Freedom of speech, which is nowadays an inalienable right in Poland, was non-existent under the communist regime. Communist Poland’s censorship often exercised the power to block films, articles, books and basically all other forms of public expression. The works of the seven writers below were banned entirely under these policies.
Helena Mniszkówna
Helena Mniszkówna, Warsaw, 1909, photo by Jadwiga Golcz, from the Collection of Museum of Literature / East News
Mniszkówna was born in 1878 to a family of landed gentry. She was mainly an author of high society romance novels, the most famous of which is the 1909 melodrama The Leper (Trędowata). Two screen adaptations of this work were created before World War II. In 1951 the communists ordered all of her books to be removed from public libraries – they didn’t appreciate her portrayal of the world of Polish nobility. The ban on The Leper was lifted in 1972 and another film version of this book was created four years later by Jerzy Hoffman.
Zofia Kossak-Szcucka
Zofia Kossak Szczucka, 1933, Modern Polish Writers, Second Series, from Wydawnictwo Komitetu Głównego Tygodnia Książki Polskiej, fot. CC BY 2.0 / Wikimedia
As a writer she gained a lot of attention for her historical novels, one of which is Angels in the Dust (Krzyżowcy), published in 1936. Her works were translated into many languages including English, German, and French. Israel’s Yad Vashem Institute posthumously honoured her with the title Righteous Among the Nations for aiding Jews in World War II. In 1951 all of her books were banned because the communists disapproved of her World War II involvement with the Polish Resistance. Kossak-Szczucka was born in 1890 and died in 1968.
Stefan "Wiech" Wiechecki
Stefan "Wiech" Wiechecki talking to coachman, from Leszek Wysznacki, Warszawa od wyzwolenia do naszych dni, Wydawnictwo Sport i Turystyka, Warszawa 1977, p. 238, CC BY 2.0 / Wikimedia
He was called “the Homer of Warsaw’s streets” because he magnificently captured the spirit of the city’s street life. Wiechecki, an author of feuilletons, short stories and novels, was born in 1896 and is especially appreciated for his use of Warsaw slang. Singers and other writers often repeated the expressions that he brought into the Polish literary world. In 1951 all works by Wiechecki were banned and removed from public libraries. By doing so the communist regime unsuccessfully tried to sever the inhabitants of Warsaw from their pre-War tradition.
Tadeusz Dołęga Mostowicz, originally published in W. Pietrzak, Rachunek z dwudziestoleciem; Warsaw, 1972, fot. CC BY 2.0 / Wikimedia
He is best known as the author of the 1932 novel The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma (Kariera Nikodema Dymy), which constitutes an ironic portrayal of the political circles of interwar Poland. Dołęga-Mostowicz was a prolific and successful writer whose talents were noticed by Hollywood. Producers bought two screenplays written by him, one of which was intended for Bette Davis. In 1951 all except three of Dołęga-Mostowicz’s books were banned – to the communists he was a symbol of the old order. He was born in 1898 and died as a soldier in 1939 during World War II.
Halina Borowikowa
She was born in 1898 in Barań. Borowikowa, who was both a writer and translator, worked under the pseudonym Jerzy Marlicz. She translated 18 books by James Curwood and wrote The Adventure Hunters (Łowcy Przygód), a 1932 continuation of his series consisting of the novels The Wolf Hunters and The Gold Hunters. She also published a few youth adventure travel novels. All of her books were banned by the censorship, because the communists considered them to be “detrimental to the shaping of the young socialist society”.
Stanisław Jerzy Lec
Stanisław Jerzy Lec, Photo: Lucjan Fogiel / East News
The most famous work of this writer born in 1909 is probably the 1957 collection of witty aphorisms, entitled Uncombed Thoughts (Myśli Nieuczesane). Even though Lec sympathized with the communist regime his books were banned from 1951 until 1956; the communists didn’t appreciate his sudden decision to immigrate to Israel in 1950. Lec unexpectedly returned to Poland two years later and lived there until his death in 1966. On his deathbed Lec was asked to approve a corrected version of one of his books. He commented: “I can’t correct this book, I’m too busy dying”.
Czesław Miłosz, photo source: AKG Images / East News
A poet, essayist, and prose writer born in 1911, Czesław Miłosz’s most noteworthy works include the 1945 collection of poems Rescue (Ocalenie) and the 1953 volume of essays The Captive Mind (Zniewolony umysł). For aiding Jews during World War II he was honoured with the title Righteous Among the Nations by Israel’s Yad Vashem Institute. In 1980 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. All of his works were banned in Poland from 1951 to 1980 – the communists considered Miłosz, who lived abroad for many years, a pro-Western traitor and renegade.
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Selection of Finnegans Wake business cards by Bartnicki&Szmandra; source: Finnegans Meet
What happens when you attempt to translate the whole of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake into images? Two Polish artists are close to finding out. For Krzysztof Bartnicki, this is already his third translation of the Wake – this visual translation follows his attempts at linguistic and musical renderings.
After having translated Finnegans Wake into Polish (a project that took ten years to complete – more here), and turning Joyce’s text into a one-of-a-kind musical score in Da Capo al Finne (read more) which in turn yielded encrypted music from both past and future (including themes from the Star Wars soundtrack – listen), Krzysztof Bartnicki has now moved to another field of practical Wakeology.
His newest endeavour is an attempt to illustrate the whole of Finnegans Wake, page by page. But 'illustrating' actually might not be the right word when it comes to the world’s most difficult book. Bartnicki prefers to speak of it in terms of translating the text into a visual language. In this, he is not alone. The task of translating Joyce’s text into image lies with Marcin Szmandra, a graphic artist and, just like Bartnicki, a keen reader of Joyce’s magnum opus.
For the last three years, after the publication of Bartnicki’s translation of Finnegans Wake in 2012, Szmandra has been laboriously going through Finneganów tren (this is the title of Bartnicki’s Polish version of the Wake) illustrating the Polish text page by page, and gradually publishing his work on his blog Finneganowizje.
While this is a work in progress in its own right, Szmandra and Bartnicki have now decided to join forces and started collaborating on a project that shall materialize as a full visual illustration/translation of the original text of the Wake. The project is tentatively titled Finnegans Meet and it looks like what it aims to be – quite a unique and intriguing meeting of literature and visual arts.
Since 2012, when Joyce and all of his works entered the public domain, Finnegans Wake has drawn much interest from artists and readers. Many of their Wake-inspired productions, which range from visual to audio and multimedia works and renderings, can be found on the internet, a seemingly perfect place for all Wake-related works (find out more about Finnegans Wake and the internet here). And while illustrating Finnegans Wake may seem like a tough nut to crack, visually speaking, it is by no means a rare undertaking in the world of Wake fans. What is then so exceptional about Bartnicki & Szmandra’s endeavour?
For many illustrators the linguistic incomprehensibility of Finnegans Wake is a pretext to engage in abstraction, to freely combine the images with Joyce’s plot, Bartnicki explains. And goes on to illuminate the origins of his concept:
When I first approached the idea of translating Joyce’s text into image, I immediately thought of Marcin [Szmandra]. Not only does he try hard to stick to the subject of Joyce’s text, but he has been progressing through the book page after page, says Bartnicki about Szmandra’s Finneganowizje.
I didn’t want our [visual] translation to drift away into abstraction which would make the reader’s trust the only way of vouchsafing that the illustration refers to Finnegans Wake and not to any other piece of prose. I also didn’t want to propose a set of illustrations (sets are static) or a Finnegans Wake comic strip, as I felt that a comic could paradoxically turn out not sufficiently abstract and ambiguous.
As a result, the two decided on an altogether different approach to visually representing the Wake.
Pages of Finnegans Wake as Business Cards
Instead of trying to illustrate fragments of the Wake, Bartnicki came up with an idea that each page from Joyce’s text should have its own calling card. With this in mind, he has been interpreting each page of Finnegans Wake in an attempt to bring it down to a person, name or theme, which could then serve as a kind of hero or subject of a business card. This also allowed them to add a textual layer to the image – but, as Bartnicki explicates, not too much, as the text should complement the image rather than dominate it.
Indeed, every illustration in Bartnicki and Szmandra’s Finnegans Meet follows the pattern and format of a business card with a quasi-name, address, and a ‘telephone number’ (which however hides the exact ‘address’ of the words used in Joyce’s book, e.g. phone number 370-06-07 refers to page 370, lines 6-7 in the text of the Wake). The ‘address information’ along with the quotes and the general idea for the business card come from Bartnicki, the visual realization of these instructions and their translation into visual language – are Szmandra’s tasks. The final visual effect is the result of a discussion between the translator and the illustrator.
Selection from Finnegans Meet cards; copyright: Bartnicki&Szmandra
For the reader/viewer each business card may seem like a visual puzzle, as the cards attempt to render Joyce's linguistic puns into images, or rather a combination of image and text. This invitation to interpretation naturally entails consulting the book which may turn out helpful in understanding the ‘contents’ of the card.
While most of the cards feature textual material taken directly from The Wake, a careful 'reader' of these miniatures will also come across a few quite surprising finds. Like card 375 which includes Joyce's words 'Let them leave Poland in peace' taken from outside Finnegans Wake: these were apparently the words with which Joyce reacted to the outbreak of WW2, and a way of suggesting to the world what was more important in 1939: the German war on Poland or the newly published Finnegans Wake.
Visual surprises may include finding the strangest post-Joycean themes and motifs, like characters from Star Wars or The Simpsons in some of the cards. This goes back to Bartnicki's strong conviction that Finnegans Wake lends itself not only to new readings (and these are not necessarily literary! - compare the compositions of contemporary composers in Finnegans Wake, decoded by Bartnicki as Da Capo al Finne) but also that these readings can refer to contemporary ideas and realities unknown to Joyce.
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The kind of rotary business card holder (called a Rolodex) to be used in the ultimate version of Finnegans Meet project; Source: Finnegans Meet
For Bartnicki however the most important thing in illustrating Finnegans Wake was finding a way to reflect what he calls the ‘rotary flow’ of Joyce’s narration. This means that the end of the last page smoothly becomes the beginning of the first page – and thus proceeds in an ultimately circular movement. This found its way into how the finished work will be presented.
