in about 1900.
History is piled upon history here. Walk to the Kazimierz district, and you can see the Pilsudski Bridge, where Polish Jews were forced by the Nazis to cross to a ghetto in 1941. (The movie "Schindler's List" was filmed in Krakow in 1994, so anyone who has seen that movie will recognize spots in Krakow, even the still-standing factory of Oskar Schindler.)
High on a hill above downtown is the kindly looking Wawel Castle, which was home to centuries of Polish kings and queens and is now a museum full of ancient huge tapestries, furniture, royal apartments, a chapel and a famous bell tower.
An hour west is Auschwitz, a must-see (see sidebar).
About a half-hour south is the Wieliczka salt mine, which has been active for 700 years. Popular with tourists since the 1800s, visitors climb down 350 stairs and visit about 20 "rooms" -- really caverns -- including a cathedral in which the floors, walls, chandeliers and even a relief of "The Last Supper" were created out of salt by artistic miners.
But in Krakow, you really don't need to rush around.
Stroll. Take a million pictures. Linger at a café. Absorb. Enjoy.
photo
Photos by ELLEN CREAGER/Detroit Free Press
cmsimg.freep.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=C4&Date=20080720&Category=FEATURES07&ArtNo=807200492&Ref=AR&Profile=1032&MaxW=550&MaxH=650&title=0[/img] St. Andrews Church on the right is from the 11th Century; the apostles stand guard outside Saints Peter and Paul church on the left. cmsimg.freep.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=C4&Date=20080720&Category=FEATURES07&ArtNo=807200492&Ref=V2&Profile=1032&MaxW=550&MaxH=650&title=0[/img]A cathedral deep in the Wieliczka Salt Mine southeast of Krakow is made entirely of salt, including the chandeliers. photo cmsimg.freep.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=C4&Date=20080720&Category=FEATURES07&ArtNo=807200492&Ref=H3&Profile=1032&MaxW=550&MaxH=650&title=0[/img]A relief in salt of "The Last Supper." Another room in the 700-year-old Wieliczka is dedicated to the Seven Dwarfs, who were miners. photo cmsimg.freep.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=C4&Date=20080720&Category=FEATURES07&ArtNo=807200492&Ref=V4&Profile=1032&MaxW=550&MaxH=650&title=0[/img]The Sanctuary of Divine Mercy near Krakow with its John Paul II window is a must for pilgrims; as a teenager he worked in a factory nearby. photo cmsimg.freep.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=C4&Date=20080720&Category=FEATURES07&ArtNo=807200492&Ref=H5&Profile=1032&MaxW=550&MaxH=650&title=0[/img]Dining al fresco is a favorite pastime of Krakovians, including its 100,000 students. If you go Getting there: There are no nonstop flights from Detroit, but it's easy to fly Lufthansa from Detroit to Frankfurt then on to Krakow. You can fly nonstop to Krakow on Polish Lot Airlines from Chicago. Fall fares are running about $1,200 round trip. Money: Poland uses the zloty; about 2 zlotys equal $1. Poland is still relatively inexpensive for American visitors in comparison to countries that use the euro. ATMs widely available. Passport: Needed for visit to Poland, but no visa required. Lodging: Good range of hotels. High end: Copernicus Hotel (www.hotelcopernicu s.com), Hotel Stary (www.stary.hotel. com.pl) or Radisson SAS (www.krakow. radissonsas. com). Nice: Hotel Senacki (www.senacki. krakow.pl) . Cheap: Flamingo Hostel (www.flamingo- hostel.com) . The Flamingo was just named the world's best hostel by Hostel World. Packages: I recommend booking a tour package that includes hotel, flight and tour guide and paying for as much as you can ahead of time in dollars. Detroit has a huge advantage for those trying to book a great trip to Krakow or anywhere in Poland. Hamtramck, the Polish heritage city in metro Detroit, has several travel agencies that can deal directly with Polish colleagues and get you the trip you want at the price you need. I used Krakowiak Travel, 11431 Jos. Campau (313-365-3437) . Others are AmerPol Enterprises, 11601 Jos. Campau (313-365-6780) , and Danmar Travel, 12177 Jos. Campau (313-365-3109) . Getting around: No car needed, although roads are good. You can walk to most sites within Krakow. You can hire a taxi for short or long trips. Horse-drawn carriages are plentiful in the old town. Krakow is also served by trains and buses to get you to other areas of Poland Day trips: Auschwitz is about one hour west of Krakow. The mountain town of Zakopane is about two hours south. TheWieliczka Salt Mine is about 20 minutes southeast of town. City highlights: St. Mary's Church, Cloth Hall, Market Square, nightly chamber music concerts. Art Nouveau stained glass in St. Francis Basilica, Jagiellonian University, dining al fresco, people watching. ************ ********* ********* ********* ********* ***** Known in Detroit, but made in Krakow Detroit Free Press July 20, 2008 Paczki Everyone in Detroit knows about the Polish jelly doughnuts called paczki (PONCH-key) eaten in massive quantities on Paczki Day every February, but paczki are available all year round in Krakow. The most famous vendor is the Blikle bakery on Wislna Street. It features paczki piled on a dainty plate, each with its own little paper holder, for $1 each. For the same price, they also sell glazed paczki with tiny bits of orange peel as a decoration on top. Inside? No big fat gooey jelly. In Krakow, paczki are filled with a small bit of rose jam, actually made with rose petals. It's perfumey. But good. The Pope Everywhere in Krakow are reminders of their favorite son -- the late Pope John Paul II. Once the archbishop of Krakow, the pope is still beloved. His photos are plastered all over town -- on posters, framed pictures, stained glass windows and more. Rooms he once stayed in are preserved with flowers on the balconies. You can take a Pope John Paul II tour that takes you to his birthplace, Wadowice, 30 miles south of Krakow, plus the Archdiocesan Museum of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, the Sanctuary of the Divine Mercy and Archbishop's Palace. The general on the horse You may never have noticed a statue in downtown Detroit on the corner of Third and Michigan Avenue near the MGM Casino. That noble figure is Gen. Thaddeus Kosciuszko, hero of both the American Revolution and Polish independence. It is a duplicate of a famous statue outside Wawel Castle in Krakow, where it is photographed hundreds of times a day by visitors. The statue in Detroit was a gift of the people of Krakow to honor Detroit on the occasion of the 1976 U.S. Bicentennial. The statue in Poland was a gift from Germany in 1960 to replace one that was torn down by the Nazis in World War II. For more: Poland National Tourist Office, www.polandtour. org. photo ELLEN CREAGER/Detroit Free Press cmsimg.freep.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=C4&Date=20080720&Category=FEATURES07&ArtNo=807200494&Ref=AR&Profile=1032&MaxW=550&MaxH=650&title=0[/img]The statue of Polish independence leader Thaddeus Kosciuszko at Krakow's Wawel Castle is identical to the one at Third and Michigan in Detroit. cmsimg.freep.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=C4&Date=20080720&Category=FEATURES07&ArtNo=807200494&Ref=V2&Profile=1032&MaxW=550&MaxH=650&title=0[/img]Paczki are available in Krakow year-round, filled with rose jam and sometimes with orange peel on top. (ELLEN CREAGER/Detroit Free Press)[/i] |
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gigi
Kindergarten kid
Posts: 1,470
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Post by gigi on Aug 4, 2008 19:44:37 GMT 1
Here`s an article about Krakow from Detroit Free Press. I saw a very abbreviated version of this article in my local newspaper yesterday. I am glad that you posted it in its entirety here! |
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gigi
Kindergarten kid
Posts: 1,470
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Post by gigi on Aug 12, 2008 14:22:02 GMT 1
Hamburg, Germany
August 12, 2008
Golfing or kite surfing are two activities rarely mentioned in connection with Poland, but preconceptions about the east European nation are not keeping up with developments in its tourist industry. "There's a long list of attractions that are not associated with Poland," said Jan Wavrzyniak, director of the Polish tourist board, in Hamburg recently.
Kite surfing is one of those activities. "Wind conditions around the Baltic peninsula of Hel are the best in Europe."
Poland is now trying to raise awareness of what it has to offer visitors.
"Poland can be surprising," is the tourist board's new slogan to entice mainly young visitors.
At the moment, most tourists visiting Poland are in the 25 to 45-year-old age group and they have a range of wellness hotels, adventure activities and night clubs in the big cities to cater for their needs.
Poland already counts on a high number of visitors. "Poland had 15 million tourists last year," says Wavrzyniak. That number includes all visitors who spent at least one night in the country.
Poland is especially popular among German visitors as 5.3 million arrived. The country has been in the top ten list of destinations that Germans visited since 2006.
Last year, it was eighth on Germans' list of destinations for bus tours after Italy, Austria and that old favourite of Spain in fourth. Almost all of Poland's border controls with EU nations have fallen since the country joined the Schengen Agreement last year.
Wavrzyniak believes that the move considerably boosted the number of people visiting his country. Among the most popular destinations in Poland are the Masuria region in the northeast, the Baltic Coast and the Karkonosze Mountains on the Czech border.
Poland is also popular as a city-break destination with the old royal city of Krakow welcoming 6.8 million visitors last year making it one of the top urban destinations overall.
"Almost every American that comes to Europe, comes to Krakow," says Wavrzyniak.
Poland is also likely to get another boost through football, regardless of how the country performs at the European Championship, as it is co-hosting the 2012 event along with Ukraine.
Investment in tourist infrastructure such as hotels is taking place with international chains such as the Radisson and Hilton building new branches.
The country's second Sheraton Hotel is due to open in the Baltic seaside town of Sopot.
Poland is also hosting the UN's Climate Conference in September in Poznan which will be something of a test run for 2012 as about 10,000 visitors from 180 nations are expected to attend the event.
from The Earth Times
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Post by pjotr on Aug 14, 2008 22:39:15 GMT 1
Folks,
In the Dutch serious quality press there is more interest in the history, political position,
Polish politics from a Warsaw correspondents point of view, Duth-Polish relationships, and Poland's role as regional power in Central- and eastern Europe. There where quite a few articles about the Polish relationship with Germany and Russia and the tensions or troubles in that connections. Poland is not yet known as a tourist destination. Only a few more cultural interested, developped and nature loving Dutch (most often high educated people) go to Poland for vacation, work or study. I know one Dutch girl from Nijmegen who speak exellent Polish, goes every year to Poland and has more Polish friends in Holland and Poland than Dutch friends (60% Polish and 40% Dutch). If Dutch colleages at her work make Polak jokes or mock Poles she attacks them verbally. The Polish diaspora is growing steadily in some parts of the Netherlands, mainly in the industrial, Urban and agricultural area's in the West and South of my country. I live in the East myself. There is also news coverage about the Polish "workers" community in the Netherlands every now and then. In some Catholic regions of Holland which suffer from secularisation and so empty churches, churches got a revival of religious life because of Polish churchgoers and Polish priests. Some churches are Polonised, other churches have seperate Dutch and Polish masses on sunday.
