Heading South Along the Rivers Vistula and San. (June 4, 2020)

June 4, southeastern Poland

When American cities are burning, when innocent black lives are being taken, and when its madman-in-chief threatens to unleash the army on its own people, it feels irrelevant to be writing about the beauty and relative prosperity enjoyed by the Poland of 1300 – 1650, to want to grasp and sensibly share events of several hundred years ago, to appreciate Polish renaissance and baroque architecture.  But as so often in history, upon second looks there are parallels and lessons to be drawn.

The American crisis is not just one of values and intolerance, it is also one of leadership, or the lack thereof.  And the monuments that I have had a chance to witness in the last couple of days, riding south along the principal rivers running from Poland’s rivers in the southern mountains to the Baltic Sea, against the flow of water if you will, benefited from the regal leadership of the last king of the Piast dynasty that founded Poland, Casimir the Great, as he was aptly named.  (more on him below)

Public figures can positively shape contemporary events.  Instead of blazing a path by teargassing peaceful protesters to photo opp with inflammatory gestures and abusing symbols, a more measured leader could lead by example (btw, he walked across Lafayette Square to get to that church, another friend of America who fought in the American Revolutionary War – on which more below).

There are not many commonalities between my modest office in central Warsaw and the Oval Office in Washington D.C., but one striking one was brought back to mind by the protesters outside the White House in recent days:  there is a monument to Tadeusz Kosciusko in front of both of them, the Polish revolutionary, noble, and fighter alongside American friends in the war of independence from 1776; not until, first, fighting on the Polish side the Polish-Russian war of 1772 that led to the 2nd partition, and then as commander in chief of the Kosciuszko uprising against Russia in 1774, which in turn led to the third and final partition of the country in 1775, that is.

I walk by him every morning when I go to fetch my morning latte from Charlotte Menora, a coffee place inside the area that once constituted the Warsaw Ghetto (menorah being the seven-lamp ancient Hebrew land stand); in these quiet lockdown days, he is usually surrounded by a troupe of defecating pigeons and some harmless drunks enjoying the first warm rays of the morning sun.

His White House equivalent was recently vandalized by some of the angry protesters outside the White House, as flagged by Polish state TV.

That in turn led to a reference to his leading by example v-a-v one of the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, he who drafted the Declaration of Independence with the lofty words ‘all men are created equal’, -- and whose Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC I visit with my daughters every time we are in town, alongside the equally impressive and inspiring Lincoln Memorial (without the soldiers that are guarding it now) -- and whom Kosciuszko befriended upon a revisit to the US in 1796. 

The article goes on to describe how much Kosciusko was against slavery, and tried to impel his new-found friend, the VP of the US but soon-to-be POTUS, to abolish slavery. Jefferson, as is well known, was a humanist but employed significant slave labour at his large rural estate in Virginia.  Kosciuszko, so the story goes, drafted a will in 1798 that asked that all of his American estate (a result of his 8 year service in the American forces) would be used to free and educate African-American slaves, including those owned by his friend Jefferson, whom he named as the executor of the will.  Historians have gone on the speculate that, had Jefferson acted upon that, the US Civil War might have been avoided.  (Jefferson never took up that role after Kosciuszko died in 1817 in Switzerland, dodging the question posed to him by his humanist friend.  And Kosciuszko, when he bequeathed his Polish estate to his sister in 1792, made it clear that he wished the serfs on that estate to be set free, to the extent possible given local circumstances and custom, highlighting his humanist and forward-thinking credentials.)

But nothing is every as facile as it appears. The first picture I took on this trip across the pearls of renaissance Poland hails from the era of socialist realism, when industry and economic achievements were embellished for political purposes … this a picture of a power plant south of Warsaw (Kozienice), a mural painted in 2019 but harking back to a different era altgother; we shall go back in time now.

Kozienice

Medieval Poland experienced extremely disruptive violence, and recovered strongly from it.  Three times in the 13th century the Tatars sacked large parts of Poland, in 1241 burning down the capital Krakow, in 1259 adding Sandomierz and Lublin among the cities on my itinerary (and Krakow a 2nd time), while during their 3rd raid in 1287 at least Sandomierz and Krakow withstood.  At the same time the counts of Brandenburg had discovered the ominous German ‘Drang nach Osten’ and had eaten away at Poland’s Baltic Sea possessions.  When Cazimierz the Great took over from his father, who had managed to reunite the central provinces (Wielkopolska around the original capital Gniezno in the NE, and Malopolska around the capital Krakow in the south, with central Mazovia (Warsaw) joining somewhat later) to rule Poland from 1333 to 1370, he was to leave a lasting impression in shaping the nation.  While Western Europe was afflicted by the hundred year war, and the Plague of 1348, Kazimierz built on the favourable climatic conditions in Poland with bountiful harvests, resulting gains from trade, and the influx of Jewish human capital fleeing repression elsewhere, to firmly put Poland on the map.  