So far each of the business cards exists only in two paper copies, belonging to the authors. Each card is then placed in a two-column Rolodex, which serves as an ersatz for the rotary narration of the novel, but also guarantees, as Bartnicki explains, some dose of randomness in the order of the cards. Because the two columns of the Rolodex are separate, their movement will inevitably interfere with the initial order of the pages, that is, of the business cards, shuffling them and effectively changing the initial order of the book.
So far Bartnicki and Szmandra have been working on two showpiece copies of the Rolodex, which can be seen as the prototypical artefacts in this process of turning the Wake into… well, a business card holder. As Bartnicki explains, producing the Rolodex-ed Wake is an expensive and technically painstaking process (technical obstacles include the fact that the Rolodex used has only 600 visit cards, while Finnegans Wake has 628 pages).
This also means that the Finnegans Meet in its ultimate Rolodex form will be, at least at first, available only on individual commission. A possibly cheaper option will be a poster format featuring a selection of cards chosen by the buyer. The credit for this idea, as Bartnicki emphasizes, goes to Andrzej Sosnowski, a contemporary Polish poet and one of the first consultants on the emerging Finnegans Meet work-in-progress:
Someone who, instead of the whole Finnegans Wake Rolodex, is interested in a selection of 10 cards, would be an equivalent to a reader who rather than reading the whole of Finnegans Wake goes for a short fragment. – explains Bartnicki.
Work on Finnegans Meet is quite advanced, with almost 400 cards already finished, and the chances are that the whole project will be complete by the end of 2015.
As to the philosophical implications of the Rolodexing of the Wake, much is uncertain. Is it an aide-memoire, or a way of mapping otherwise unchartable text? Will the Finnegans Meet project find a way to exist on the internet? – all of this remains to be seen.
For the Polish translator of Finnegans Wake it is yet another and definitely not last attempt at tackling Joyce’s last novel, and dealing with its greatness.
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The 2015 Transatlantyk Award Goes to Laurence Dyèvre
2015/06/15
Laurence Dyèvre, photo: private archive
Laurence Dyèvre, a translator of Polish literature into French, was announced as the winner of the Transatlantyk Award for 2015, the Polish Book Institute's annual award for outstanding ambassadors of Polish literature abroad.
Dyèvre’s translations encompass around sixty book publications, mainly Polish contemporary prose, and cover the whole of the 20th century. Among others, she has translated books by Andrzej Bobkowski, Leopold Tyrmand, Ida Fink, Adam Zagajewski, Jerzy Pilch, Leszek Kołakowski, Czesław Miłosz, Sławomir Mrożek, and Stanisław Lem, as well as the essays of Adam Michnik, Andrzej Sapkowski's Last Wish, several children's books, and recently, two comic-book publications.
Laurence Dyèvre studied Polish at the Sorbonne, then developed programmes for teaching the Polish language at secondary schools. She co-wrote a Polish language textbook for high-schoolers (Dzień dobry). She has lectured at Paris' finest high schools and at the Sorbonne.
From 2004-2008 she served as vice director of the French Institute in Krakow, and then for two years as the vice director of the French Culture Center in Riga, Latvia. She has won the Order of Academic Palms (2003), a medal of Service to Polish Culture (2004), and an Award of the ZAIKS Authors' Association (2008).
The award ceremony took place on 12 June at the Jagiellonian University's Collegium Maius in Krakow. The award includes 10,000 euros and a statuette by Łukasz Kieferling.
The Transatlantyk is a Book Institute (Instytut Książki) award for outstanding ambassadors of Polish literature abroad. Its aim is to promote Polish literature in the world and to integrate communities of people who popularize Polish literature (translators, literary critics, literary historians, and cultural animators).
The former winners of the Transatlantyk Award are:
2005 – Henryk Bereska (Germany) – born in Silesia, translator of Polish literature into German;
2006 – Anders Bodegård (Sweden) – translator of Polish literature into Swedish
2007 – Albrecht Lempp (Germany) – translator of Janusz Głowacki and Jerzy Pilch into German, one of the authors of Poland's success at the International Book Fair in Frankfurt in 2000;
2008 – Ksenia Starosielska (Russia) – translator of Polish prose into Russian since the 1960s;
2009 – Biserka Rajčić (Serbia) – translator of books by Polish poets, philosophers, literary scholars, expert on Polish avant-garde literature;
2010 – Pietro Marchesani (Italy)– great promoter of Wisława Szymborska in Italy;
2011 – Vlasta Dvořáčková (Czech republic) – promoter of Polish poetry in Czech Republic;
2012 – Yi Lijun (China)– translator of, among others, Mickiewicz's Forefathers' Eve (Dziady), Sienkiewicz's Trilogy and Miłosz's Captive Mind;
2014 – Bill Johnston (USA)– translator of Prus, Kochanowski, Różewicz and Tkaczyszyn-Dycki, among others, professor of comparative literatures at Indiana University.
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The search for a mysterious girl photographed in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto almost 70 years ago has yielded no results so far. She would be in her eighties right now, and could be anywhere in the world.
Until recently this was not a very well-known picture in Poland. But over the last month thanks to the efforts of a couple people and a Facebook profile, the image has gone viral and is now on the path to becoming one of the most iconic images of destroyed Warsaw. Still, while the Internet was able to establish a lot of important facts, including the exact location of the place, the main goal of the whole effort has not yet been achieved, which is finding the girl in the picture and getting to know her story.
Here's the story behind the most viral image in Poland right now.
What the Image Says
The image shows the exact location of the scene in the picture; Source: FB profile of Tomasz Gruszkowski who helped to identify the exact location.
The black-and-white image shows a girl (approximately 10 years old) looking at the sea of ruins of the Warsaw ghetto. She is standing on a roof of a building which in the course of a private investigation by Marek Kossakowski (follow here) has been identified as a building at 5/7 Stawki Street - which is one of the very few buildings in the area to have survived the war. The building still stands today at four stories tall, which is not so obvious when you look at the picture – it seems that the flattened background of razed rubble somehow distorts the perspective and proportions.
In the left top corner one can discern the silouette of the Saint Augustine's Church, well known from other pictures of the destroyed ghetto. The T-shaped cross-road on the left has been identified as the intersection of Muranowska and Zamenhofa, the streets that had formed the heart of the Warsaw's Jewish district before WW2.
The girl on the roof is smartly dressed, the only thing which is out of sync are the shoes - too big and probably belonging to a man, they make one wonder how she made it all the way up here. The girl is caught in the act of touching her hair (the wind must have blown furiously at this altitude). The power of this picture is best felt by comparing this image with another photo – made in the same place with the same girl but by a different photographer (below).
This is what the image tells us, and it is not much. But we know also that the iconic photograph was taken on April 3, 1946 by Reginald Kenny who was a photographer accompanying former US president Herbert Hoover on the so-called Food Mission in Europe. In 1946 and 1947 Hoover visited around 40 countries struck by the war in an effort to estimate losses and provide the best relief for war victims. One of the places he visited was Warsaw.
This was not the first time Hoover visited the capital of Poland. He had been in Warsaw some 27 years earlier. Immediately after World War I he came to Poland on a similar mission. At that time he was, reportedly, shocked to see so many children running barefoot. This time, the sight of Warsaw must have been even more appalling. Polish capital was now utterly destroyed - with some parts of the city, like the Ghetto or Old Town almost razed to the ground, in the aftermath of the Ghetto Uprising of 1943 or the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, or both.
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As we can learn from the old film footage of this visit (see the film at Repozytorium Cyfrowe) in April 1946 Hoover saw the most destroyed districts of Warsaw - and was devastated by what he saw. He also spent some time with pre-school children.
Herbert Hoover visits children’s schools and orphanages in Warsaw, Poland, March 30, 1946. Hoover (Herbert) subject collection, Hoover Institution Archives, envelope SSS, photo from the Archive Hoover Institution
A photograph (above), captioned as 'Herbert Hoover visits children’s schools and orphanages in Warsaw, Poland, March 30, 1946' (Hoover Institution Archives, envelope SSS) shows the former president on the same visit, surrounded by children in the street of Warsaw. Could it be that one of the girls in this picture (or in the newsreel) is the same girl as the one photographed by Reginald Kenny on the roof of the building in the ghetto?
This is one of the hypotheses proposed by Grzegorz Kosson, Polish author and one of the persons involved in the internet search for the girl from the image. Kosson, for whom the figure of the girl was an inspiration for his book Gruzy (see preview), believes that the photo session on the roof of the building in Stawki 5/7 was arranged by the photographer, who very likely had picked the girl from a crowd of school children hanging out with president Hoover in the ruins of the Old Town. Old Town is not far from Stawki, Kosson explains. - Today it's a 15-minute walk, but back in those days, with real mountains of rubble in between, it could have taken considerably longer.
For Grzegorz Kosson finding the girl from the image would be a way to conclude the story of the photo, the city and also his book. He dreams of photographing the woman in the same place 70 years later. But is it possible?
The Girl
Despite efforts from Kosson and others, we still have virtually no clue as to who the girl in the picture is. Who was she? Why was this photo even taken? What has her story been since then? And where is she now? – This still remains to be uncovered.
The search campaign, initiated by the Varsovian Facebook profile Tu było tu stało and Grzegorz Kosson, started over a month ago (i.e. May 18) and made the image go viral across Polish internet; however, it has not come to fruition. One potential link that points to Australia as the possibile wherabouts of the girl (who by now would be around 80 years old) has not been yet verified.
Meanwhile, the authors of the campaign decided to take the search to the street initiating a poster campaign in the Muranów district [a Communist housing estate located on the spot of the former ghetto]. This may be the right thing to do, considering that an 80-year-old person would not necessarily keep up with trending photographs on the Internet (no matter how viral the photo goes).
But it is also probable that the girl in men's shoes lives very far away from Muranów, Warsaw.
If you think you may know something about the girl from this image, please contact Patrycja Jastrzębska and Grzegorz Kosson at tubylotustalo@gmail.com.
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Our class directed by Tadeusz Słobdzianek, 2010., photo. by Krzysztof Bieliński
Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class has been presented with the Israeli Theatre Prize for best foreign play. Director Hanan Snir and choreographer Miri Azar were also awarded.