Pieter
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Post by Bonobo on Aug 24, 2008 22:59:22 GMT 1
Poland A Trip To The Old World Dania Bogle Jamaica Observer Sunday, August 10, 2008 If you're standing in an airport or a railway station and find yourself face to face with a sign with words that have one or no vowels, you might be in Poland. I had not stepped off the plane five minutes in Warsaw when it hit me that I had no clue about the Polish language. It doesn't sound like anything I've ever heard, and it's impossible to look at a word and know what it means. No point in trying to pronounce it either. Take the city where the 12th IAAF World Junior Championships were held, for instance. Bydgoszcz is pronounced Byd-gosh-ch. A view of the Brda River from the city's main bridge. www.jamaicaobserver.com/lifestyle/images/20080809T230000-0500_138884_OBS_POLAND_A_TRIP_TO_THE_OLD_WORLD__1.jpgNo matter how good your own English is, if you end up in a place where the natives don't speak it, all of a sudden you find yourself speaking in broken sentences, monosyllables and using sign language and body signals that would make any traffic cop worth his salt proud. After a while, though, even if you can't pronounce them, you understand what the words mean. For example: wyjscie means exit; some words are spelt the same except for one letter - centralna and centralny both mean central, but the one ending in 'a' is feminine; some words appear to be a poor attempt at English - toaleta (self-explanatory) , but then there are the just plain incomprehensible words such as chrzaszcz meaning beetle. The country has embraced democracy and is now part of the European Union, but there are still a few remnants of the former communist system - the multi-block high-rise apartment buildings - many unpainted - sprinkle the skyline, the trains are practically ancient and trams still in operation. Bydgoszcz, a city of around 400,000, was founded on the banks of the Brda and Vistula rivers sometime in the 13th century. The old town is quaint with a cobblestone marketplace, dotted with small restaurants with outdoor seating. One can take a motorised boat tour from the bridge, which joins the main town and the market, up the Brda past the opera house and the old mill which sit on its banks. The hallmark of the city is a sculpture poised high on a tightrope across the Brda which commemorates Poland's entry into the EU on May 1, 2004. I don't usually have any hang-ups about trying new foods when I travel. In fact, I believe it adds to the experience, even if you hate it, but there are some intricacies in Polish cuisine which can take some getting used to. I was served a UFO (Unidentifiable Food Object) for breakfast one morning. It seemed to me to be a cross between Spam and pate. The German tourist who sat across from me at the dining table said it was liverwurst. With that, I was served four stalks of the bottom end of a scallion, or what is called 'spring onion' in Europe. There was pork patty for lunch one day. Not anything like Jamaican patties, but rather something that looks like hamburger meat, breaded and fried. It caught Jamaica's world junior team technical director Jerry Holness off guard and he nearly ate it thinking it was chicken. Bless the gods he discovered in the nick of time what it was and carefully scraped it off his plate. The Poles do eat a lot of meat including deer and other game, and they serve them with an abundance of accompanying sauces. Abundance of food appears to be part of the culture. The International Association of Athletics Federations (JAAF), by whose magnanimity I attended the WJC, hosted a small dinner for the media covering the event. We were served mountains of fish, beef, pork, vegetables, rice, and chicken, and just when we thought it was over and were preparing to go, the hosts brought out a suckling pig. Yannis, the IAAF's Greece-born media manager, insisted that even if we were full we must at least eat a little to be polite. The oddest idiosyncrasy I found, though, was with the pizza - which Poles eat a lot of. They eat it with ketchup, in much the same way one would eat French fries or a hamburger with ketchup. Best of all, for a Jamaican like myself, Poland is good for boosting self-esteem and self-confidence. It may have something to do with being in the middle of Europe and not being used to peoples of other cultures and races, but I attracted a lot of attention, especially from the children who were adorable. Most Poles too I found to be very polite, pleasant and helpful, and it wasn't strange to have someone shout "hello" to me whenever they passed me in the street. Communication was not easy, though, because most people I encountered spoke little or no English, and though I learnt a few words of Polish close to the end, I woke up to the realisation that as English speakers the world doesn't revolve around us, and there are places in the world we may find ourselves one day where no one will have any idea what we're trying to say and we'll still need to get by. |
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Post by Bonobo on Sept 1, 2008 17:54:49 GMT 1
Eye on Poland: Country at the Crossroads
CNN
9/1/08
Story Highlights:
*CNN turns spotlight on Poland during week of special coverage
starting Oct. 6
*"Eye on Poland" series examines one of Europe's most dynamic
countries
*Series focuses on business, politics, pop culture, sport, stag
weekends
*CNN viewers encouraged to submit their views on what makes Poland
unique
(CNN) -- A nation with a proud past and promising future -- Poland's
influence on the global stage is growing. A driving force in the new
Europe with a skilled workforce spreading its influence beyond its
borders and an economy increasingly attractive to foreign investors --
Poland is making its mark.
"Eye on Poland: Country at the Crossroads" is a week-long CNN
International series focusing on the color and contrast of one of
Europe's fastest developing nations; from business and politics to
pop culture. CNN offers a series of wide-ranging reports on this
complex country tackling a time of transition; from Warsaw to Sopot,
to Gdansk, Krakow and Lodz.
Solidarity Avenue, the Chopin Monument, and the Palace of Culture and Science are just some of the backdrops for CNN's live broadcasts during a week of programming hosted from Warsaw by Fionnuala Sweeney.
The week will include reports from around Poland by correspondents Frederick Pleitgen, Diana Magnay, Phil Black and Zain Verjee. European Political Editor Robin Oakley and U.S. Affairs correspondent Jill Dougherty will also feature prominently in the coverage. CNN's flagship business programme -- Business International -- will concentrate each evening on the personalities and companies driving the economy at home and abroad.
CNN is encouraging viewer participation -- on-air and online -- by
seeking people's thoughts from inside and outside Poland. Viewers and users will be asked to send their videos, pictures and comments via the Eye on Poland Web site on what makes Poland and its people unique.
"We want to hear people's views on Poland and we'll use the best on air and online," says Mike McCarthy, CNN International' s vice
president of coverage and feature programming.
"We're looking forward to some distinctive programming where viewers and users can have their say on how this country has transformed itself in recent years. As our first Central Eastern European destination, this marks an exciting addition to the 'Eye on...' strand."
The "Eye On" series has traveled around the world visiting France,
Russia, India, South Korea, China, South Africa, Brazil and Lebanon.
Daily Coverage
Monday Oct. 6 --Poland: A New Era Begins: Find out why Poland is
becoming more strategically important on the global stage and how it is preparing for its moment in the spotlight as co-host of the 2012
European soccer championships. Glimpse unexpected aspects of Polish life -- from the "fast and the furious" street racers of Lodz to the multinationals making Poland a manufacturing hub for some of world's leading brands.
Tuesday Oct. 7 -- Poland: Strategic Ties: What are Poland's
international allegiances? What is the nation's strategic importance
to the U.S.? How does it now define its relationship with neighboring Russia and interpret the historical legacy left by the influence of the former Soviet giant? How has the political game changed since its accession to the European Union and taking on an active role in NATO?
Wednesday Oct. 8 -- Poland: Booming Business: A look at Polish
business as the zloty strengthens against the dollar, as Poles return to Poland in an improving home economy, and as Poland takes on the new role of an immigrant destination, this time for Indians and Ukrainians. We ask how Poland has brought about this changing business dynamic which now finds itself home to one of the world's fastest growing stock exchanges, and the ninth most attractive real estate market in the world.
Thursday Oct. 9 -- Poland: Springs to Life: CNN seeks out what
defines Poland culturally: from the beauty spot of Sopot dubbed "the Pearl of the Baltic", to the vibrant music scene of its cities where Chopin meets Trance; to a booming brewery industry which will leave you thirsty for more.
Friday Oct. 10 -- Poland by the Poles: From the youth studying at
Krakow University to the immigrant Poles living in Brooklyn -- New
York's "Little Poland" -- we hear from Poles around the world. We
also look at Poles who've made it on the international sports stage,
and look at the "stag weekend" phenomenon that makes Poland a number one destination for Europe's exuberant revellers.
Saturday-Sunday Oct. 11-12: The programming culminates in a half-hour special -- "Eye on Poland: Country at the Crossroads."
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gigi
Kindergarten kid
Posts: 1,470
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Post by gigi on Sept 1, 2008 17:58:47 GMT 1
Eye on Poland: Country at the Crossroads
*CNN turns spotlight on Poland during week of special coverage starting Oct. 6 Sounds like a great series...thanks for the heads up!  |
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Post by valpomike on Sept 1, 2008 20:15:52 GMT 1
Please get back to us just before this goes on, and remind us of this, since Oct. is a way away, and we don't want to miss it.
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Post by Bonobo on Sept 1, 2008 21:06:35 GMT 1
Please get back to us just before this goes on, and remind us of this, since Oct. is a way away, and we don't want to miss it. Mark the dates in your diary/organizer/palmtop/laptop/notebook/computer/mobile phone, whatever you use. ;D ;D ;D |
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Post by locopolaco on Sept 2, 2008 5:51:48 GMT 1
^^^ lol.
there have also recently been a few articles that concentrated on polish-jewish relations, talking about the history etc. with some language mis-usage. there might have been a thread about this here somewhere.
PL seems to be a pretty much a hotbed for tourism but in the early stages or at least the more adventurous go. i think the word needs to get out and then it'll be crazy. of course there are drawbacks to more tourism as many poles like to sight see themselves.
i hear skiing is the big draw for new age crowds. PL slopes are empty and just as good as everywhere else around. i hear of many flying in for an extended weekend in Zakopane. from what i understand, it's overall darn cheap.
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Post by Bonobo on Sept 5, 2008 10:54:07 GMT 1
there have also recently been a few articles that concentrated on polish-jewish relations, talking about the history etc. with some language mis-usage. there might have been a thread about this here somewhere. Infamous Polish concentration camps.... More tourism is prevented by underdeveloped sports facilities, strong currency and insufficient transport structure. Roads!!! Hmmm, cheap.... Unfortunately, Poland isn`t cheap anymore. many people prefer going to much cheaper and more tourist-oriented Slovakia to spending time in Polish skiing resorts. |
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Post by Bonobo on Sept 6, 2008 6:07:08 GMT 1
www.ft.com/cms/s/0/149de75a-6a59-11dd-83e8-0000779fd18c.html?nclick_check=1
Where memory thrives in silence
By James Hopkin
Published: August 16 2008 01:15 | Last updated: August 16 2008 01:15
On a side street in Kazimierz, the Jewish district of Kraków, workmen are carefully restoring the facade of one of the many old tenement buildings. The word Restauracja appears across the top, while lower down Hebrew letters emerge. I ask the owner what these letters mean. “I have no idea,” she replies. And what is the building going to be, a restaurant? “No, a shop,” she answers.
Around the borders of this beautifully decrepit district, this dusty quarter of crumbling town houses and crooked alleys, of abandoned streets and reconstructed synagogues, of green tin roofs and bright red tiles, of hidden courtyards, decorative iron gates and creaking wooden balconies, the new money-seekers creep. It is just as Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz (murdered by the SS) warned in his poetic fable The Street of Crocodiles : “the spirit of the times, the mechanism of economics” transforms a once flourishing community into a “parasitical quarter”.