Poland circa 1370 (Upon Casimierz’ Death)

The quality of his leadership was visible in institutions, where he used Magdeburg city law to re-found some key cities and to order the building and/or fortification of many towns and castles and churches; in state-building, where he united all legal codes into a civil and criminal code; in education, where he founded Krakow university in 1364, shortly after the foundation of Prague University, based on the laicist Italian model of Bologna and Padua; in doubling the size of Poland through Ukrainian conquests, and in encoding the rights of the Jewish population.  (See Notes from Poland for a good 30-minute podcast on the Piast dynasty incl. Cazimierz, from its editor, a lecturer in Polish studies at Cambridge University.)

(BTW, Casimierz nearly rivaled Henry VIII, in that he had four wives as well as - allegedly - a Jewish mistress; the wives included a Lithuanian, a German and two Polish ladies. While he had many children, those born in-wedlock were all female, thus leaving no male heir, which complicated the Polish succession and led the way, through many convoluted steps, to the Commonwealth with Lithuanian and the Jagiello dynasty.)

Crossing the river on a barge towards Kazimierz Dolny (founded by Kazimierz, of course).

The resulting boom was very visible on the first three days of my trip through the southeast of the country, following the former trade routes along the main river Vistula and its San tributary.  Despite the Tatar sackings and the Swedish Deluge (1655-1660), the route is littered with beautifully preserved (or re-built) historical town centres, Renaissance churches, monastic castles, noble castles, synagogues turned into museums, and Jewish cemeteries that give an inkling of the rich multi ethnic Polish history.  Some pictures below give an impression.

As one follows the San upriver and heads in the SE corner of the country, one encounters a beautiful, sparsely populated area of dense pre-alpine forests and woodlands with rolling hills known as Bieszczady. The Polish language excels in putting four consonants next to each other; during certain past violent periods, people were asked to pronounce Polish tongue breakers to prove their ‘Polishness’, and if they failed, they were liable to be put to the sword – so before you come and visit, better brush up on that Polish!

This is the Podkaparthy or Subcarpathia, an area of the country that has been consistently voting for the Kaczynski brothers since 2007, and riding an orange motorcycle with a Warsaw license plate (not to mention holding a German passport), I start to feel a little alien.  It is probably just the mind playing tricks with one’s stereotypes, but one notices signs of rural poverty, like horses pulling plows (saw only one), the horse-drawn cart (again only one, when twenty five years ago it would be have been pervasive across the country), an unusual number of cars with steering wheels on the right (evidence of the many Poles that have left these structurally weak areas to seek their fortune in the UK after Poland’s 2004 EU entry), the charming wooden houses and even more impressive wooden churches (signs also of the lack of good building stone in Poland, which only the invention of the brick in the 12th century ameliorated).  With presidential elections due later this month, the election posters give another inkling of what values people are inclined to vote.  The only election posters up are for the incumbent president of the PIS party, the right wing Polish Confederate candidate, the peasant party candidate (the only party to have survived since Poland’s experiment with socialism), and a maverick journalist that is hard to pin down; no liberal or centrist candidates on any posters. 

However, the tentacles of the EU reach everywhere, signs of structural assistance funds being put to work to support renovations, new roads, new buildings are everywhere.  And the repatriation of capital, including the approx. EUR 9 billion of annual funds being sent back by Polish workers abroad, with many holiday homes being built in this area full of natural beauty that makes Poles’ eyes gleam when they speak of youth trekking trips to this enchanting end-of-world region. Increasing tourism infrastructure comes into full view when one reaches the picturesque valleys and crooks stretching out like tentacles of a star fish from the large reservoir of Solina in central Bieszczady, benefitting from a 660m long and 80m high damn put in place in the 1960s, alongside 50km of surrounding roads that make for a motorcycle nirwana.  Ukraine is only a stone throw away, before it is time to turn around the beast and start heading north alongside the river that demarcates a good chunk of Poland’s eastern border, the Bug.