Our Class was co-produced by two theatres: Cameri and Habima. The play that had its premiere in February 2014 was translated from Polish by Anat Zajdman. Our class was well-received by the audience and has been shown over 200 times so far. Now it has been presented with the Israeli Theatre Prize, an important and prestigious yearly prize awarded by the Israeli Ministry of Culture.
Our Class tells the story of the Polish and Jewish students of a pre-war school in a small town. The consecutive “lessons” tell their harrowing life stories, full of hate, death and revenge. The community of students falls apart and yet at the same time bonded together by the memory of evil.
The play was originally written by Tadeusz Słobodzianek, Polish playwright, director and director of the Gustaw Holoubek Theatre in Warsaw. It was awarded the Nike Literary Award in 2010.
Our Class is currently the most frequently staged Polish theatrical performance in the world. It has been staged in Canada, the USA, Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic, Japan, Brazil, Denmark, Sweden and Hungary. The Polish premiere took place in 2010 in the Gustaw Holoubek Theatre in Warsaw, directed by Ondrej Spisak, who was later awarded the Warsaw Felix Award 2011. The Hungarian staging was presented with the Critics’ Circle Theatre Award, the one in Stockholm was called the most important performance of the year by the Dagens Nyheter journal and the Tokyo staging was awarded the Yomuri Great National Theatre prize for the best theatrical performance of 2013.
Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s (born 1955) literary debut was child’s play Historia o żebraku i osiołku [The story of a beggar and a donkey]. His dramatic works include: Car Mikołaj [Tsar Nikolai], Prorok Ilja [Ilja the prophet], Merlin. Inna historia [Merlin, a different story].
Wrocław's European Capital of Culture Programme Revealed
2015/06/29
Wrocław, photo. by Marek Maruszak / Forum
The European Film Awards, the Theatre Olympiad, and a meeting of European choirs – these are just a few of the artistic events to be held in Wrocław whilst the city holds the title of European Capital of Culture.
Wrocław, the 2016 European Capital of Culture 2016 (ECC), plans to offer over a thousand different cultural events in various fields of art: architecture, film, music, visual art, theatre, performance and opera. The programme was announced on 19 June at a press conference in Wrocław's Stadion Miejski.
Wrocław president Rafał Dutkiewicz said that 2016 may be the city’s most important year in its post-war history:
"We want to reach certain goals for the ECC, but the most important one is to double the number of culture-savvy citizens and tourists in Wrocław".
Dutkiewicz pointed out that the city has been preparing for the ECC since 2013:
"The ECC in Wrocław will reach its zenith in 2016; however, some events are to be continued in 2017 as well. The cost of organising it is estimated at 300 million złoty, 120 million of which will be donated by the Polish government."
Jarosław Fret, the chairman of the Board of Curators and the director of the theatre section, expressed the belief that the ECC 2016 will not only engage the citizens of Wrocław in cultural activities, but also profoundly change the culture of the city:
"The programme of the ECC 2016 combines an event-based festival with a process of change and transition. 'Spaces for Beauty', the motto we created for Wrocław ECC, means transforming the tectonics of the city. Our second motto, 'Metamorphoses of Culture', is the key to Wrocław’s identity and multiculturalism.
Film
"A Short Film about Killing" directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1987, photo. by Polfilm/East News
The most important film event to take place during the 2016 ECC is the European Film Awards ceremony that is to be hosted in Wrocław in December 2016. Europe's key film awards will be presented for the 29th time. So far, Polish filmmakers have been presented with this award twice: Krzysztof Kieślowski for A Short Film about Killing and Paweł Pawlikowski for Ida.
"The most significant European filmmakers will participate in this event. Starting from October we are planning to screen films that have been awarded the European Film Awards so far. This year’s nominated pictures are also to be presented before the final ceremony." – says Roman Gutek, the director of the T-Mobile New Horizons film festival who is also responsible for the film section of the ECC 2016.
Gutek also announced that Wrocław will host a series of film reviews that are to present the history and diversity of European cinema. The film events start this year: the audience of 2015 T-Mobile New Horizons film festival will be able to watch the most significant Lithuanian films. Plans for 2016 include reviews of Wim Wenders’ works, Czechoslovakian New Wave and Ukrainian cinema.
The Film Operas project will start in 2016 as well. It includes the Polish premiere of Lost Highway, an opera performance based on David Lynch’s movie, with libretto by Elfriede Jelinek.
A review of Basque cinema is also scheduled (Basque city San Sebastian is also 2016 ECC) as well as a series of translated Polish film classics for Wrocław-based foreigners.
The ADAPTER audiodescription programme is to be developed as well. Over a hundred films, suited for the needs of people with visual and hearing impairments, will be available on a free-of-charge VOD portal.
The ECC 2016 programme also includes major film festivals that are already well-known in Wrocław: the T-Mobile International New Horizons Film Festival and the American Film Festival.
Literature
Wrocław panorama, photo. by Marek Skorupski / Forum
In 2016, Wrocław will also be the World Book Capital City of UNESCO. Ireneusz Grin, the director of the literature section:
"During the events in Wrocław, we will create an international book anthem based on Tadeusz Różewicz’s poem. On 23 April 2017, the last day of the World Book Capital City in Wrocław, this anthem will be sung in many cities around the world. This piece will remain the international book anthem even after our presidency" – says Grin.
The Pan Tadeusz Museum in Wrocław is to be opened in 2016 as well. Run by the Ossolineum, it will exhibit, among others, a manuscript of the Polish national epic, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz.
The Bibliopolis is a project that aims at encouraging people to read. Its programme includes public readings and book exchange fairs. Literature will also become visible outdoors – books will be displayed on the building's walls and 10,000 cars will be covered with literary texts.
The Silesius International Poetry Festival will be organized in 2016 as well. It will collaborate with the biggest poetry festivals in Poland: Poznań Poetów, Miasto Poezji from Lublin, and the Czesław Miłosz International Festival from Kraków. Also,Wrocław will host the 4th World Congress of translators of Polish literature.
Polcon, the biggest festival of science-fiction and fantasy in Poland, is also scheduled for ECC 2016, as well as the official congress of Polish book club members, a meeting called a “literary Woodstock” by Grin.
New books are also to be published for ECC 2016:
"We are planning to translate the classic Polish children’s books into the languages of ethnic and national minorities. A literary portal created solely by students from Wrocław will also be created." – said the curator of the literature section.
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Centennial Hall in Wrocław, photo. by Marek Skorupski / Forum
The National Forum of Music that is scheduled to be open in September will be the main stage for the music events of the ECC 2016 in Wrocław. The Washington National Symphony Orchestra, along with world-renowned Chinese pianist Lang Lang, is to perform there on 18 February 2016. The works of Mahler are to be performed on 18 March by the Budapest Festival Orchestra, one of the world’s top classical music orchestras. The Wiener Philharmoniker conducted by Semyon Bychkov is due to perform in June.
The National Forum of Music will also host several jazz concerts. The Jazztopad festival in February will include a performance by great jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. Jazz concerts and jams will also be heard throughout the city on 30 April, International Jazz Day.
One of the major music events of the Wrocław ECC 2016 is a David Gilmour concert. The Pink Floyd guitarist is rumoured to be set to perform with Polish pianist and composer Leszek Możdżer.
The ECC 2016 music events also include the Singing Europe project, a meeting of European choirs that will present oratory and opera pieces.
Several music conferences will also take place, such as the European Forum on Music, the International Rostrum of Composers, and Pearle-Live Performance Europe.
The main opera event to be staged is Spanish Night with Carmen – Zarzuela Show. An audience of tens of thousands will have a chance to watch the spectacular performance at Stadion Miejski in Wrocław.
The show is based on fragments of Carmen by Georges Bizet, a story which takes place in Seville, Spain. The highlight of the show will present zaruzelas– a genre of music popular in Spanish-speaking countries, pieces of which resemble traditional operettas and contemporary musicals. The show will be enriched with a display of Spanish regions and cultural monuments.
Theatre
The theatrical section is dominated by the Theatre Olympiad, an international festival that presents major theatrical works from around the world. 'The World as a Place of Truth' is the main motto behind these events:
"This motto is a paraphrasing of Jerzy Grotowski’s words. He said that the world should be a place of truth and that the theatre is, implicitly, this very place." – says Jarosław Fret, the chairman of the Board of Curators and the director of the Jerzy Grotowski Theatre.
The Masters’ Programme is in the centre of the Theatre Olympiad – three weeks full of the theatrical performances of the great masters, each day dedicated to a different artist, including renowned guests such as Tadashi Suzuki, Theodoros Terzopoulos, Robert Wilson, Eugenio Barba, Peter Brook, and Romeo Castellucci.
Along with the Theatre Olympiad, the Dziady Recycling festival is to take place. A week-long event is to present both previous and modern interpretations and remixes of Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady.
Reviews of independent theatre from the central-eastern Europe and Polish repertory theatre are also scheduled for ECC 2016. A conference on playwriting and theatrical critique is also planned.
The theatre festivals that are annually organized in Wrocław are also encompassed by the ECC 2016 programme. The events include the Stage Song Contest (this year’s edition is dedicated to European artists), and three music festivals, Polish, German and Lviv, that are related to Wrocław’s history.
Architecture
WuWa2 housing project in Wrocław, design: Tadeusz Sawa-Borysławski, Piotr Zybura, Paweł Horn, Tomasz Głowacki, Igor Kazimierczak, photo. by Nowe Żerniki studio
One event in the architecture section is the Constructing Europe. 25 years of Mies van der Rohe Award exhibition – a summary of the 25-year-long history of Europe’s most significant architecture award.
The main architecture event is the presentation of WuWA2, a housing project that is supposed to facilitate social interaction. The concept also focuses on innovativeness in terms of ecology.
"The tenants are the subject of this project. They took part in the designing sessions and contributed to the final outcome of the WUWA2 housing". – says architect Zbigniew Maćkow, the curator of the ECC architecture section.
Several major architecture exhibitions are to be organized in 2016 as well: an exposition on the architecture of 20th-century Wrocław, the modernism of interwar Lviv and Werkbund's experimental 1927-1932 housing that was established in Stuttgart, Brno, Zurich, Prague, Vienna, and Wrocław.