But all is not lost. Kazimierz resists, as it has always resisted. Founded in the 15th century, the district, with its five synagogues and numerous prayer-houses, established itself as a leading Jewish settlement in central Europe. Before 1939, the community numbered 64,000. The Nazis desecrated or destroyed most of the Jewish sites; the Reform Temple Synagogue served as stables. Moved to a ghetto just over the river Wisla, the Jewish community suffered appalling conditions and, on March 13, 1943, most were murdered or sent to death-camps when the ghetto was liquidated. After the war, 6,000 survivors returned only to face a communist-led pogrom. The state deemed Kazimierz a working-class district, and many remarkable properties and Jewish sites were left to sink into dereliction.
Which makes it difficult to tell the genuine old buildings, weathered by history and severe winters, from those left to rot by the state. This is part of the charm and the challenge of Kazimierz: how much of it is extreme poverty, tumbling bricks held up by wooden stanchions? How much the disinherited heritage of the Jewish community, now little more than 150 people? And how much due to the (post-EU accession in 2004) initiatives to transform this unkempt quarter into an artistic village in which a wi-fi bohemianism prospers inside these same buildings.
Plac Nowy is the realm of the student-boho crowd. The first café-bar in the square is still the most interesting. Singer is crammed with foot-pedal sewing machines embossed with the maker’s name in gold letters. There are three magical (and very smoky) rooms. The first offers strains of daylight, an antique wooden sideboard and, in winter, a real fire. The second is ruby-red, with a wooden bar, a piano, and walls hung with charcoal sketches and broken mirrors. The final chamber is tiny, with boarded-up windows. At weekends, there is cavorting to Polish, Baltic or Jewish folk music, and the sound of empty shot-glasses being slammed down beside half-litres of Zywiec beer.
Other fantastical spaces abound, such as Alchemia, a stylish cafe with several rooms, one of which is reached by walking through a wardrobe. And Mleczarnia, a former Jewish milk-bar, its smoky recesses stuffed with tables, whispers and old radios. But, oh for Schultz’s Street of Crocodiles! Now, there are dozens of bars – all metal and fake marble interiors, with western music and, worst of all, British stag-parties.
Still, if you stay quiet, respectful, inquisitive, there remain hidden pleasures in Kazimierz. There’s a French bakery nestled between buildings long since resigned to desuetude, and, further along the same street, there is the huge wooden former tram depot that housed a go-kart track where Polish Formula One sensation Robert Kubica learned his trade. If you stagger out of Singer at dawn on a Thursday, you will see cages full of pigeons being unloaded from Zuk trucks that look like bread tins on wheels. Smoking men in tatty leather jackets haggle for them, holding the birds in their hands, two red eyes protruding between forefinger and thumb.
Plac Nowy is famous for its markets. Babciu grandmothers sell fruit and veg during the week, balancing their produce on rusty scales using small brown buckets. At weekends, women with bigger hair than in an 1980s pop video sell clothes and cosmetics, while a clutter of ownerless objects, including Jewish artefacts, can be found at the flea-market across the road. And you must try the local speciality, zapiekanka, a toasted half-baguette with tomatoes, ham and mushrooms, topped with melting cheese and chives. Endzior makes the best ones from a serving-hatch in the former poultry slaughterhouse at the centre of the square.
The Jewish presence/absence is constant. A walk down Józefa street offers more strange buildings, pretty balustrades, antique shops, galleries, and a watchmaker who has survived the swift influx of tourist-orientated trades. The High Synagogue rises at the end of the street with its tall first-floor windows marking the men’s prayer room. These days, though, it’s difficult to gather a minyan or 10 men aged over 13 required for Jewish public worship.
Yet it’s just over the cobbles and round the corner from the High Synagogue where I rediscover my favourite part of Kazimierz: Szeroka street. With the Old Synagogue on the south side, and a majestic three-storey Renaissance house on the north side, Szeroka was the bustling centre of Jewish life from the 15th to the 19th century. Now its melancholy air, its intense but strangely peaceful feeling of absence, is a blissful retreat, both from Kraków’s maddeningly overcrowded centre and from the world at large. Unlike much of this dilapidated district, there are trees and birds, and benches from which you can savour the stillness.
Alongside elegant restaurants and stylish hotels, stands the Remu synagogue, perhaps the most striking of the restored sites. I was so moved by it that I set the ending of my novel there. Yet, in recent years, a restaurant has opened next door. On summer days, music from the kitchen encroaches the peace of the cemetery, and disturbs the silence upon which memory thrives.
James Hopkin’s novel ‘Winter Under Water’ is published by Picador
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008See pics from Kazimierz polandsite.proboards104.com/index.cgi?board=krakw&action=display&thread=317
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Post by Bonobo on Sept 10, 2008 18:29:52 GMT 1
One more article about Krakow.
Come on, it`s getting boring. hahahaha
Charming Krakow the cultural capital of PolandCity offers an authentic taste of eastern Europe
Trish Audette
Canwest News Service
Saturday, September 06, 2008
The 24-year-old painter sits in a little bar in Kazimierz, Krakow's
historic Jewish quarter.
"When communism was over," I ask, "what was the first thing you
bought?"
Grzegorz (pronounced g-jay-goj, with hard g's like the word "good")
was just five years old when the Berlin Wall fell about 500
kilometres west of this city, Poland's cultural capital.
"It's too embarrassing, " he says, shaking his head. After some
cajoling and some dramatic pause, he admits: "Barbie."
He explains his grandmother sometimes gave him coins, and he pulled enough money together to purchase the all-American toy. Barbie came with an evening gown -- not appropriate for everyday wear, of course - - and Grzegorz began cutting the bottoms of dresses in his mother's closet so he could fashion bikinis and other outfits for the sun- kissed doll with long blond hair and outlandish curves.
He hid the toy from his father, a butcher who told him communism
was "something old, something over now."
The unlikely purchase, made nearly two decades ago, is a small symbol of how today's young Poles embrace the West, as tourists slowly flood Krakow's Old Town and virtually everyone under 30 speaks near- flawless English.
My best friend, a Canadian, lives in Krakow and teaches English.
Grzegorz is his roommate, and something of a cultural tour guide for
both of us.
"Poland is part of the West now. We are the West," Grzegorz tells me.
Key to this sense of belonging is a completely open economy. English- language billboards offer property for sale, the latest Hollywood movies are available in English with Polish subtitles, and there is sushi, pad Thai or McDonald's for anyone who wishes to skip traditional (beige) Eastern European cuisine.
Brought into the European Union in 2004, nothing stops Poland from being open for business. Even its shared border with the Czech Republic is wide open, as trains chug along a Prague-Krakow route twice a day with no stops for passport checks.
A city of about 750,000 tucked in Poland's southwest, Krakow has
become a hot attraction for British stag parties, and a magnet for
tour-bus-bound groups from other parts of Europe. Considered safer than the Polish capital of Warsaw, Krakow is a cheap plane ticket away from London, for example -- one-way fare can cost as little as $90.
Poland's zloty is not even equal to 50 Canadian cents. In Europe,
that puts it just shy of a third of a euro and just 25 British pence.
The government's budget problems stand in the way of setting a date for Poland to adopt the euro; in the meantime, buying anything from clothing to a bottle of vodka is unlikely to put much of a dent in the wallet of a foreign traveller.
But the beauty of Krakow is in the places where East does not meet
West.
While some call it the new Prague, Krakow is a far cry yet from the
Czech Republic's capital: Krakow's market square is not yet overrun
by tourists; lineups to enter Wawel Castle, on the edge of the
Vistula River, are absolutely manageable.
Where Prague's cafes and restaurants have been taken over by a
soundtrack of Top 40 hits from the last 15 years -- Nirvana, Alanis
Morissette, Kelly Clarkson -- Krakow's eateries are more likely to
play a mix of classic French songs, Polish pop, and remixed American
songs of the '80s and '90s.
Meanwhile, even young people well-versed in the ways of Brits and
North Americans do not yet recognize Starbucks. Here, cafes with
hardwood tables and creaking chairs -- like Dym in the Old Town or
Les Couleurs in Kazimierz -- offer a heavy spoonful of romantic
European ambience with delicious coffee that is absolutely worth any wait.
Good advice: order a "biala," or "white" instead of a latte or
cappuccino. Heavy on milk, this coffee is slightly less expensive
than its foreign-named cousins.
So many of Krakow's buildings are somehow dark and mysterious.
Walking into its Gothic cathedrals is like walking back in time,
hitting a wall of heavy, spiced air. Bars and clubs often sport a
uniquely red-tinged retro feel that can bring Cold War-era spy movies to mind.
But the city's green spaces are bright and open. The banks of the
Vistula are grassy, and on hot summery days you will find tethered
tour boats at the ready. The whole of the Old Town is surrounded by a green belt of trees and benches, fountains and walking paths. Here, everyone seems to stake out a spot to write, read or draw.
Krakow invites the imagination. It is a city alive with artists, in
no small part thanks to a thriving university at its core --
Jagiellonian University was built in the late 1300s as Krakow
Academy. (One of its most famous students was the astronomer
Copernicus in the late 15th century.)
If you can get past the armies of pigeons that roam sidewalks and
swoop from buildings, there are long walks along centuries-old
streets to be had all through the city's centre, and so many unique
or tourist-aimed shops to visit.
At the very heart of Old Town, Cloth Hall sees vendors set up shop
daily to offer souvenir trinkets, traditional dolls, jewelry,
sweaters, and more. Possibly the busiest spot in Krakow, the hall is
narrow and packed on any given day.
To the south of the city's centre, Kazimierz is gentrifying. Once a
Jewish ghetto, this corner of the city is named for a 14th-century
Polish king known for protecting Jews and their rights.
Despite hipster clubs moving into the neighbourhood, Kazimierz still
has its share of Polish grandmothers walking their pets along narrow streets, or sitting at their windows to watch the world.
Krakow's most traditional restaurants are often its most unabashedly kitschy. Take Bar-Szynk, in Kazimierz, where washboards, yokes, gas lamps and even a stuffed rooster hang from the walls.
Behind the bar, beside bottles of unrecognizable local vodka, sit
bottles of Jack Daniels whisky and Kahlua liqueur.
But a favourite spot, for English-speaking ex-pats at least, is
Massolit Books.
Here stories are read to children on Sunday mornings, and biala is
served in the front room. Used and new English books are crammed into four rooms that connect with long and short hallways, while bright- coloured walls and comfortable furniture invite hours of browsing.
- - -
IF YOU GO
- Krakow was founded in the 600s by tribes taking up residence along the Vistula River, in Poland's southwest corner.
- Today, it's Poland's third-biggest city, with a population of
roughly 750,000.
- Krak is the name of Krakow's dragon. According to mythology, before he was destroyed, the dragon preyed on the livestock and virgins of the region. Today, his fire-breathing statue stands guard just below Wawel Castle on the riverfront.
- Tourists can visit a 700-year-old salt mine about 15 kilometres
southeast of Krakow. Guided tours are offered in several languages, including English, and take visitors right into the mine, including its underground chapel built of salt.