Visual Arts and Performance
Wrocław's Europe, a presentation of the cultural diversity and the importance of Wrocław and Silesia a few centuries ago is one of the main visual arts events during the ECC 2016. The event is supposed to recall the memory of Bartłomiej Strobel, one of Silesia’s greatest painters.
Basque artists will also be presented during the events, for example, the works of Eduard Chillida, one of the major Spanish artists of the 20th century, are to be exhibited in Wrocław.
The art and culture of times gone by will also be shown during ECC 2016. The Ostrale festival that is typically organized in Dresden will also be a part of Wrocław’s culture festival. The Ostrale exhibits a huge spectrum of German art.
Wroclaw From the Back Yard is a socio-cultural project that aims at rediscovering and renovating the neglected fragments, especially backyards, of the city.
"It’s one of the major visual arts events to be undertaken during the festival. The artists will collaborate with citizens. We hope that the latter will realize that it is possible to change the places they live in". –says ECC visual arts curator Michał Bieniek.
The official opening and closing ceremonies of the Wrocław ECC 2016 are to be huge performance shows. The European City of Culture will be inaugurated with The Awakening on 17 January 2016.
"Four main spirits: a Spirit of Many Religions, Innovation, Reconstruction and Flood will awake in four distinctive districts of the city and they will march to the city centre. As they go, they will tell their stories and explain, why they meet on that day." – say the performance's creators.
Flow, another performance, is to be presented on 11 June. It will focus on the Oder river. The river is the central point to the history of building, destruction, and reconstruction of the city.
"It is a 150-thousand-person show, a symphony composed by artists from Germany, the Czech Republic, Israel and Poland; the representatives of the nations that are indelible in the Wrocław history". – says British director Chris Baldwin, responsible for the performance section of the ECC.
17 December 2016 is the day of the official closing ceremony that is to be celebrated with a performance called Heaven. The show will combine the elements that appeared in the previous performances of the ECC.
Here are 20 castles worth conquering this summer. From the hundreds that have been preserved over the centuries, we have picked out the most beautiful, the most extraordinary, and those which have inscribed themselves most strongly in Polish culture and history.
'The war ended seventy years ago, but not in our homes, not yet unfortunately'– said one of the many people Mikołaj Grynberg spoke to. Maybe it’s more appropriate to say: one of his brothers and sisters.
That is what Grynberg calls people, he met over the years and spoke to about something, that he also knows from his own experience. Mainly, being a child of Holocaust survivors, a member of ‘the second generation’. A person, that was not supposed to exist, because his parents were meant to cease to exist.
I blame Auschwitz / Oskarżam Auschwitz is a record of twenty something conversations with the now grown-up children of Holocaust survivors. Short, long, recollected or quoted word for word, carried out in Polish or in English - in homes, cafes or train stations. Grynberg – a photographer, psychologist, and also author of the conversations with Holocaust survivors (Survivors of the 20th century / Ocaleni z XX wieku) – meets his brothers and sisters in Warsaw, Tel Aviv and New York. The eldest of which, were born right after the war, the youngest in the 1970s. 'I believe, that these stories deserve a place in a wider arena than just support groups'– he writes in the prologue.
Although Grynberg’s interlocutors didn’t experience the Holocaust first hand – maybe even that is why – they have their own stories to tell about those events: intimate, family stories that go all the way to the core of their relationships with their parents. These are stories about the impact the Holocaust has had on day-to-day life, even several decades after the war and the immense strength that is needed to survive living in its shadow. Honest, strikingly detailed and painful. 'We didn’t speak to Holocaust survivors, we listened to their stories: with humility and respect'– Anka Grupińska writes in the foreword. The second generation is a different story though: Grynberg speaks to them freely, as he would with fellow peers. He discusses the matter and isn’t afraid to ask difficult questions – because he exposes himself to them as well.
These conversations are often shocking. Like the one, that opens the novel I blame Auschwitz (which also inspired the title of the book). Jossi from Tel Aviv, who made a career in Israel and who is very proud of that fact says, that the one’s, who survived ‘are Hitler’s greatest success. If they had died, then that would have been it. But Hitler let them go. Let them have children and ruin the world further.’ There are surprising stories – of the strange and intertwined paths of the trauma passed on from generation to generation.
One of the women Grynberg interviewed said, that in Auschwitz she finally feels like she arrived home. That she is dreaming of laying on the ground and feeling the warmth of everyone, who was left there. Grynberg’s book unveils the sphere of human experience, that we know very little about, because after all the first hand survivors of those traumatic events are in the spotlight, not their children or grandchildren (although both Bożena Keff and Ewa Kuryluk wrote about this in a moving way).
Here are people, who’s birth marked the beginning of the world, who were raised with no past, ancestors or family memories. Who – as one of our main characters – had long lived with the conviction, that being a grandfather was a public function, because in her neighbourhood in Israel, there was only one and he was ‘shared’. They are people, who may have heard the following at the dinner table: ‘Eat it and be grateful you’re not in Auschwitz. You would appreciate what food means if you were there.' Raised by ‘odd’ parents – such as Gitli’s father, who was silent and only ‘read, wrote and smoked cigarettes’. Who were convinced, that you’re not allowed to be sick, because otherwise you won’t pass the selection process. Almost without exception, obsessively devoted to their parents, very protective, brave and deeply lonely. Often living a double life, invisible in some way – like Towa, a seemingly joyful, ‘energetic woman’, who was in fact distrustful even toward her own husband. ‘My mathematics teacher says: who believes in my happiness, will not see my pain’. Caught in the trap of ‘bravery’. 'Tell your parents, that your sex life is unfulfilling and that’s why you’re depressed. Tell your parents, that your children are naughty and those are your problems.’ When in fact – like Jossi, who wonders what things one should take for their child in Treblinka, when he packs his family for vacation – they are slacklining over an abyss.
I blame Auschwitz is a sort of collective portrait, in which similar concepts crop up. One of them is certainly a distrust towards psychologists, therapists and loneliness in the face of ‘post-suffering’. Often so, it seems as if the interviews conducted by Grynberg are a form of therapy itself (not always though, other times they are more like a door slam). The book is not a record of Grynberg’s ‘questioning’. The uniqueness of Grynberg’s book is the fact that it rather resembles a search for kindred spirits, a ritual, in which one of the main characters is also the author, searching for something much greater than just another story. ‘Why are you sitting here with me for so long and listening to what I am saying?’ – Daniel from Downtown Manhattan asks him. ‘I just gained a new brother and that’s something, isn’t it?’ – asks Grynberg. ‘I feel a need to listen to these stories’ – he says in another place. ‘You’re addicted to them’ – says the interviewer.
At times, reading these conversations feels like eavesdropping a meeting, between two people, between whom something very important is happening. Grynberg – emotional, viewing the main characters, as his fellow brothers and sisters, speaking from the depth of his own experience, balancing between the role of the author and one of the characters - is probably the only one, who could have succeeded at this endeavour. That is writing a book, that is equally gloomy, as it is whimsical, provocative, moving, revealing deep wounds, but also love.
In I blame Auschwitz’s prologue he writes, that he would once like to hear that the stories that are told in it, are our – meaning all people’s – heritage. The book also entails another, often repeated suggestion: that only ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ can truly understand each other. Grynberg’s book – as any, that manages to reach the truth about people – sheds some light on other contexts, experiences and areas of reality as well. He not only found a way to ‘write about what is going on in our heads for others to see’ but also created a universal story about children and their parents, about a cross-generational transmission of suffering, about facing loss and endless desolation.
Warsaw, 1940. A man is rounded up in the street by the occupying German forces. He is imprisoned, then sent to Auschwitz - a place now synonymous with death and terror...
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Aleksandra Lipczak, July 2015, Translated by: Zuzanna Wisniewska
Cover of the photobook Sztafeta (Relay) by Melchior Wańkowicz, photo source: polishphotobook.tumblr.com
Sztafeta (Relay) is not a typical photobook, but rather a richly illustrated reportage, documenting and glorifying the large industrial projects of the Second Polish Republic in the wake of the Second World War.
Melchior Wańkowicz was one of the most acclaimed Polish reporters of the 20th century. A patriot and journalist committed to the well-being of his motherland, his immensely popular publications made him part of the narrative of the identity of the Second Polish Republic. Sztafeta (Relay) is not a typical photobook, but rather a richly illustrated reportage, whose graphic design was prepared by another prominent artist active from the 1930s, Mieczysław Berman. Interestingly, while adhering to their usual genres and styles, both of them remained artistically active in the politically and socially contrasting reality of the Polish People's Republic.
Wańkowicz's book was published in the wake of the war and instantly gained huge popularity – its second edition was sent to print only one month after the release of the first. The book doubtless owed its success largely to its content, as it documented and glorified the large industrial projects of the Second Polish Republic and demonstrated the thriving national economy, thus uplifting national sentiments in the light of an escalating international conflict. Sztafeta is a modern version of the 19th century canonical books written to raise readers' spirits. Years later, it comes across as slightly naïve, but certainly reflecting the actual feelings of its readers back in the day. At the same time, its incredibly suggestive graphic layout, based mainly on photographs, but also on narrative infographics, is a great asset. This large volume was perfected in every single detail and carefully printed in three versions – the popular paperback version with a dust jacket, in a linen hardcover with a dust jacket, and the exclusive one – leather-bound with golden embossing.
Sztafeta is undeniably a model propaganda publication, incidentally inspired by Prime Minister Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski, who appeared to be pleased with the manufacture-like rhythm of reportages from the grand building sites of the Four Year Plan and Central Industrial Region projects, additionally complemented by the Polish army's 1938 annexation of Zaolzie, which Wańkowicz received with enthusiasm. All of that contributes to the general atmosphere of this book portraying the Sanation regime; an atmosphere that could be described as a nationalist fantasy, a dream about imperialism dreamt in the wake of a war.
As should be the case when promoting a young, modernly-oriented statehood, the book also makes use of a wide variety of modern means of expression. Its graphic design resembles a somewhat mellowed variation of constructivist printed materials and photo collages, and unsurprisingly so, considering the background of both the text's author and graphic designer. Wańkowicz had collaborated with the Kraków-based company Illustrated Daily Courier (IKC) publishing tabloids, as well as made journalistic trips to the USSR and the United States. That experience likely influenced the form of this publication and his cooperation with Mieczysław Berman. As one of the most interesting graphic designers of the interwar period and an early photomontage enthusiast, Berman was known both for his strictly commercial and ideologically-charged, far-left works. In this case, he nevertheless agreed to participate in a project that was favourable towards the late 1930s Sanation order.
The photographs in the book (including four colour spreads) are predominantly records of industrial projects, but they also include journalistic shots of labourers at work, and scenes of government members and politicians, as well as historical iconography. The photographs were taken from numerous sources, and, curiously enough, about thirty of them were created by Wańkowicz, while some of the others were sourced from the Polish Telegraphic Agency, Foto RU-AN, and from the collections of two renowned interwar photoreporters: Stefan Plater-Zyberk and Antoni Wieczorek. Berman used some of them as the basis of his photomontages, which in fact were quite plain and meant as a complement for or ornamentation of selected motifs, rather than referencing the constructivist rhetorics. One interesting method used in Sztafeta, however, is the superimposition of text columns onto photographs.
The photographs are dynamically imposed in at least several ways. They appear as full-page images, as well as on the page margins – individually or in montaged sequences – serving as footnotes of sorts or as more abstract visual elements enhancing the layout. In many cases, the photographs are cropped so as to fill a given space on a page and create a visually coherent composition on the spread. Berman, who was familiar with the techniques of modern visual propaganda, including their Soviet model, created a very contemporary book, which – together with Wańkowicz's text – paradoxically became the prototype for the post-war 'production books'– socialist realist publications commissioned by the later authorities. Berman's photographic narrative is a strong support to the rhetoric values of Wańkowicz's artistically quite dull reportage. As a whole, it effectively embodies a modern reportage based on text and image, whose form still continues to be appealing.
photographs: Juliusz Halewicz (colour), Polish Telegraphic Agency, Photo-Plat, Foto RU-AN, Antoni Wieczorek, Melchior Wańkowicz et al.
text: Melchior Wańkowicz
graphic design: Mieczysław Berman (leather cover: Edward Manteuffel)
publisher: Biblioteka Polska Publishing House, Warsaw
year of publications: 1939
volume: 532 pages
format: 24.8 x 16.7 cm
paper back with dust jacket, linen hardcover with dust jacket, leather-bound hardcover with embossing
Invitation into the abyss of the Polish alphabet, art installation "Między" (Between) (1977) by Stanisław Dróżdż (by the end of our course you'll pronounce this name), photo: Andrés Valentín Gamazo
The Polish alphabet has 32 letters, nine of which are unique. Considering that some of the letters form digraphs and even one trigraph, this adds up to a total of 17 signs, which you‘ll unfortunately have to learn by heart. On the other hand, once you know them all, you’ll be able to pronounce any Polish word.
The Polish language has always had issues with the Latin alphabet. Ever since the 12th century, when the language first started to be written down in the Latin script, scribes were struggling to fit the mind-boggling abundance of Slavic phonology (estimated at that time to comprise 12 vowels and 33 consonants) into the 23 letters of the Latin alphabet.
It got easier over time. Over the years and with the help of a few diacritic signs (like the ogonek , the kropka , and the kreska) Polish has developed all the necessary letters for its specific needs:Ą,Ć,Ę,Ł,Ń,Ó,Ś,Ź,Ż. (Also, it dropped ‘useless’ Latin letters such as Q, V, X, preserved in the English alphabet.)
Day, ut ia pobrusa, a ti poziwai - is considered the first Polish sentence. It was written down in the so-called Księga Henrykowska around 1270. You can see that the inscription uses no typical Polish letters yet; Source: Wikimedia/ CC
To complicate things further, there’s more to the terrible Polish orthography. Polish also features a few curiosities, like its digraphs CH, CZ, DZ, DŹ, DŻ, RZ, SZ, and even one trigraph: DZI.
This adds up to a total of 17 letters and letter combinations unknown to English speakers. But, no worries - we will take you through those strange letters step by step. So read up, and soon you’ll be able to master such monstrous monstrsities, as our most famous tongue-twister: W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie [fʂt͡ʂɛbʐɛʂɨɲɛ xʂɔɰ̃ʂt͡ʂ bʐmi ftʂt͡ɕiɲɛ].
Choose your difficulty level:
I want to start with something non-threatening (False Friends)
Polish children learning alphabet at school, photo: Jan Morek / Forum
Before we go into details and start explaining the letters unique to the Polish alphabet, we must make one thing clear. Some Polish letters are impostors. For example:
C - unless followed by the letter ‘i’, is pronounced ‘ts’ (as in ’tsunami’) - never ‘k’ like in the word ‘cat’.
EXAMPLE: the word co, pronounced ’tso’meaning ‘what’.
W - is always pronounced ’v’ like van, so forget the weird way English-speakers pronounce their ‘w’.
EXAMPLE: Wietnam (pronounced like in English)
J - the bastard
Another false friend - J in Polish is pronounced‘y’, like the ‘y’ sound in ‘yeti’.
EXAMPLE: lojalny, pronounced ‘lo-yal-neh’, meaning ‘loyal’.
TRIVIA: Though J might seem like an honest character among our complicated letters, since it used to be written as ‘i’, or sometimes 'y' or 'g.' It has caused significant controversy among Polish scholars and linguists. Despite having been introduced in Polish as early as the 16th century, by a man fittingly called Jan Januszowski, it remained the most contested letter in Polish orthography up until the 19th century when it was finally accepted for good. One of the greatest J-adversaries, Jan Śniadecki, called it the “bad grammatical spirit”, ‘an intruder’, or even the “Gdańsk bastard’. [The letter J was used in the 1632 protestant edition of the Bible published in Gdańsk]
N.B. The Polish ‘r’ is rolled like in Spanish or Russian. If you have trouble making the sound, start out by saying a double ‘d’ sound like in ‘Eddy.’
How many Polish diacritic signs can you find in this image? Sound installation "Za waszą i naszą wolność" by the art collective Slavs and Tatars, shown in Istanbul in 2014, photo: IAM
OK, now we’re ready to take a look at the diverse world of Polish diacritics. Here’s a little hint:
ogonek means little tail and is responsible for nasalizing vowel sounds - ą, ę;
kreska (acute accent) means either palatalization as in ś, ć, ) or turns o into u;
kropka (overdot) is only used with ż;
the slash across letters is used only with ł
Here are the 9 Polish letters formed with diacritics:
Ć- like ‘ch’ in China, except softer
EXAMPLE: This letter is most often found in infinitive verbs like pić (to drink), spać (to sleep), wstać (to get up).
Ś - Again, this is like ’sh’ in ‘shore’ only much softer.
EXAMPLE: ślub, śpiew meaning respectively wedding, singing
Ń - this is a palatalized n, a sound close to the Spanish ñ, but you’ll find it also in ‘onion’.
EXAMPLE: Famous director Roman Polański, even though English media often drop the ń
Ź – has no English equivalent. It is very similar to Ż, except softer. The differentiation between soft and hard consonants is one of the hardest features to conquer, but fortunately people will understand you even if you can’t quite pull them off.
EXAMPLE: The surname Woźniak
CI, SI, ZI, NI - Please note that the four abovementioned phonemes (ć,ś, ź and ń) have an alternative notation. When standing before a vowel they are written as ci, si, zi, ni, but they sound the same.
EXAMPLE: The common Polish surname Zieliński is pronounced ‘zhel-een’skee, with the ź sound at the beginning
Ó- looks like ‘o’ but you pronounce it as English /oo/, as in moon. This means it is pronounced just the same as Polish u.
TRIVIA: Ó is the bane of Polish schoolchildren, who never know if a word is written with ó or u, but etymologically speaking, it is very useful. Basically ó is a sign that centuries earlier, this was still a regular o sound. One of such examles is król (king). Knowing this, one can correctly deduce that it comes from the name Karol (Carolus, or Karl) - the emperor of Franks and the one time Europe's most powerful ruler went on to become the generic name for king in many languages in eastern and Central Europe (Compare: Czech král, Croatian Kralj, Russianкороль, Lithuanian karalius and Hungarian Király).
Ż - [ʒ] /zh/, like "s" in the English word "measure", pronounced exactly like ‘rz’ (see below).
EXAMPLE: żyrafa a giraffe.
Ą - one of the two nasal sounds preserved in Polish. Interestingly, the sound represented by Ą is not a nasal A, but rather nasal O (which would make a different notation (ǫ) more sensible). It sounds more or less like ‘on’ in ‘wrong.’
EXAMPLES: Polish doughnuts are called pączki and have recently become trendy in the Western world, where they are sometimes anglicised as ‘ponchki’
Ę - a nasal E, most often encountered as the ending of first person singular conjugation, but when it is at the end of a word, it is almost inaudible. In the middle of a word, it sounds like ‘in’ in ‘bin.’
EXAMPLE: Dziękuję, the Polish word for ‘thank you’
TRIVIA: Polish and Kashubian are the only two Slavic languages to have preserved the historic nasal vowels, which were once typical for all Slavic languages. In laguages like Compare Pol. dąb (oak) and Russian Дуб (dub), Polish ręka (hand) and Rus. рука (ruka).
Ł - The mysterious ł with a slash is pronounced like an English ’w’ like in the word ‘wool.’
EXAMPLE: Forget the English pronunciation of Wałęsa, and try to say it the Polish way!
TRIVIA: Until very recently, ł was pronounced more or less like an English l – the so-called dark l.You can still find older people in Poland who say it like that, but if anyone below 80 pronounces ł in prewar fashion, it, sounds cheesy..
Now, you know all the letters using diacritic signs, which means you are ready to pronounce a test sentence containing all the Polish diacritic letters:
You are almost ready to unbound the full potential of Polish alphabet (Location: Kraków, main square), photo: Jakub Ociepa / AG
Even though these agglomerations of consonants may look frightening, they all represent a single sound, many of which exist in English.
CZ - like ‘ch’ like in ‘change’.
EXAMPLE: ponczo, the polonized spelling of the Spanish word ‘poncho’ is pronounced like its English counterpart. You can also use it to greet Polish acquaintances: Cześć means ‘hello’!