- Hipsters who take Lonely Planet books as their guides to everything call Krakow the new Prague -- the same people might call Prague the new Paris and Ukraine's Kiev the new Krakow.
- Krakow is about 75 km west of the town of Oswiecim, population
48,000. Just outside the town lies Auschwitz, a Second World War
concentration camp. All day long, buses leave for the partly standing
camp and its heartbreaking interpretive museum.
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Post by valpomike on Sept 10, 2008 20:55:23 GMT 1
You did not say anything of the great Polish Jazz Music that is there also.
Mike
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Post by Bonobo on Sept 12, 2008 10:24:14 GMT 1
You did not say anything of the great Polish Jazz Music that is there also. Mike Because jazz sucks... ;D ;D ;D I was to a punk and hc rock concert in an underground pub 2 weeks ago. |
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gigi
Kindergarten kid
Posts: 1,470
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Post by gigi on Sept 12, 2008 13:32:56 GMT 1
You did not say anything of the great Polish Jazz Music that is there also. Mike Because jazz sucks... ;D ;D ;D And I thought you were a cultured man!  I was to a punk and hc rock concert in an underground pub 2 weeks ago. What? I thought you didn't like concert crowds? Must have been a more intimate venue. Hey, is this you?  |
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Post by Bonobo on Sept 12, 2008 14:11:09 GMT 1
And I thought you were a cultured man! No need to listen to everything to be cultured.... It wasn`t crowded. There were a few dozen people in the pub and it was still OK. The groups performed two steps from you. One of them was Bora from Lithuania Surprisingly, only my former student (he had invited me to the concert) had a similar hair-do. Other people had dreads. Pics soon..... |
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gigi
Kindergarten kid
Posts: 1,470
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Post by gigi on Sept 12, 2008 14:33:44 GMT 1
Surprisingly, only my former student (he had invited me to the concert) had a similar hair-do. Other people had dreads. Pics soon..... Oh ick, dreads are so gross! I recently went to a Renaissance festival where a 40-something dad and his son had them down to their waist. Anything could have been living (or dying) in those dreads...  |
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Post by valpomike on Sept 12, 2008 17:15:09 GMT 1
Jazz and Punk are no way near the same.
Jazz has been around a long time, and will be here forever,
Punk is just passing by, is new, and will not last.
Go and try real Polish Jazz Music and you will love it.
Is hc hard rock, if it is, that's no good either.
Mike
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Post by Bonobo on Sept 12, 2008 21:08:24 GMT 1
Surprisingly, only my former student (he had invited me to the concert) had a similar hair-do. Other people had dreads. Pics soon..... Oh ick, dreads are so gross! I recently went to a Renaissance festival where a 40-something dad and his son had them down to their waist. Anything could have been living (or dying) in those dreads... They probably looked uncleanly themselves and hence your impression. I must say I looked at those pub dreads with pleasure - they looked fresh, and some were coloured pink and other too. I have great pics, wait patiently.... Jazz and Punk are no way near the same. Jazz has been around a long time, and will be here forever, Punk is just passing by, is new, and will not last. Very interesting remark. It might really be so in the future. Nope. Do you want me to get upset? Do you really want a pissed off admin in the Polish forum?  ?? No, hc is hardcore , it is a kind of punk rock. And one more no, hard rock, though not as good as my favourite heavy metal (European kind, not American pop metal), is still better than jazz. Mike, you must understand it - jazz gives me jitters and headache. To bear it, I must drink alcohol. You know it`s not good to drink to stiffle bad emotions as it might turn into a drinking habit. Do you want to make an alcoholic of me? |
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Post by valpomike on Sept 13, 2008 3:24:26 GMT 1
For each his own, real men love Polish Jazz.
Mike
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Post by Bonobo on Sept 13, 2008 21:11:06 GMT 1
For each his own, real men love Polish Jazz. Mike Nope, I don`t think so. Only sissies like jazz ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D True men prefer dynamic and loud music: heavy metal. |
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gigi
Kindergarten kid
Posts: 1,470
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Post by gigi on Oct 5, 2008 21:17:57 GMT 1
*CNN turns spotlight on Poland during week of special coverage
starting Oct. 6
Monday Oct. 6 --Poland: A New Era Begins: Find out why Poland is
becoming more strategically important on the global stage and how it is preparing for its moment in the spotlight as co-host of the 2012
European soccer championships. Glimpse unexpected aspects of Polish life -- from the "fast and the furious" street racers of Lodz to the multinationals making Poland a manufacturing hub for some of world's leading brands. The series begins tomorrow. These broadcast times were listed on the CNN website: Fionnuala Sweeney reports from Warsaw Oct. 6-10: 0700, 0800, 0900, 1100, 1400 ALL TIMES GMT. If you don't know GMT vs. your time zone, try this site: wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/ |
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Post by Bonobo on Nov 16, 2008 9:44:16 GMT 1
Poland reveals its winter wonders
Ross Young catches a horse-drawn sleigh to Zakopane, home to Poland's top ski resort
Saturday, 8 November 2008
Independent, UK
"What happens now?" I asked. "Now we take a romantic sleigh ride together," replied Alan Garcia.
I'd been in Zakopane for less than two hours and already I was a little nonplussed. I'd fully expected Poland's top ski resort to be a little less modern than its Alpine counterparts. What I hadn't expected was for my journey to the slopes to be Dobbin-powered. As the driver whispered sweet nothings into his horse's ear, I wondered whether this trip to test Poland's premier pistes had been such a bright idea after all.
I needn't have worried. The sleigh that Alan – managing director of an operation called Sunshine World, a specialist in ski packages in Zakopane – had commandeered was an optional throwback targeted squarely at tourists. Visitors can get around more swiftly on public transport or by taxi, and they'll need to: pretty as Zakopane is, with street after street lined with wooden chalets, it's far too big to walk around.
Things took a welcome turn for the modern after I had gingerly dismounted from the sleigh. My pre-trip research had me perversely anticipating my first ride in the 60-year-old cable car to Kasprowy Wierch, the biggest of the half-dozen or so ski areas in and around Zakopane. The downside of using ski infrastructure dating from the Forties: the two-hour queue I might face to board.
However, the cable car had undergone a £14m refit that doubled both its capacity and its speed of travel. Maximum queue times are now around 45 minutes, leaving considerably less time for you to ponder why eight out of 10 people queuing with you aren't skiers but sightseers.
You'll wonder even more once you're up the mountain. Kasprowy Wierch is glorious – a vast, open bowl with fabulous views over Zakopane to the north and across the High Tatras towards Slovenia to the south. Its wide pistes were, at least when I was there, almost deserted despite near-perfect conditions. A carpet of freshly fallen fluff had settled on top of the hardpack of the groomed slopes, making powder skiing a doddle.
The chairlifts (all two of them – Kasprowy Wierch isn't vast by any means) were another pleasant surprise. Until recently, a struggle with a fistful of increasingly soggy paper tickets was part of the boarding ritual in Zakopane. Thankfully, readable cards are now standard and the pre-ride fumble is a thing of the past. However, as up to date as Zakopane's infrastructure is, local business politics are lagging behind. Each lift system has its own charging structure, so you can't use an unfinished pass from one ski area if you head to another the next day.
That's a shame, because skiing a different area each day is one of the things that make a trip to Zakopane so attractive. Each has its own distinctive character – Kasprowy Wierch will test all but expert skiers, while the gentle slopes of Biaka Tatrzañska, Nosal and Symoskowa are perfect for beginners and intermediates. Thanks to powerful floodlights, the latter three remain open until 10pm, so you can sleep in after a big night out and still manage a full day on the slopes.
It may not have hundreds of miles of interlinked pistes, but Zakopane's unthreatening terrain and easily manageable ski areas makes it a good, budget choice. Advanced skiers won't be stretched, though – but that doesn't mean Zakopane has nothing to offer adrenaline junkies.
A couple of mornings later I rose at dawn. I felt bleary-eyed and furry-tongued – until I met the stag weekend party who had also hauled themselves out of bed to spend the morning snowmobiling. These guys had obviously been going for it in no small measure – one of them actually appeared to be perspiring vodka.
After a brief tuition session ("this one's the accelerator, that's the brake"), we were off. As wake-ups go, hurtling over frozen wastes at several dozen miles an hour, splashing through streams, getting some serious air over hill brows and – if you're one unfortunate stag weekender – tipping over sideways and falling face first into a snowdrift is pretty effective. It's cracking fun, too, perfectly perched between risky (snowmobiles can really shift if you want them to) and reassuring (a pair of guides led us all the way and two more brought up the rear).
The stag weekenders had picked a good town for evening entertainment, too. The Krupowki, Zakopane's pedestrianised main drag, is lined with bars offering a wide range of beers as well the obligatory vodka shots for just £1.30 a (generous) measure. There are some good clubs, too, including Prestige, an atmospheric cellar with comfy sofas and a dancefloor just dark enough to tempt patrons into strutting their stuff to Europop anthems.
If you'd rather eat than drink, the Krupowki is also home to plenty of very affordable and surprisingly stylish restaurants. A hearty plate of farfalle puttanesca at Soprano, a classy Italian, set me back £4. Traditional Polish restaurants such as Karczma Siklawa are another great option – particularly if you get a buzz from supping beetroot soup while being serenaded by a folk singer. And, of course, the Scrabble possibilities opened up by the names of dishes such as zur zkojnicki z jajkem lub kielbasa (soup made from sour rye with egg or sausage) are liable to provoke more discussion than a dish costing £2.20 has any right to.
The writer stayed in Zakopane with Sunshine World (020-7581 4736; www.sunshineworld. co.uk) which offers seven nights' half-board in a catered chalet from £495. The trip includes return flights, ski passes, professional coaching, equipment hire, airport transfers.
Apres ski in Krakow
Holidaymakers flying to Zakopane from the UK will most likely pass through Krakow's Balice airport. The city can offer après ski with a difference to anyone willing to stop off for a couple of days on their way home from the slopes. The perfectly preserved square kilometre of the old town, busy in summer, is atmospheric and quiet in winter. It's easy to while away a day exploring its vast market square and maze of cobbled streets or sampling the refined café culture in the nearby Jewish quarter of Kazimierz. There's no off-season for Krakow's renowned nightlife, either – and jazz joints like Boogie and Harris Piano Jazz bar will always reward a visit.
Inghams Short Breaks (020-8780 7710; inghams.co.uk) offers two nights B&B in Krakow at the four-star Hotel Amadeus in Krakow for £295 pp including BA flights from Gatwick. (Pre-bookable transfer from the airport costs £18 one way).
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Post by valpomike on Nov 16, 2008 18:42:13 GMT 1
I have been there a few times, and it is a great place. One that you want to come back to often.