SZ - approximates the English ‘sh’ in ‘shape’.
EXAMPLE: szal, a scarf or a shawl, or proszę, meaning Please - but to be also used on other occasions, like when saying Pardon!, Go ahead!, Here you are!, Not at all!,Well, Well!, and Come in! - Proszę covers them all.
RZ - exactly like ż: /zh/
EXAMPLE: rzecz (thing), Rzeczpospolita (republic) - used as another word for Poland.
TRIVIA: Another etymological hint. It indicates a former ‘r’ sound. For example, the word rzeka (river) in Polish will be reka in Russian, rijeka in Croatian, etc.
N.B.: There are a couple of exceptions, Tarzan, mierzić, marznąć - in those cases you would pronounce rz as r and z separately.
DZ - it is close to ’ts’, but voiced like in ‘podzol’
EXAMPLE: dzban, a pitcher
DŻ - is pronounced as g in gel or J in Jennifer
EXAMPLE: dżem, jam – like the sweet fruit paste, not like traffic on the road. You can now pronounce the name Stanisław Dróżdż - find out more about this pioneering artist of Concrete poetry.
DŹ - Trying to say d+ź should do the trick here.
EXAMPLE: dźwig (lift), dźwięk (sound)
CH - pronounced just like H.
EXAMPLE: cholera - both a disease and a popular curse word.
TRIVIA: The alternative ch spelling again indicates that the two sounds differed at a one point in history. H alone represented a voiced glottal fricative /ɦ/ , ch - a voiceless velar fricative /x/. The Czech language still maintains this distinction. Also, you can still find people - born in the Eastern lands formerly belonging to Poland - that pronounce h the old way (which makes herbata [tea] sound really crude).
DZI - Polish has also one trigraph DZI, pronounced like dź.
EXAMPLE: dziewczyna, a girl, or dziękuję (see above)
And that’s it! Now you can pronounce sentences like:
Pójdźże, kiń tę chmurność w głąb flaszy,
It uses pretty much everything you’ve just learned.
Step 4. How to Misspell Polish...
The 2nd ephemeral publication of Polish Futurists. Find more at polona.pl
Now that you know all the intricacies of Polish alphabet, it might have crossed your mind that things could be much simpler. In fact, over the years the complexity of the Polish alphabet gave rise to several attempts at reforming Polish orthography. The most famous, as well as the most radical of them, came in 1921 with the publishing of the ephemeral Futurist newspaper called "Nuż w bżuhu", edited by poets Bruno Jasieński and Anatol Stern.
The paper was printed on November 13, 1921 in poster format and written in a simplified version of Polish alphabet, with all words being written phonetically. The Futurists discarded of all alternative notation, ridding Polish of all ni, si, zi, as well as rz, ó, ch - which as you know can also be written asń, ś, ź andż, u, h. That's how Nóż w brzuchu (meaning: Knife in the belly) became Nuż w bżuhu.
However, Jasieński's reformative effort was met with dismay and even outrage. Critics saw it as an assault on Polish language and tradition, and linked it with its authors' Communist sympathies. As a result, all the copies of the paper were confiscated by censorship. Writing Polish could have been so much easier...
In order to guide English-speakers towards the Polish authors best suited for their specific tastes, Culture.pl has put together an exclusive guide offering historical...
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Ursula Phillips, the author of several translations of Polish literature, has been awarded the Found in Translation for her 2014 English version of Zofia Nałkowska’s novel “Choucas”.
The Found in Translation award was founded by the Book Institute, the Polish Cultural Institute in London, and the Polish Cultural Institute in New York, and is presented annually to a translator of Polish literature to English. The jury, Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Philip Boehm (awarded in the previous editions) and Anna Godlewska, Bartek Remisko and Grzegorz Gauden (the organizers’ representatives), awarded Choucas, one of Zofia Nałkowska’s least known novels. The book was published in Poland in 1927 and is set in a health resort in the Swiss Alps. The eponymous birds, an Alpine species of a jackdaw, keep its visitors of various nationalities company. The novel attempts to examine the psychological basis for nationalism.
Ursula Philips is known for her fondness for women’s writing of the 19th and early 20th century. She researches and popularizes Polish literature at the School of Slavonic & East European Studies of the University College in London. So far, her translations include for Narcyza Żmichowska’s The Heathen, Maria Wirtemberska’s Malvina, or The Heart's Intuition, and Wiesław Myśliwski’s The Palace, as well as several books by Agnieszka Taborska and works on the theory of literature. Philips is also an author and co-author of numerous essay books, including the 2013 Polish Literature in Transformation.
The English edition of Zofia Nałkowska’s Choucas was published in 2014 by Northern Illinois University. The author of the winning translation was awarded 10,000 złotys and a three-month artistic residence in Kraków.
Writer Olga Tokarczuk has been awarded the Brueckepreis award, an international prize given by the twin towns of Zgorzelec, Poland and Goerlitz, Germany, in recognition for her activity in the field of intercultural understanding and agreement.
Olga Tokarczuk’s writing ‘has broadened literary perspectives on the literature of Central and Eastern Europe and has become a strong means of communication between representatives of different nations’, said Willi Xylander, director of the Bruckerpreis Award Committee, on 10 July 2015.
In Księgi Jakubowe / The Jacob’s Scriptures Tokarczuk took a new role: a pugnacious 21st – century’s prophetess, who reaches back to the history of the nation in order... Read more »
'In her novels, essays and other short literary forms, Olga Tokarczuk ‘constructs literary bridges between people, cultures and generations, especially those that live on the intersection of the Polish, German and Czech borders.' – reads the jury’s verdict.
Tokarczuk lives in a village in the Sudetes on the Polish-Czech border, and according to the verdict, the Polish writer ‘throws a sensitive glance at the past, the Polish-German-Czech past as well, and tackles issues with a certain emotional burden. This is how bridges of empathy are being built’.
According to the members of the Bruckerpreis Association the Polish writer gave literary language and a new intellectual basis to the multinational and multicultural area of Lower Silesia.
The award ceremony is scheduled for 4 December 2015 in Goerlitz. Along with the award, Tokarczuk will receive 2,500 euro. The prize has been awarded since 1993 in recognition for the development of democracy and dialogue in Europe. The award was previously given to, among others, Jean-Claude Juncker, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Guenter Grass, Norman Davis, and Vitali Klitschko.
After the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, the cities of Zgorzelec and Goerlitz started intense cooperation. The twin towns applied to be the European Culture Capital, however, without success. In 1998 they formed the Euro City Zgorzelec/ Goerlitz.
A photograph from the album "Warszawskie autobusy. Najpiękniejsze fotografie" of the Wydawnictwo RM publishing company. The Somua brand buses at the inauguration of the A line, Teatralny square, June 29th, 1928 , from the National Digital Archive collection, photo: courtesy of Wydawnictwo RM
Warsaw keeps on changing, and so do its buses. For the past 95 years, they kept the capital’s dwellers company on their everyday commute. Most of the vehicles that once travelled across the streets of Warsaw have perished, and remain only to be seen on yellowed photographs, but Włodzimierz Winek’s book invites readers for a ride back in time.
The 1920s – A Trial Period
After a break of a few years, on 29th June, 1928, buses returned to the streets. The Warszawianka journal announced this "as a trial, with the purpose of lightening the tramway traffic on lines travelling trough Marszałkowska and Nowy Świat-Krakowskie Przedmieście streets towards the Teatralny square, a new bus line has been put into operation, from Teatralny square to Zbawiciela square, which will be for the moment served by eight buses, each capable of carrying 60 passengers. The course from the Teatralny to the Zbawiciela squares is divided into three sections and it takes 14 minutes, with a charge of 10 grosze for each section travelled.”
["Warszawianka", 1st July, 1928]
The 1930s – Still Not Enough Buses
A photograph from the album "Warszawskie autobusy. Najpiękniejsze fotografie" of the Wydawnictwo RM publishing company. A Somua brand bus at the initial stop of the A line, on Teatralny square, 1932, from the collection of Dariusz Walczak, photo: courtesy of Wydawnictwo RM
"In 1931, more than 17 million passengers were transported by buses. Presently, six bus lines are operating, with a total length of their courses amounting to 23 kilometres. The biggest number of active buses is now 33 vehicles. Yet in spite of the significant expansion of the tramway network and the creation of the bus communication system in recent years, the transportation needs of the dwellers of Warsaw are by no means satisfied. The capital’s people, both in the city and in the suburbs, can painfully sense the insufficiency of the currently existing means of transport. The development of bus traffic must be sped up, which is announced by reliable factors and competent spheres as an urgent matter."
A photograph from the album "Warszawskie autobusy. Najpiękniejsze fotografie". The photograph depicts a Warsaw bus of the Chevrolet brand, transformed into a holzgas and operating in Kraków, 1940–1944, from the collection of the National Digital Archive, photo: Ewald Theuergarten / courtesy of Wydawnictwo RM
"The bus lines in Warsaw are only for Germans. Non-Germans are forbidden to enter them under strict punishment. The execution and governing of this command is a responsibility of the workers of the Urban Communication Institute in Warsaw (Städtische Verkehrsbetriebe Warschau)."
[From an information poster of the S.V.W. board for city bus drivers]
The 1940s – Faulty Urban Transport
A photograph from the album "Warszawskie autobusy. Najpiękniejsze fotografie". In the photograph, a Somua bus fixed by the efforts of MZK employees, on the Trzech Krzyży square, spring, 1946, from the collection of the Warsaw Museum, photo: courtesy of Wydawnictwo RM
"At present, cars travel across three lines: Bielany–Praga, Żoliborz–Śródmieście, Praga– Śródmieście. Soon, new lines will also be put into operation. All of it nonetheless depends on the further distribution of vehicles and the heightening of gasoline distribution limits. The petrol delivered to the MZK as part of the distributive process is often polluted, which of course causes unexpected defects of the engines during their running, as was the case last week.”
["Życie Warszawy", 9th of February, 1946]
The 1950s: Mavags on Their Way to the Capital
A photograph from the album "Warszawskie autobusy. Najpiękniejsze fotografie". The Mavag Tr 5 bus, from the collection of the Warsaw Tramway Archives, photo: courtesy of Wydawnictwo RM
"In Cieszyn, a special technical team of the MZK has taken over a second consecutive series of seven Mavag buses bought in Hungary to strengthen the capital’s MZK stock. The vehicles are already on their way to Warsaw."