Mike
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Post by Bonobo on Nov 30, 2008 17:14:08 GMT 1
A Country in the Moon, by Michael Moran Farce and romance in God's Polish playground Reviewed by CJ Schüler The Independent, UK Friday, 16 May 2008 Instilled with a love of the music of Chopin by his concert-pianist uncle, the Australian travel writer Michael Moran has long been fascinated with Poland and its history, with its beauty and its horror, and its Quixotic sense of honour born of heroic defeats. His title is taken from Edmund Burke's comment on the partition of 1795, which eerily foreshadows Neville Chamberlain' s 1938 remark about neighbouring Czechoslovakia, and "a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing". All that has changed with Poland's accession to the EU. The Polish language is widely heard in British shops, pubs and building sites. But when Moran arrived in Warsaw soon after the fall of communism, at the head of a motley crew of teachers charged with introducing the Poles to the joys of the free market, the country still held a lunar chill. The conference centre in which they are housed is semi-derelict; their pupils, Polish business people, are immured in the paranoid, nepotistic ways of the nomenklatura; among the sex-starved, vodka-crazed Brits, class resentments turn into open hostility in scenes resembling a campus farce by Tom Sharpe. Having set the scene, Moran plunges swiftly into the terrifying history of the country. Between Russia and Germany, Poland was fated to be the cockpit of Europe or, in the words of the historian Norman Davies, God's playground. Too often in books of this kind one has the sense that the writer is somehow appropriating the great tragedies of history. Moran avoids this pitfall: a visit to Auschwitz is handled with exemplary tact and sensitivity. Moran emerges from these pages as a romantic, a bon viveur, a music lover and a film buff, equally versed in the polonaises of Chopin, the novels of Joseph Conrad and the movies of Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieslowski. He conducts a clandestine affair with unhappily married Zosia, and together they explore the historic cities of her country. His sojourn comes to a premature end when the project's rackety finances expire. The last chapters briskly fast-forward up to the death of Pope John Paul II. As for his romance with Zosia, reader, I wouldn't dream of giving the game away. After Moran's car is broken into in Gniezno, he bemoans the loss of his notebook and the "felicitous phrases" he will never be able to recreate. There are many felicitous phrases in this book; there are also many infelicitous ones. At its best, Moran's writing is richly atmospheric, with real depth and sparkle; too often, the prose is clunky and slapdash, the narrative jump-cuts confusing, while several passages of architectural description and historical anecdote read like something from a Lonely Planet guide. This is a great pity, because there's a much better book in here trying to get out. Fortunately, Moran's deep knowledge of the country and genuine engagement with its people outweigh the deficiencies of this absorbing, exasperating and ultimately rewarding travelogue. ************ ********* ********* ********* ******* Magnetic Poles Rory MacLean on an 'essential' travel book that sets out to celebrate and make sense of Poland's overwhelming history guardian.co. uk, Tuesday May 6 2008 Cultural journey ... Poland was once the largest kingdom in Europe. A Country in the Moon: Travels in search of the Heart of Poland by Michael Moran published by Granta April 24, 2008, £20 Poles give good parties. They sing, drink and laugh with an intensity unequalled in the West. One of the most remarkable shindigs I ever attended was in Warsaw. It was May Day 1990. The Berlin Wall had fallen and eastern Europe was in a state of euphoria. 50 years of totalitarianism – first under the fascists then under the communists – had ended almost overnight. But my passionate and complex Polish hosts weren't content simply to wave the national flag and let off fireworks. Instead, they staged a mock communist celebration, dressing as Pioneers in moss-green shirts and red ties, singing the Internationale, chanting "Red! Red! Red!" so loudly that astonished passers-by stopped and stared from the pavement. "I doubted the wisdom of Lenin's analysis!" confessed a young man. "Shame!" cried his peers. Their dance on the grave of communism was an act of defiance, a celebration of the resilience of the human spirit, which made them feel quite mad, as if the nightmare had come back to haunt them. "The history of Poland," writes Michael Moran in this erudite, humbling and rhapsodic travel book, "is a manifestation of absence, mysteries to be read from fragments, the residue of human action." Once the largest kingdom in Europe, its people's lives, land and moveable cultural heritage have been stolen since Napoleonic times. The Nazis aimed to wipe the place off the map. The communist years led to a complete erosion of ethics outside the family. A Country in the Moon boldly gazes into those absences to make sense of "that incorporeal Poland … that hypnotic phantom" (Tadeusz Konwicki). Not long after my May Day Parody party, Moran moved to Warsaw to manage a business school. He had no links with Poland, other than a death bed pledge to his uncle to try to understand the patriotic roots of Chopin's music. At the school, an hilarious cultural clash unfolds. Suspicious students lie to their teachers, unable to break the habits of a lifetime. Officials massage budgets. The switchboard operator cannot dial any telephone number which includes a "3" (that button is broken). In the surrounding woods, Moran's fellow Western tutors regularly burn effigies of him and he, in return, subjects them to inflammatory character sketches: an Oxford graduate has "marvellous wit but bruised emotions", a Morris dancing tutor from Dorset is "chronically indecisive". His portrayal of the late-communist world is equally evocative: old tower blocks "smell of dog breath", glass cases line hallways displaying lumps of coal and cow fertiliser, the school canteen serves tripe, chicken hearts and "cold pasta with warm strawberry sauce washed down with a pink, faintly perfumed, gelatinous potato drink called kisiel". When Moran escapes the crumbling school, the book is lifted on to another plane. By following the course of the Vistula – one of the last great natural rivers in Europe – and then criss-crossing the country during the first international car rally in generations, he begins to fill the absences in our knowledge. On the road he relates – for example — the history of Partition, when thousands of intellectuals were forced to walk to Siberia – an 18-month journey – where they were chained to wheelbarrows night and day and worked to death. He considers our debt to the 8,500 Polish airmen whose élan and tactics helped to win the Battle of Britain. He details the iniquity of the Katyn massacre and betrayal of the Warsaw Uprising. He celebrates Chopin and the "frisson of close Polish dancing". His breadth of knowledge is profound, his views opinionated, his writing passionate and heart-felt. The result is the best contemporary travel book on Poland, reminiscent in its finest moments of Patrick Leigh Fermor's masterful Time of Gifts. The book is not without faults – it lapses into moments of academic distance, its learning is not always lightly worn – but given the overwhelming weight of history, how could it be otherwise? Poland is "a land of surreal emotions and theatrical gesture … a land of deepest tragedy and a domain of human degradation" . It is unique in its displays of "light and utter darkness". In our cosy, island smugness we seem to have forgotten the critical contribution – and heroic sacrifices – Poland made for the freedom of our shared continent. Poles defeated the Turks at the gates of Vienna in 1683, frustrating the Ottoman's relentless advance. Poles promulgated the first written constitution in Europe. Poles prevented the Red Army from taking Warsaw – hence Germany and perhaps France — in 1920. Poles founded the trade union Solidarity which – inspired by a Polish pope – hastened the collapse of communist regimes throughout East Central Europe. No thinking traveller interested in Poland should overlook this essential book. ************ ********* ********* ********* ** A Country in the Moon: Book review Paul Mansfield is absorbed - and sometimes frustrated - by Michael Moran's account of Poland. Review by Paul Mansfield Telegraph.co. uk 30 May 2008 A Country in the Moon, Travel books A Country in the Moon: Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland, by Michael Moran With Poland in the EU, its plumbers in our kitchens and its food and drink in our high streets, what better time to reassess the largely unknown land of which Edmund Burke remarked in 1795: "with respect to us… might it be considered as a country in the moon"? Yet this engrossing but frustrating book is only partly successful. Michael Moran is a former classical musician and academic who arrives in Warsaw to teach business skills to aspiring locals. The year is 1992, and Poland is struggling to adapt to the free-market economy. We meet Moran's fellow workers, of whom the Poles - labouring to overcome the "duplicitous, and secretive, evasive and slippery" mindset of Communism - prove far more interesting than his English co-workers. The political and financial conniving that bedevil Moran's working life form a narrative thread to the book. Poland, Moran discovers, is a country that for two centuries was a major force in central Europe but that corruption and misrule made ripe for disaster. Invaded by Tartars, Swedes, Germans and Russians, by the late 18th century it had been all but swept off the map. A brief flowering of independence after 1918 was crushed by the Nazis and, following the Second World War, by the returning Russians. Yet the Polish character is remarkable for its resilience. Take Warsaw, all but annihilated in the Second World War but soon rebuilt, and today with its own singular appeal for tourists. "This is a tough city," writes Moran. "To walk here is to be moved to melancholy at the folly and cruelty of human nature. Warsaw inspires an exploration of the deeper heart." Moran writes well of the Polish concept of zal (regret after irrevocable loss) ; of Polish pride, honour and exuberance mingled with pessimism; and of the importance of the Catholic church and the family. He is good on Poland's physical charms - its lakes, mountains and forests, and overlooked cities such as Wroclaw and Poznan. But after a while his narrative becomes bogged down by footnotes, long digressions on music and architecture, folk tales and historical anecdotes. At times it feels as if one is wading through a guidebook. Moran's decision to eschew politics also leaves the book stuck in the early 1990s. One example: a revival of Jewish culture in post-Communist Poland is rightly noted; but more recent signs of an emergent neo-Nazism are not. An interview with a former Prime Minister who hints darkly of a return to the bad old days is summarily cut off. Moran acknowledges that a new generation is emerging of Poles who "could be on a different planet to their elders", but his principal concern is with the past. Fair enough. This well-written book offers some much-needed history lessons, but to find out what really makes your plumber tick you'll need to look elsewhere.   |
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Post by Bonobo on Dec 6, 2008 21:54:09 GMT 1
Greetings from Warsaw!
Friday, 05 December 2008
American Embassy Warsaw Newsletter
November passed very quickly here. It was a very full month, starting off with great interest: the election on November 4 of Barack Obama as President.
Ambassador Victor AsheOver 1,200 people gathered in Warsaw's Hotel Intercontinental for an Election Night event hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce in Warsaw (AmCham), which the Embassy co-sponsored. In addition to the live coverage on giant screens provided by CNN and Poland's TVP, TVN24, and Polsat, guests were treated to live music, a DJ, a great buffet, and a chance to vote in a "mock election" (Senator Obama defeated Senator McCain in this election too).
All Polish television news programs were broadcasting from the event along with major radio stations and print press, with TVN24, Polsat, and TVP remaining throughout the night. Returns started coming in around 2:00 am Warsaw time. Poles were tremendously impressed by both the victory speech by President-elect Obama and the concession speech by Senator McCain. The cordial and respectful tone of each towards the other was well commented on.
Poles, like people in the United States, have discussed actively what a Barack Obama presidency will mean for the issues that concern them, like accession to the visa waiver program or the construction of a missile defense facility. Embassy diplomats and I have taken part in a number of interviews, talks, and panel discussions on the subject over the past month. Polish President Lech Kaczynski and Prime Minister Donald Tusk both sent letters of congratulations to President-elect Obama and spoke personally with him in phone calls on November 7.
November 4 had additional significance for Poles – on that day in Szczecin the Polish Government held an official welcome home ceremony for the last Polish soldiers to return home from Iraq after finishing their successful mission there. President Bush expressed the appreciation of the United States for Poland's distinguished service alongside our troops since the war in Iraq began in an October 29 letter. Although the Polish military has concluded its service in Iraq, it has increased its presence in Afghanistan, where it has taken over primary responsibility for the province of Ghazni. The Poles have hit the ground running – and we hope that the many armored personnel carriers they have received from the U.S. military will help them succeed in their critical mission in safety.
Our recognition of Polish heroism in Iraq and Afghanistan continued with a poignant ceremony at the Embassy on November 19, in which Mrs. Dorota Pietrek received the Purple Heart awarded to her son Dawid Pietrek, who died in Afghanistan on June 14 while serving as a Private First Class in the U.S. Marines. Dawid had immigrated to the United States in 2005 and worked in health care before enlisting. Illinois Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn and Embassy U.S. Marine Security Guard Detachment Commander Sgt. Robert Kunard joined me in expressing our appreciation for Dawid's sacrifice to his mother, his sister Ewelina Pietrek, and his grandmother Jadwiga Huniewicz, who had traveled to Warsaw from Police, near Szczecin, for the occasion. The ceremony was covered by the Polish public television channel TVP.
In happier news, we have taken further steps toward the official launch of a year of celebrating the 90th anniversary of U.S.-Polish Diplomatic Relations in 2009. The United States not only was the lead country pushing for an independent Poland as part of the peace plan for the end of World War I, but was also the first country to recognize the new Polish government. The finishing touches are now being put on a book, jointly produced by the Polish Foreign Ministry and the U.S. Embassy, which will commemorate our shared history. On November 7, I took part in a conference at the Igancy Jan Paderewski Museum in Warsaw's Lazienki Park to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Poles in Jamestown, Virginia. That same day, I visited the Rogow Forestry and Environment Experiment Station of the Warsaw University of Life Sciences (SGGW) to preview a site that will host a new North American Trail in honor of the 90th anniversary.
The environment and climate change are topics of much conversation in Poland, with the 14th annual UN Conference on Climate Change (COP-14) running December 1-12 in Poznan, Poland. The Polish Government and all embassies have been busy preparing for the 8,000 delegates and 600 news reporters that will descend on the western Polish town for the follow-on to last year's conference in Bali and precursor to Copenhagen in 2009. The U.S. Delegation will be led by Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky. Several Members of the U.S. Congress are also expected, if Congress does not extend its session throughout that period. The U.S. goal for the session is to make forward progress for a possible new international agreement on climate change to be reached next year in Copenhagen. During the conference, the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan plans to confer an honorary doctorate on former Vice President Al Gore, who will attend the conference. In anticipation of the Poznan events, the Warsaw School of Economics (SGH) hosted climate change expert and former CIA Director James Woolsey for a well-received talk on November 13.
Other distinguished visitors this month included an American astronaut with Polish ancestry: George Zamka, a pilot for the Space Shuttle Discovery. Zamka visited Warsaw, Olsztyn, Krakow, Chorzow, and Sopotnia Wielka November 16-23 for public talks, meetings with students, and interviews with the press. At a reception at my Residence on November 17, Zamka helped me present awards to students who participated in and won prizes in two space-related contests sponsored by the Embassy with the Students' Space Association and with Fundacja Wspomagania Wsi (Rural Development Foundation). Zamka also presented to the Museum of Polish Army during a ceremony on November 18 a Kosciuszko Squadron patch that was produced by Polish film producer Adam Ustynowicz – which had flown in space with him on the Discovery. The Embassy had recently given the museum a grant to make upgrades to their Kosciuszko Squadron exhibit.
At the same time that our thoughts have turned to celebrating Thanksgiving, we have also been reaching out to thank and highlight 16 Polish individuals who have done great work in their activities to end gender-based violence. Starting with the November 25 International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, we have been featuring a new profile each day as our participation in the U.N.-sponsored "16 Days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence." We have already profiled such women as Manuela Gretkowska, Renata Durda, Malgorzata Tarasiewicz, and Monika Ksieniewicz. To learn more about these remarkable individuals and a dozen others, please visit our website.
Other noteworthy events this month include the Pole's celebration of the country's 90th anniversary of independence at the end of World War I. The Embassy's Marine Security Guards participated in the November 11 march in Warsaw, with our flag enjoying a place of honor during the ceremony. A week later, the Special Olympics International Torch Run relay passed through Warsaw, making a stop by the Embassy, where I was privileged to greet them with brief remarks, and I also hosted the participants and organizers for a reception at my residence. In a related event, Polish medal-winning athletes from the Beijing Olympics and previous Olympics joined American basketball players from the Polish professional league in a luncheon at my Residence on November 24. The Embassy and the Fulbright Commission also produced an excellent education conference for International Education Week on November 18.
As we look forward to the holiday season, we will still find ourselves fully engaged in other activities. In addition to the climate change conference in Poznan, the last of the original order of F16s Poland purchased will arrive on December 11, we will launch a new documentary contest with Polish Public Television TVP for the 90th anniversary, and negotiating teams will continue to meet to conclude the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). We also look forward to the Social Security Totalization Agreement being implemented in the early part of 2009.
I wish you all a safe and happy holiday season.
Sincerely Yours,
Victor Ashe
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Post by Bonobo on Dec 21, 2008 16:25:34 GMT 1
Poland here, and Poland nowby Alan Lockwood
Brooklyn Rail, NY
12/12/08
Poland's 1989 elections ended communist rule, and have earned twentieth-anniversa ry acclamations. With economic pain worldwide, an Economist piece on Eastern and Central European nations under strain said that in Poland "things look better," by a sturdy margin. Relations with Russia remain testy: At a South Ossetian checkpoint in November, President Kaczynski rattled sabers along with his ally, Georgia's Mikhail Saakashvili, and the August agreement to host ten U.S. interceptor missiles met with a Russian general's bald threat. During a September trip at the invitation of the Polish Cultural Institute (PCI) in New York for concerts and recitals of the Warsaw Autumn Festival, I asked a question on the missile accord at dinner with a music publisher, and got a wry smile. Governmental one-upmanship with their near neighbor left Poles nervous, he said, but they feel nevertheless that immediate alternatives are best with the West.
www.brooklynrail.org/article_image/image/4716/lockwood1-web.jpgStudent groups at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Photos by Alan Lockwood.
The Warsaw Pact decades were hard. Much of the nation's production shipped east, and an acquaintance I looked up in Warsaw recalled a family outing during martial law in the 1980s that landed the dad in jail when a butchered goat, hidden in the car trunk by sympathetic country relations, was confiscated at a Warsaw roadblock. During the Second World War, most people had fought for Poland's independence, not Soviet "liberation. " In The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz's anti-totalitarian tract, he writes of resistance fighters imprisoned after the Germans' defeat—"another of History's ironic jokes"—in a land that never demonstrated much taste for communism. Milosz terms the social quandary that followed "metaphysical Ketman": the mandatory masking of what you think and feel.
The Holocaust remains the awful national intractability, centered there as it was, both statistically and operationally. Poland's 3.5 million Jews comprised 10 percent of the population in 1939. Only 300,000 were alive in 1945, making Jews the majority of Poland's six million war dead. This reality grew even worse when, around 1968, the government countered civil unrest with "anti-Zionist" platforms. Most of the remaining 40,000 Jews saw that more plainly as anti-Semitism, the prime weapon of European nationalism, and chose to emigrate. In New York this autumn, Tovah Feldshuh starred in the play Irena's Vow, about Irena Gut Opdyke, a Catholic Pole who saved a dozen Jews in the basement of a German major. (In 2008, another hero died: Irena Sendler, who smuggled several thousand children from the Warsaw Ghetto.) Feldshuh, who played Golda Meir in a Broadway hit in 2003, traveled to Poland for a PBS special. At a Polish Consulate event, she declared that "the great synagogues of Poland are now malls," then said when one meets a Polish intellectual, one should be prepared for a person acutely attuned to contradiction and complexity. To an outsider, such contradictions can leap out of the very language: In Warsaw's Old Town, a cobbled lane named Piekarska has a square, Piekielko, execution site for the seventeenth- century nobleman Michal Piekarski, who tried to kill King Zygmunt III as he entered a nearby church (his gibberish under torture became a Polish expression for nonsense: "muttering like Piekarski"). This grasp that Feldshuh acknowledged derives from deep, perilous experience, and can boggle a mindset that prefers seeing the world in black and white, especially when that attitude derides "intellectualism. " While it may be possible to view Poland strictly in its current, robust guise, it's perhaps more instructive and accurate to see it through the layers and ambiguities that resonate everywhere in a nation where such an important portion of its history was annihilated so recently.
Up the Finnair MD-11's bustling aisle stood pianist and composer Anthony Coleman, en route to play a Lithuanian festival. Over the Atlantic, from dinner 'til dawn, we pored over my PCI itinerary. Coleman said that Autumn Festival LPs were decisive in his development: leading composers' work as interpreted by top Polish orchestras and ensembles, with fluency and polish that new compositions were not then receiving in the West. He noted a scheduled stop in Krakow at director Tadeusz Kantor's foundation, and recalled Kantor plays at La Mama such as Wielopole, Wielopole, which radicalized Coleman's spatial conceptions. The concert of Mauricio Kagel's 1898, scheduled on the festival's closing day at the renowned Lutoslawski Radio Concert Studio, also piqued his interest; a spring event he'd organized at Merkin Hall included a rare Kagel performance (the Autumn Festival concert became a tribute, as the Argentine composer died the day of our flight, at 76, in Cologne).
At Warsaw's Chopin Airport, PCI music programmer Ania Perzanowska collected me and Steven Lankenau, the Brooklyn Philharmonic' s programming director. Our base, the Victoria Hotel, alongside the Saxon Gardens, lay like a great H tipped on its backside, bone-toned with copper-tinted windowpanes. A guidebook declared the Victoria to have been "Warsaw's most exclusive hotel" in the late 1970s, and two Varsovians I know mentioned youthful visits in the gleaming lobbies when their parents had out-of-country visitors. From a top-floor window mists obscured the Palace of Culture and Science, erected by the Soviets in the mid-1950s as Europe's second tallest building. The PCI group, with Jessica Schmitz of the Electronic Music Foundation and Michael Lawrence of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, crossed Pilsudski Square in a drizzle. Named for the first head of state after Poland regained independence under the Versailles Treaty (the marshal who'd repulse a 1920 Soviet invasion), Pilsudski was the site of the 1979 mass by the former bishop of Krakow, Pope John Paul II, in a crucial rebuke to communist authority. We toured the immense Teatr Wielki, home of Poland's national opera and ballet companies. It took decades to recover the Wielki from war damage; on reopening in 1965, it was one of the planet's imposing performance facilities. A yawning metal service lift took us to a sky-lit prop workshop, and to a climate-controlled vault densely organized with costumes, fashioned in-house, that span the operatic canon. Dinner with Krzysztof Knittel, impish VP of the Polish composers' union, was followed by the festival opening at the National Philharmonic Hall. Krzysztof Urbanski conducted the Warsaw Phil in Giacinto Scelsi's choral masterpiece, Uaxuctum, chocked with fearsome crags of sound, then in the cante jondo of Mauricio Sotelo's Si después de morir, with the singer Arcangel winning audience acclaim.