["Życie Warszawy", 19th of January, 1950]
"MZK already have 14 Mavag buses from Hungary, which will back up particular lines. Today, on Saturday 21st January, 1950, the Mavags will begin their service on bus lines nr. 100, 107 and 123.”
["Życie Warszawy", 21st of January, 1950]
The 1960s – Preparing for the Weekend Season
A photograph from the album "Warszawskie autobusy. Najpiękniejsze fotografie". The Chausson bus on Defilad square, from the collection of Szczepan Mazanek in the Plant Archives of the MZA, photo: courtesy of Wydawnictwo RM
"A plan for so-called green line connections which operate on holidays and during the weekends is under preparation. They will start with the warm weather. The old lines will be maintained, such as those to Chojnów, Magdalenka and Struga. A new connection will be added, one going to Białobrzegi (it will be the third one in the direction of the Zegrzyński Lagoon). More than 100 buses will operate on these routes (in 1963, there were a little over 60). If there is be such a need, the Miejskie Przedsiębiorstwo Autobusowe [Urban Bus Entreprise] will start up new connections to attractive locations for Sunday tourism. With the coming of spring, MPA will receive proposals and requests for excursion bus rentals. This activity – and justly so, it seems – will not be pursued by the MPA. The vehicles can be rented for a few hours – between the peak hours of morning and afternoon. At peak hours, they should all be in operation on the routes”.
["Życie Warszawy", 26th of March, 1964]
The 1960s – Ticket Pre-sale at the Kiosks
A photograph from the album "Warszawskie autobusy. Najpiękniejsze fotografie". A Jelcz bus in the "Ostrobramska" depot, from the Plant Archives of the MZA, photo: courtesy of Wydawnictwo RM
"Finally, after two years of debate, the issue of selling disposable tickets for all means of urban transport in the Ruch kiosks has been settled positively.This allows for the board of the MZK to introduce buses without conductors and with automatic ticket validators. From 2nd August, 1965, validators will be mounted on buses of the 300 line, and on other additional lines. All of these vehicles will bear a plaque with the inscription "Vehicle with no conductor, ticket sale in Ruch kiosks”. Thanks to the initiation of ticket pre-sale in kiosks, we will no longer witness the paradoxical situations wherein, in spite of the numerous buses in operation, many passengers were forced to wait at bus stops for a vehicle with a conductor. This innovation should doubtlessly aid a rational and even distribution of passengers.”
["Życie Warszawy", 30th of July, 1965]
The 1970s: Berliets on Three Lines
A photograph from the album "Warszawskie autobusy. Najpiękniejsze fotografie" Jelcz and Berliet buses on Marszałkowska street 1970s, photo: Zbyszko Siemaszko / Forum
"53 Berliets are already driving across the streets of the capital, and through to the end of December, 1973, there will be 210 of them. They serve the express A line, and, in part, also the F and M lines. Passengers have taken a liking to the Berliets, as they are quiet and better cushioned than the old buses. Thus everyone may be interested in the fact that towards late 1974, the capital will receive another stock of the Jelcz-Berliet, buses, meant for the regular lines. These buses, however, will be somewhat modified. The demands of local users were taken into account in their design. The new Berliets will thus have three doors, which will be longer and narrower.”
["Życie Warszawy", 19th of July, 1973]
Author: Janusz R. Kowalczyk, June, 2015. Quotes from Warszawskie autobusy. Najpiękniejsze fotografie by Włodzimierz Winek.
Pipes and 17th century churchwardens, hand-painted porcelain rarities, historic fonts, accordions, and medieval torture halls. Culture.pl advises you on 15 unusual museums that astound with their originality and can …haunt your vacation.
The beauty of printing at the Book Art Museum in Łódź
Book Art Museum in Łódź, photo: press materials.
More than a thousand book masterpieces, 250 thousand matrices, and 30 tons of historic machinery from Gutenberg’s era are all to be discovered at the Book Art Museum in Łódź. Here, the past of printmaking meets the future of book design within the post-industrial spaces of Henryk Grohman’s villa in the Księży Młyn district. It's definitely worth finding yourself here and discovering the art of books!
Founded in 1993, the museum developed out of a small publishing company called Correspondance des Arts, which was started in 1980 and later changed into a foundation under the same name. The founders of the company and the creators of the museum are Janusz and Jadwiga Tryzno. In the past, they were active participants of the independent underground printing initiatives of the Solidarity movement. Together they restored old machinery, cultivated the art of printing, and also saved a font-casting workshop in Warsaw. Not only did they save the workshop’s foundry equipment, but also old Polish, Hebrew, Cyrillic, and Armenian fonts. "They weren’t thrown away and they constitute very precious material for future generations," the creators of the institution told the PAP agency. The Tryznos have been honoured for their activity by the American Association of the History of Print, for a special merit in the field of printing.
The Book Art Museum is also engaged in publishing activity and it conducts various educational workshops. Their collection comprises a contemporary set, "Polish artistic books of the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries.”
Accordions from across the world play in Kaszuby
The Accordion Museum, photo: Wojciech Strożyk / East News
The only museum of its kind in Poland and one of only three such institutions in Europe can be found in the very heart of the Kaszuby region. And this location is no coincidence, because it is here that accordion music enjoys a long and rich tradition. Local musicians even call the instrument distinct names, such such świnia (pig), kwecz or kaloryfer (heater). The Museum’s oldest accordions date back to the 1830s. A historic Hohner Carmen II, a German Tatra, and more than a hundred unique instruments from across the world also find themselves in the Museum’s collection in Kościerzyna.
The authors of a multimedia exhibition at the Accordion Museum comment, "The world of accordions is incredibly colourful and versatile. These instruments have a soul.” All of the information is provided in four languages: Polish, Kaszubian, English, and German.
Every visitor is also invited to try playing an accordion.
Bells and old pipes
Muzeum Dzwonów i Fajek (Bell and Pipe Museum), photo: Adam Wajda / Forum
The historic late-Baroque Clock Tower towers 40 metres high at the heart of the Old Town of Przemyśl. It is there that one can admire an exceptional collection of items. Both bells and pipes are the handicraft pride of Przemyśl, so it come as no surprise that the European capital of both pipe and bell making has decided to enclose some of its best items with a museum cabinet. Inside, one can see clay pipes, churchwardens from the 17th century, historic pipes, biedermeyer pipes, hunters’ and soldiers’ pipes. But that is not all…
"On the first floor, we display the collection of pipes found in the Przemyśl fortifications. The porcelain pipes are also particularly interesting – among them is one that belonged to a reservist and which is connected to the custom that accompanied a soldier’s passing into the reserve forces. A separate space has been reserved for the so-called walatówki. They were pipes of Przemyśl’s legendary pipe maker Ludwik Walat."
(from nowiny24.pl)
Tourists can also see a model pipe workshop, with old equipment and tools. And let us not forget about the bells – the biggest ones come from Zbigniew Felczyński’s workshop, and the smaller ones are those usually used on ships. The toils of climbing the tower’s narrow and steep staircase is also additionally rewarded by the panoramic view of the town, which stretches underneath the terrace of the Museum.
Soap Opera
Muzeum Mydła i Historii Brudu (The Museum of Soap and the History of Grime, photo: Maciej Rozwadowski / Forum
Where does soap come from, who invented shampoo, and who made the first shower? What did advertisements for cosmetics look like a hundred years ago? Hints to these questions are a provided by the creators of the The Museum of Soap and the History of Grime in Bydgoszcz. Among the items that are significant in the history of hygiene there is the iconic washing machine called Frania. There are old washboards, washtubs, 19th century scrubbing brushes, iron tubs, and a model shower from 200 years ago! A space arranged to resemble a bathroom from the Polish Communist Republic also boasts a collection of dozens of soaps from the 1970s and 80s. Jacek i Agatka, a perfumed proposition for the youngest visitors, opens the collection. And speaking of the sense of smell – it can also be tested in the Museum’s olfactory lab.
"We want each of our guests to step out of the Museum with a smile on his face and a soap in his pocket. We try to depict history through a series of anecdotes and stories, including those smelly ones. We train the visitors a little in washing on the washing board, we try to take him back in time to the Medieval bath house or the weighing of soap bar at a colonial shop."
Theatre in the museum – the Centre of Polish Stage Design in Katowice
Centrum Scenografii Polskiej w Katowicach (Centre of Polish Stage Design in Katowice), photo: promotional materials.
Projects derived from the most famous stagings, which proved fundamental to the history of Polish stage design can be found in Silesia, at the Centre of Stage Design. The collection of the institution, which has been operating for some 25 years, comprises 10 thousand original designs, drawings, models, costumes, paintings, posters, and manuscripts along with puppets and dolls from the best artists – from Andrzej Kreutz-Majewski and Józef Szajna, through Lidia and Jerzy Skarżyński, to Zofia de Ines.
During the Centre’s opening ceremony, Jerzy Moskal claimed,
We are not a typical institution – we are somewhere between a museum and a theatre. Our spirit isn’t in the museum space but rather on the stage, which we transform into an auditorium.
These words best render the character of exhibitions hosted by the Centre, which are always theatrically arranged. The stage and the museum room is semi-dark, with a very telling play of lights, much like in the theatre.
CSP operates on the border between theatre, film, architecture, and visual arts. It is a section of the Silesian Museum.
The turbulent and multicultural history of Silesia, as well as Poland and Europe, are woven together in this post-industrial space. The new museum opens on 26 June 2015.
Read more »
Ina coffee set, made by the Industrial Design Institute in Warsaw, produced by the Ćmielów Porcelain Tableware Factory, 1962
What does an old, 22-metre stove for porcelain baking look like? What is a bisque? The answers can be found in the 200 year old Porcelain Factory in Ćmielów. The factory gathers extraordinary items, from delftware of Małachowski's – the factory’s founder – through contemporary designs of acclaimed designers. It is here, in the Live Museum of Porcelain, that you can get a live peek at the process of making hand-decorated tea cups and other frail porcelain wonders. Ćmielów is one among few manufactures across the world that produced traditional porcelain. It is also where the international Art Food workshops take place, under the guidance of the exceptional potter, Marek Cecuła.