Gray morning light tinged ancient buildings on Market Square in the Old Town, a UNESCO Heritage site. They bear the date "1953," when Warsaw was rebuilt, the Germans having destroyed 85 percent of the city in 1944 after crushing the Warsaw Uprising. Narrow ways in the Old Town's core abound in stone doorframes, hewn centuries ago. Studiously reassembled, they're now thickly patterned by bullet pocks. The imposing Royal Castle, home to presidential offices when Poland was free, was left in rubble during the communist era. In the Autumn Festival offices overlooking Market Square, director Tadeusz Wielecki said that, in solidarity, the festival had skipped one year in its half-century of operation, to defy the government that imposed martial law. Funding plunged when capitalism ran rampant in the 1990s, but with commitments of $500,000 from the culture ministry and the city Wielecki's planning three years down the track. At Polish TV and radio headquarters, conductor Tadeusz Wojciechowski led an energetic Schumann rehearsal by Sinfonia Iuventus, an age-limited orchestra founded to offer conservatory grads jobs in Poland. That evening, in a white-tile private room at the Gessler's U Kucharzy, a chef minced steak tartar on a castored butcher block as we met with composer Pawel Mykietyn. Mykietyn's hundred-minute, willfully ambitious Mark's Passion had just premiered, in Wratislavia (highlights include guitar onslaughts and an ecstatic soprano having it off with the orchestra). Cigarettes followed pastries, and Steven Lankenau asked Mykietyn for, say, three suggestions for visitors. The composer offered one: the few remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Breakfast at the Victoria included fresh plums, cured Baltic fish, strong coffee and torte cubes dense with mak (poppy seeds), then Michael Lawrence and I crossed the Marszalkowska tram lines to the former Ghetto, stacked with housing blocks, glass towers, construction cranes. Four hundred thousand Jews—a third of Warsaw's population—were walled into its two square miles by 1942. Typhus, malnutrition and German cruelty killed a hundred thousand people, then forced removals swept Jews through the Umschlagplatz to Treblinka-bound cattle cars. A thousand ZOB insurgents took up a hopeless month-long battle in 1943, armed with a few dozen pistols and rifles. The Ghetto Uprising, Europe's first urban rebellion against German occupation, resulted in the district being razed. Pedestrian paths within one block led us to the compact Nozyk Synagogue, which survived as a German storehouse and is the city's sole active synagogue. A shell-battered brick factory and a collapsing tenement still stand at Mirowski and Walicow, too far south to have been obliterated in the aftermath.
Dinner at Smaki Warszawy with Pawel Szymanski and his wife turned not to the composer's influential sur-conventionalist approach (of a recent commission, he said "I assume they want it not easy"), but to the large prize just given to his younger colleague Mykietyn. Szymanski's limpid settings for director Krystian Lupa's Zaratustra was awarded Best Score of 2005 by Teatr magazine (available on EMI, as are Szymanski solo piano and string quartet discs). We crossed the Vistula River to Praga, heart of Warsaw's gallery scene. The late-night program at the converted Fabryka Trzciny complex peaked with soprano Agata Zubel's Cascando, its denouement as bruised and beautiful as its Beckett lyrics.
A wall of Monika Strugala's office at the Chopin Institute is adorned with faint pencil sketches of the composer at his piano. Strugala, project coordinator for the 2010 Chopin bicentennial, told us of the design by Milan team Migliore + Servetto to fit cutting-edge biographical exhibits into Ostrogski Palace, home of the Chopin Society. She praised minister of culture Bogdan Zdrojewski, "the first minister who talks about perspectives, not just `tomorrow.' The government changed in October," she said of prime minister Donald Tusk ousting President Kaczynski's twin in 2007, "and thank god, because the previous one was terrible." Lunch at the venerable theater club U Aktorow introduced us to composer and dramatist Boguslaw Schaeffer and his Aurea Porta team, gearing up for his eightieth-birthday events. Soft spoken and wily, Schaeffer's deft arms handled an air violin as he asked, "Where are pieces for two strings?" Chuckling at the pleasure of writing what no one's done—"even more so, to do something no one else can do"—Schaeffer continues challenging a culture that's endured tyranny and oppression and where, as another acquaintance put it, "people are not afraid to fail."
A taxi took me south to the Teatr Nowy (New Theater) offices of director Krzysztof Warlikowski, whose Krum at BAM took a 2008 Obie award. (Warlikowski was to have opened Gerard Mortier's 2009 season—now canceled—at New York City Opera.) Dramaturge Piotr Gruszczynski indicated a hangar-sized building slated to be renovated into Nowy's auditorium, before cultural funding shifts to Poland's co-hosting of the 2012 Euro Cup. Warlikowski' s (A)pollonia premieres this spring, and Nowy plans city-wide, serialized handouts of novels by young writers. Nearby, a billboard featured economist Joseph Stiglitz (the Nobel laureate has extolled Poland's gradual restructuring after shock therapy against inflation). At the back of a narrow jewelry shop, booksellers dug out a stained, hand-stapled samizdat excerpt from Witold Gombrowicz's renowned diary (dead in exile in 1969, the writer's harshly comic works weren't available in Polish bookstores until the late 1980s). Dinner with music publisher Andrzej Kosowski had him skip his night train to introduce our group to Mad Dogs, shots of Zubrowka rye vodka with berry extract and drops of hot sauce. He taught Jessica Schmitz the word tak ("yes"), which she'd use to general mirth when the waiter inquired about more rounds.
Central Poland, once carpeted in Europe's vast forests, was roamed by bison from which Zubrowka takes its name. Checker-boarded with small farms, it lay out the windows of the Krakow train, thicketed with sunflowers, lanes lined with laden apple and pear orchards, fields wedged with cabbages the size of purple basketballs. For centuries, this land was the switching yard among competing empires, a fate that gives Norman Davies' monumental history its title: God's Playground. Divided through the nineteenth century by Russia, German kingdoms and the Austrians, Poland's émigrés sustained its identity: Paris was where national poet Adam Mikiewicz wrote, and Chopin died (his embalmed heart went to Warsaw's Holy Cross cathedral); Shakespearean heroine Helena Modjeska left in the 1870s for a utopian colony in California; Joseph Conrad's unsurpassed English prose signifies an ultimate exile effort.
Krakow's Romanesque and medieval structures help make the nation's ancient capitol a tourist magnet. In the lobby of our hotel, the elegant Francuski near the fortified Barbican Gate, a Muzak version of the Stranglers' "Golden Brown" gave an eerie break from Polish radio's penchant for stadium rock. Krakow wasn't bombed in the second World War, and the vibrant streets make for elusive contrasts to rebuilt Warsaw. Is the latter a simulation, and if so, are history's specters and resonances any less graphic and pertinent than standing, for example, before St. Andrew's eleventh-century steeples? After seeing Veit Stoss's grand Gothic altar at St. Mary's, which towers over the central square, we passed the Jagiellonian University, where Copernicus studied. The Kantor Theater Foundation director showed plans for a brace-shaped, rust-glass administrative building, which will envelop a power plant being converted along the Vistula. Within the sprawling Wawel Castle, on riverside heights and convincing evidence of Fortinbras's Polish foe in Hamlet, we saw tombs of royalty and poets, then met in the Kazimierz district with Robert Gadek of the Jewish Culture Festival, focused since 1988 on education, cooking, film and performance (the Sephardic project of Brooklyn's Elysian Fields played this year's fest). "It's about changing minds a little bit: If you have interest, if you have doubts, come," he said for the sake of enthusiasts and skeptics of a renewed Jewish presence in what had been a thriving township of synagogues and markets (Schindler's List scenes were shot there). In their auto, Gombrowicz scholars Klementyna Czernicka and Janusz Marganski sped me through the Krakow nightfall for curtain time at the Stary Teatr, where director Michal Zadara's Iphigenia emitted much sound but little fury (the 2009 Philly Fringe hosts Zadara's production of Gombrowicz's cataclysmic romp, Operetta). Two electronic music mavens, Lukasz Szalankiewicz and Marcin Barski, kept Steven Lankenau and me out 'til all hours at a club called the Lovely Dog. Tatankas, apple juice and Zubrowka, were my chosen potion, then steely rain and a seat on the 8am Auschwitz coach were the hair of that dog….
The PCI group headed to Zakopane, the Carpathian Mountain resort town near the Slovakian border, while my itinerary accommodated a request to first visit Auschwitz, west of Krakow. An hour-long introductory film screened during the bus ride, but preparation doesn't exist for the site where more than a million people were murdered in less than three years. The Auschwitz memorial was operational two years after the Soviet army arrived in January 1945. Most visitors are Polish, a large percentage on school trips, and the scale of German engineering is unforgettable. Without even the pretense of a collaborationist government, the Reich annexed the southwest of defeated Poland, located at Europe's geographic center and already webbed with rail interchanges. Eight local villages were destroyed, with the name of one, Oswiecim, Germanized to "Auschwitz." An artillery base was commandeered and staffed by the SS, its two-dozen brick barracks filled first, in 1940, with Polish resistance suspects and intelligentsia. Forced labor produced chemicals and artificial rubber at munitions factories established nearby, including an extensive IG Farben works. Only at Auschwitz were inmates' forearms tattooed; in 1941, Zyklon B was tested for slaughter (a manor-like building housed the canisters), and the low hospital where Josef Mengele worked stands near the gate. Almost fifty feeder camps were developed and, as the Final Solution got underway in 1942, the death camp at Birkenau was built three kilometers away. A smattering of fifty-foot-long plank huts have been preserved at Birkenau, which today is a stark landscape of skeleton chimneys. The squat guard tower overlooks this infamous acreage from the brick gatehouse, which gives through to the rail siding where SS medical officers sent undocumented masses of Europe's Jews and "inferior races" to four gas chambers and incinerators operating where the woods begin. In 1944, a Hungarian government edict transported 440,000 Jews here, overwhelming those ovens. On their retreat, the Germans demolished Birkenau's incinerators, but the lesser one at Auschwitz remains, and tours pass through the false shower room to where metal carts on rails fed corpses into nine ovens. A tight plaza above ground holds the camp gallows, where Commandant Rudolph Hoess, whose family had occupied the hedge-enclosed home a stroll away, was brought to be hung after his postwar trial. Vitrines in the barracks hold two tons of hair shorn for marketing to German fabric manufacturers, along with rail tickets sold to Greek Jews, and notes slipped to sympathizers through electrified razor wire in failed attempts to engage the West.
Heavy weather at the Krakow bus station turned to cold rain in the southern highlands. Clouds enveloped Gubalowka Mountain's sheer rock faces, which loom as Zakopane's picturesque backdrop. The study group, whittled down to three, heard one fierce Gorale string combo at dinner, then another highlander band for baked apples at a cozy establishment on the Krupowki, the steep pedestrian street on which Gombrowicz opens Cosmos, his brutal, exacting 1965 novel. In morning rain, we trooped to the valley market (sheep cheese, tart berry preserves, mushrooms in oil; fleece booties and raw-wool socks), then to Villa Atma, the wooden home of composer Karole Szymanowski, family friends with pianist Artur Rubinstein. (His opera King Roger was revived this summer at Bard, and in Mariusz Trelinski's more acclaimed production, conducted by Valeri Gergiev at Edinburgh's International Festival). The Museum of Zakopane Style resides in one of Stanislaw Witkiewicz's ornate, steep-roofed manor houses. Luscious, frequently jolting portraits by Witkacy, the architect's home-schooled son, were displayed. Witkacy would posthumously become Poland's brash voice of modernism and a cornerstone of contemporary Polish theater, having killed himself as the Germans and Soviets overran Poland in September 1939.
Above the Warsaw train station, stars dangled beyond the bronze-lit Palace of Culture and Science. Many Poles felt the portico-capped tower and colonnaded annexes deserved an end similar to the demolition, after Poland's independence in 1918, of what was then the city's tallest structure, a monolithic Russian Orthodox cathedral on Pilsudski Square. ("Pole and Russian," writes Czeslaw Milosz, "have never loved one another.") A late concert in the Ochota Sports Centre, of pieces for beatboxers, was followed by a tepid combo in a Warsaw jazz club and a late-night Silesian sausage soup, served in a hollowed-out onion loaf.
www.brooklynrail.org/article_image/image/4721/lockwood2-web.jpgThe Vistula River bridges in Warsaw.
Brunch at Pawel Mykietyn's apartment, arranged during our dinner the previous weekend, yielded insights into the composer's dozens of theater collaborations with Krzysztof Warlikowski. The actor who played the lead in Warlikowski' s Krum, Jacek Poniedzialek, joined us, pointedly comparing rehearsal approaches of Warlikowski and TR artistic director Grzegorz Jarzyna. Mykietyn's desk was soon strewn with scores, with our PCI guide Ania Perzanowska, a cellist herself, in the thick of the sonorous cello sonata and Mykietyn's three-year-old son grinning in an armchair as the hi-fi played interwoven accelerandos that propel the dad's second symphony. At TR Warszawa that evening, the revival of Jarzyna's Magnetism of the Heart mainlined and double-clutched with the company's thrilling vigor. On exiting for dinner with Cezary Kosinski—Macbeth in TR's Dumbo production last June—teen cliques..." pounced for photos and his autograph. Jarzyna drove to Gessler's bistro, where overflowing crowds set their plates and vodka shots on parked autos. At the Old Town's brink, past stone steps falling to the riverbank, we were nodded into a club without a sign for a private birthday behind a velvet curtain. At dinner, Jarzyna had said that Edinburgh just picked Macbeth for their '09 opening night, utilizing the mobile staged constructed for the Dumbo production. On the club settees, he essayed on the influence of Witkacy, and Gombrowicz's "masks upon masks," then spoke of a "maybe thirty minute" movement sequence in his new piece on Pasolini, set for a December premiere. Deep in the morning, we passed a restaurant where Jarzyna said Gombrowicz used to skeptically observe Young Poland's leading literary lights, in a nation that wouldn't exist after its twentieth birthday.
On the sunny afternoon of our final day, we saw the Warsaw Rising Museum, in a converted tramway power plant on Przyokopowa Street. Brimming with up-to-date curating, jagged with its ghastly story, the fact that it's only existed for four years reveals again forces in Poland's conflicting past. In June 1944, the Home Army fought the uprising, but were then shunned by communists who deemed them counterrevolutionar ies. The uprising, planned to jumpstart Western support or intervention by the Soviet Army watching from the Vistula's far bank, did neither. Two months later, with 200,000 Varsovians dead, the city was emptied then systematically wrecked. We had a reviving lunch in actress Kasia Figura's snazzy restaurant, KOMunikat, in the PAST telecom building, a site of intense fighting during the uprising. At the National Philharmonic Hall, the Autumn Festival closed with Oscar Strasnoy's The End, a vigorous send-up of classical pomposities. Humor must fail in the face of ineradicable realities here, from the Holocaust to hostile foreign occupations. But the audience response indicated that, as Polish comics showed in the 1970s with double-speak social critiques, a particularly clear-eyed, complex-minded Polish capacity to laugh endures.
In November, the Rail ran Alan Lockwood's piece on Polish master filmmaker Andrzej Wajda, whose 2007 feature on Soviet wartime massacres, Katyn, receives US distribution this February.
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Post by Bonobo on Jan 3, 2009 23:56:43 GMT 1
Charity starts at home Poland Monthly December, 2008 www.polandmonthly.pl/more.php?id=S1228820551PM493e5047831ef&div=Issues
The third sector in Poland isn’t nearly as well developed as it is in the West, mostly due to historical factors. However, there a number of well
established charities and more are constantly being founded
Christmas is just around the corner, which for most of us means gifts, time spent with loved ones and the traditional festive meal, whether that’s carp or turkey in your house. There is another side to Christmas though, which is often one of the most difficult times for the less fortunate in society. As charities struggle to raise funds and awareness of their work amongst Poles, the government is working on improving legislation to help organizations working in the third sector. If you’re not thinking “bah humbug” by the end of the article, we’ve profiled a number of charities operating in Poland along with details of how to volunteer or donate to them.
There are certainly differences in Poland’s third sector compared to its counterpart in more affluent Western countries. This difference is attributed to a combination of factors, beginning with the lack of a coherent charitable tradition in Poland. Added to this is the legacy of the sector’s poor status under Communism and the fact that income levels are generally lower in Poland than in countries where the sector has a high profile, such as Germany and Great Britain.
In terms of claims that there is no tradition of charity in Poland, they seem to be largely unfounded. Pre-World War II there was certainly a strong tradition of philanthropy in Poland. In the late nineteenth century, Henryk Jordan launched the first of a number of parks – ogrody jordanowskie – which provided sporting facilities and meals for children in Kraków. His is not an isolated case, in the wake of First World War, celebrated pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski and Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz organized a committee to raise money for Polish victims of the war.
Undoubtedly the status of charity in Poland suffered under Communist rule. Philanthropy was condemned as bourgeois and independent associations operating in the areas of education, healthcare and welfare were banned.
More recently, the charity extravaganza which proceeded the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004 showed Poles to be at least as charitable as their neighbours in the region. Shipments of aid, financed by the government in cooperation with NGOs were sent, worth a total of PLN 1m. This was comparable to the Czech response although significantly less than Hungary’s donation. The huge popularity of events such as the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity (WOŚP) is also indicative. Founded in 1993, the annual event has raised over USD 96m for public hospitals in the last 15 years.
For many, a criticism of the charity sector is that organizations are doing a job, which should be done by the government. The Ministry of Labour and Social Policy (MPiPS) is the main branch of government involved in the sector, providing legal advice, funding and support. The Ministry works within the framework of the Public Benefit and Volunteer Work Act, introduced to strengthen cooperation between the government and the NGO sector. The act makes provisions for the foundation of public benefit organizations, which are entitled to a waiver on corporate income tax and air time on public media free of charge. Conscripts serving substitute military service may work for such organizations and personal income taxpayers may donate 1 percent of the tax calculated to one of them.
Marta Żołędowska from the MPiPS focused on the 1 percent of income tax donated to charity as one of the major successes of the ministry. „When the law first came in, not many people were donating their one percent because the procedure was so complicated, but now it’s much easier and we’re seeing a great response.“ There are problems however, with many charities critical that they are unable to build up a relationship with donors who remain anonymous under the scheme, or simply thank them. People are also not able to split their donation between a number of causes and the scheme favours the country’s biggest charities over donations to individuals or smaller, local organizations. Żołędowska admitted that the system could be better “We want to make it simpler, more time efficient and more friendly to smaller projects and organizations.”
Charities have also expressed concern over plans to allow taxpayers to donate their one percent of income tax to political parties. They fear that this will send money which would have gone to charity out of the sector and change the public’s perception of the scheme.
One area where the system in Poland differs from many other countries is fundraising linked to sport. In certain other countries major sporting events such as marathons are used as a way to generate huge amounts of money for charity. The London marathon leads the way in this area, with organizers claiming that statistics such as the GBP41.5m raised in 2006 and the 78 percent of runners raising money for charity in 2007 make it the biggest fundraising event in the world. Similar events held across the globe also raise huge sums. Participants in the recent Nike organized 10km Human Race in Warsaw were given the option to give a percentage of their registration fee to charity, although Polish runs generate a fraction of the money raised in other countries.
Marek Tronina, Director of the Warsaw Marathon, explained why organizers themselves don’t give a proportion of each runners’ registration fee to charity. “We don’t give part of the registration fee to other organizations for two reasons – firstly the registration fee doesn’t even cover the costs of participation in the race, so giving money away would be against the interests of the foundation. Secondly we can’t do it for statutory reasons. We are classified as an organized collecting financing to promote sport so transferring money to charities would not be in accordance with our mission.” It’s not all doom and gloom though, as the Marathon organizes charity events such as the Rat Race, in which employees dress up in office wear and run in teams to raise money for charity. “This year, we raised around PLN 65,000 for charity through these schemes.” Tronina adds.
In terms of runners raising money themselves, the situation is less than encouraging. According to Tronina, the idea is virtually unheard of, and not just because of a lack of action amongst runners, which he admits is a factor. He points to a lack of awareness amongst potential donors as a major barrier. “I know someone who tried to raise money for charity by approaching companies for sponsorship, and he found it really difficult to get people to understand and support his idea.” He added that the organization is aiming to popularize the idea in the coming year.
The huge untapped potential in the third sector in Poland is reflected in its rapid growth over the last twenty years. Increasing cooperation between the government and NGOs as well as the popularity of charity events dependent on public support indicate that this growth will continue. So whether you want to help disadvantaged children, recovering addicts or the ill, contact one of the following charities – it’s time to do your bit. |
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tomek
Nursery kid
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Post by tomek on Jan 4, 2009 14:38:03 GMT 1
There are certainly differences in Poland’s third sector compared to its counterpart in more affluent Western countries. This difference is attributed to a combination of factors, beginning with the lack of a coherent charitable tradition in Poland. Added to this is the legacy of the sector’s poor status under Communism and the fact that income levels are generally lower in Poland than in countries where the sector has a high profile, such as Germany and Great Britain. Undoubtedly the status of charity in Poland suffered under Communist rule. Philanthropy was condemned as bourgeois and independent associations operating in the areas of education, healthcare and welfare were banned. More recently, the charity extravaganza which proceeded the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004 showed Poles to be at least as charitable as their neighbours in the region. Shipments of aid, financed by the government in cooperation with NGOs were sent, worth a total of PLN 1m. This was comparable to the Czech response although significantly less than Hungary’s donation. The huge popularity of events such as the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity (WOŚP) is also indicative. Founded in 1993, the annual event has raised over USD 96m for public hospitals in the last 15 years. Charities have also expressed concern over plans to allow taxpayers to donate their one percent of income tax to political parties. They fear that this will send money which would have gone to charity out of the sector and change the public’s perception of the scheme. [/i][/quote] I consider Poles are suporting charitys. Wielka Orkiestra Œwi¹tecznej Pomocy gathers moneys from peoples, many millions, in January. Whnen there happen disaster, and a house is buried to the ground on fire, or flooded village gets, in such case people from neighbours houses help to them who are lost in disaster. |
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