Centrum Kultury Ekumenicznej (Centre of Ecumenical Culture) photo: Travel Photo / organisers’ promotional materials
There is a place in the Bieszczady Mountains that restores the memory of the region’s culture. In Myczkowice near Solina, one can take a stroll in the charming ecumenical park of miniatures. It stretches across the area of one hectare, and its few mini-hills boast 140 meticulously reconstructed wooden models of Greek Orthodox and Catholic churches from South-Eastern Poland, as well as Slovakia and Ukraine. The models are surrounded by miniature plants, and Greek Orthodox chants resound from loudspeakers mounted in the park. The Centre of Ecumenical Culture evokes the lost wooden church architecture of the past, and it also depicts the history of Bieszczady. National Geographic listed the Centre as one of the 7 New Wonders of Poland, next to the Ćmielów factory.
Reymont’s Dolls
Doll Museum, photo: Marek Skorupski / Forum
Zofia Bohaczyk from Pilzno first reconstructed the miniature Lipce of Reymont, and these were followed by heroes of different Polish legends and fables. There are kings, princes, and figures known from the literary worlds of Aesop, La Fontaine, and Andersen. For 25 years, the Doll Museum has been a tourist attraction of the region, with the largest collection of Japanese dolls in all of Poland. The porcelain and marionette works of the doll makers’ art also embody characters from Mickiewicz’s Sir Thaddeus. They are exemplary of 18th century fashion and customs. And some are also strikingly similar to the actors of today’s political scene…
The salon of fear
Museum of Horror in Racibórz, photo: promotional materials.
Here’s an offer for thrill seekers. The Museum of Horror provides an abundance of these, located within the historic palace in Wojnowice, 5 km from Racibórz in Upper Silesia. Apparently it can be quite scary, though the creators of the Museum assure us that the purpose is mainly educational. There are ten themed spaces – a guillotine room, Dracula’s salon, the room of ghostly sheets, and a horror bathroom find themselves among them. There are also sophisticated torture tools. All this in a place that is unique in Poland and is also one of a few in the world!
The history of surgery
Museum of Surgery in Ustroń, photo: Tomasz Fritz
So now, for a change, let’s go to the operating room. The history of Polish surgery, with the first heart-lung created by Professor Tadeusz Paliwoda’s team, a surgery chair from the 18th century, and a room from the 1970s are all on display at the Surgery Museum. Located in Ustroń, by the the Rheumatological Hospital, the museum boasts a collection of nearly 500 items and tools which document the development and the achievements of Silesian medicine. Biographies of prominent doctors who revived Polish medicine from ruins after the Second World War find themselves at the heart of this institution. A similar institution also operates in Edinburgh, it is the Surgeons' Hall Museum which possesses the largest collection in the field of pathological anatomy, surgery and dentistry in Britain.
Krosno, the city of glass
Glass Heritage Centre in Krosno, photo: promotional materials
Did you know that glass masterpieces from Krosno decorate the court of Queen Elisabeth II, that of Juan Carlos in Spain, and also the Imperial Court in Japan? The history and success of glass manufacturing is presented at the Glass Heritage Centre in Krosno. Visits start at the newly renovated underground levels, which display the most famous glass works. The centre also has an old stove and a glass in physics room, where visitors are allowed to experiment with glass items, blow glass bubbles, lenses, kaleidoscopes and optic fibre. There are also patterns for glass designed for leading international brands, such as Venetian Murano. Only in Krosno!
Piłsudski’s kajzerki rolls
"Obwarzanki krakowskie" (the Kraków bagels), one of the items on display at the Bread Museum, photo: Michał Łepecki / Agencja Gazeta
Marian Pozorek, a known baker from the Praga district in Warsaw knows pretty much everything about making bread. This is why in 2000, he instigated the creation of the Bread Museum, which documents the history of the craft. For many years, it has housed an expanding collection of old bakery signboards, journeyman diploma certificates, centuries old weights and machinery for grinding grain into flour. Kajzerówki moulds are also on display, which allowed for the making of 4 classic kajzerka rolls in what used to be Piłsudski’s favourite bakery. There are also family treasures passed to the museum from bakers across all of Poland. Bon appetit!
Łowicz buttons
A plate from the Button Museum in Łowicz, photo: promotional materials
They can tell us things about fashion, customs, great history, and first and foremost – about their owners. Three thousand… buttons, which belonged to prominent figures in Polish culture, art, and politics are presented at the Button Museum in Łowicz. Among treasures from across the world there are the buttons of Wisława Szymborska, Marek Edelman, Jerzy Waldorff, Lech Wałęsa, General Władysław Sikorski, Stanisław Lem and Sławomir Mrożek. There is also a button of legendary actress Helena Modrzejewska (found in the garage of an exclusive hotel in Kraków) and one of the most famous buttons in all of Poland – a faithful copy of the button of Marcin Oracewicz, a hero and a defender of Kraków during the Confederation of Bar.
The Museum’s custodian Jacek Rutkowski explains in a talk with the PAP agency:
"A member of the Kraków belt maker’s guild loaded his gun with a large button taken off his own coat during the Russian siege of the city on June 22nd, 1768, and with an accurate hit, he wounded and killed a Russian lieutenant.”
The event is confirmed by historic sources, and this unusual bullet has been raised to the rank of an important medal, presently awarded by the Strzeleckie Bractwo Kurkowe Society in Kraków.
Napoleon in the Romantic Opinogóra
The Museum of Romanticism in Opinogóra, photo: promotional materials
Tourists are given a lesson in Romanticism by Opinogóra – a small and charming dwelling in the Mazowsze region, that attracts admirers of Zygmunt Krasińki’s literary oeuvre. It is here that the author’s only statue in Poland can be found, as well as a collection of his aristocratic family’s items. There are also other interesting items, such as Napoleon’s dossier, which was taken by Kossaks during the passage across Berezina river, the Krasiński family tree – a 1722 copper etching printed on silk, portraits, busts, and two libraries built in the empire style with a French collection of literary, historic and philosophical writings from the 17th and 18th century. The Museum’s collection also includes early editions of Krasiński’s works, his correspondence, a collection of etchings, and maps.
The Museum’s park has a little bench from 1832, made in accordance with the request of Amelia Załuska, the first muse of Zygmunt Krasiński, with the engraved phrase "May my memory always be dear to you.” Those who visit Opinogóra declare that anyone who sits on the bench will fall in love!
Kraków’s stained glass
Stained Glass Museum in Kraków, photo: promotional materials.
And finally, we look into the Kraków studio that has been creating the leading pieces of Polish stained glass art since 1902. More than 200 realisations – unique works of art – that come from the studio on Krasińskiego Street can be seen not only within the Stained Glass Museum, but also across all of Kraków – in Wawel, in Gothic cathedrals, the Mariacka Basilica, and in private houses. And apart from the permanent exhibition, the Museum also provides a chance to witness the process of making stained glass, a fabulous procedure which remains unaltered for centuries.
sources: www.museo.pl, PAP, Muzeum Witraży, Muzeum Romantyzmu in Opinogóra, Muzeum Guzików in Łowicz, Muzeum Książki Artystycznej in Łódź, Muzeum Chleba, Centrum Dziedzictwa Szkła in Krosno, Muzeum Akordeonów, Muzeum Chirurgii, Muzem Mydła i Historii Brudu, Muzeum Dzwonów i Fajek in Przemyśl, Fabryka Porcelany in Ćmielów, Muzeum Lalek in Pilzno, Muzeum Horroru, Centrum Kultury Ekumenicznej in Myszkowce.
Edited by Anna Legierska, July, 2015
Translated by Paulina Schlosser, 26/07/2015
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A spread from the book - Abc.de - by Iwona Chmielewska, photo: Wydawnictwo Warstwy
Iwona Chmielewska’s latest book is a multilingual, illustrated dictionary about German culture and an ambitious graphic alphabet that takes the audience into the world of art, literature, science and philosophy.
Words, characters and letters seem to be waiting in front of Sigmund Freud’s office, flowing out of Brecht and Goethe’s books, jumping on top of Bach’s music sheets and Cologne cathedral rooftops. Our tour guides through the Polish – French – English – German sentences are well-known figures in the world of culture, art and science: the brothers Grimm, Max Ernst and Albert Einstein. We also meet Pina Bausch, Mozart’s family, Joseph Beuys, Leibnitz and many more. In the preface of the book, the artist renowned worldwide for her illustrations writes:
Regelinda – a smiling Polish girl from the cathedral in Naumburg. You will find her in this book. As a Pole, I also smile at the not so foreign language and culture that is close to me. I owe a lot to my grandmother Hulda Jaeger, who taught me German poems and sung Stille Nacht to sleep, not only in winter. She was a simple weaver from Łódź, but you will find her in this book too. Granny, you probably didn’t expect this.
The latest book by Iwona Chmielewska– author of numerous literary successes - among others Eyes/Oczy, that was awarded the illustrational Oscar is at the same time, a gesture towards German culture and a story about European history and identity. The publishing house calls it ‘the thinking alphabet’, enriched by linguistic context of French, English and Polish, which makes it a universal publication and accessible to readers of all ages. It sucks you into an intellectual game, that is entertaining due to its associations. Justyna Sobolewska recommends the book to adults rather than children in Polityka:
Mainly adults will appreciate the subtle allusions and sense of humour. The new book is an illustrated Polish – English – French – German dictionary and at the same time a tribute to German culture. It is adults who will notice the word play in these collages like Leipzig and Leibniz. Or two men from Friedrich’s painting, who are walking away into the fog on the page marked ‘holidays’ or Rilke with a rose. Children on the other hand can enjoy the amazing illustrations much like a 19th century German encyclopaedia. You can also treat this book as an introduction to art, and all in four languages at once.
As the publishing house accentuates, the book is deliberately published in Wrocław – a city with a multicultural tradition, whose German history was suppressed by inhabitants for decades, yet is indeed permanently present in the urban tissue.
Author: AL., July 2015, Translated by: Zuzanna Wiśniewska, July 2015
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