Anyway yeah, these are the steeples of the Catholic church (Katedra?) in the middle of Pruszków. I just remember snapping this while walking to my father's place and just feeling intoxicated with the springtime on a quiet Saturday morning. I sometimes envy my old man for ending up here.
Park Potulickich is full of very old, very large trees. From the Polish-language Wikipedia page, machine-translated via Google:
The park was established on the order of hr. Antoni Potulicki in the second half of the 19th century as a neighborhood of the classicist Potulicki palace, the designer was German architect Karol Sparman . According to trends prevailing at the time, the composition included the existing terrain and the natural water system consisting of the river bed of the Utrata river and four ponds with a total area of 8.5 hectares. In their area there are alders , as well as ash , birch and lime , while in the former river channel a wetland complex of rush and sedge. ... The unique nature of the Potulicki Park is highlighted by valuable ancient trees, consisting of white and gray poplar , European larch , black alder , elm elm , ash, and monuments of nature. Existing natural conditions have made it an area of natural habitat and breeding sites for numerous fauna, especially birds.[sic] where appropriate.
The park's western edge runs parallel to a road called Prusa Bolesława (yes, named for the author of Lalka), which we (my sister Beth, her partner Scot, and myself) followed during our frequent walks between my father's home and the hotel we were staying at. We might have saved a few seconds cleaving to the sidewalk along the street and taking a more direct route, but we invariably veered into Potulickich. It seemed a waste not to.
(I'm told it's a statue of the Virgin Mary. Go figure.)
I took so many god damn pictures of these things.
Cool roof, though.
Poland is predominately Catholic, but I'm to understand that the Orthodox Church (here the Polish Orthodox Church, or just the Church of Poland) has a few isolated strongholds, most of them towards the eastern border. Evidently Białowieża lies in one of those strongholds.
A Jesus lawn shrine/ornament. It might not be totally unfair to analogize this area to the United States' Bible Belt. Eastern Poland is the wellspring of support for the ruling Law and Justice Party, which earlier this year officially instated Jesus Christ as the King of Poland.
Not that I'm not grateful for the privilege of coming here to begin with, but I would have counted myself exceptionally blessed to have had an obligation, a destination somewhere farther down this road.
I wasn't exaggerating when I said Poland is greener in the springtime than the Mid-Atlantic United States. If I spoke Polish well enough to be employable there, I'd have probably already packed my shit and moved to Białowieża. The insurmountable language barrier is my only excuse.
A local fellow goin' fishing.
...and here he is again, two hours later. The fact that he's certainly never written a book about how to live well is proof that this man is an expert in living well.
The English-language Wikipedia entry for Białowieża calls this "Hunter's manor - the oldest surviving building in Białowieża." It was built in 1845. We were fairly convinced it was haunted.
A white wagtail (Motacilla alba) on the driveway outside Hunter's Manor. Pretty sure it was haunted, too.
White storks (Ciconia ciconia) migrate from Africa to Central Europe during spring to breed. Apparently 25% of them end up in Poland. They build gigantic nests, which they return to during subsequent migrations—and which Polish law forbids people from destroying. I'm told this makes the stork unpopular with certain folks in rural Poland, namely those without central heating systems. A giant bird setting up a permanent homestead at the top of their chimney must be an unwelcome sight indeed. (This mother and chick resided on top of a utility pole near a restaurant patio in Białowieża village, though.)
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I know I shouldn't have looked twice at an Adventure Time plush hanging in somebody's upstairs window; it's not like American cartoons are a global niche product. But since I was reading Lost Territories Wordbook (a series of mirco-essays on the little curiosities and unpublicized particularities of life in Soviet and post-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe) at the time, I was imagining an alternate history where Finn became a subversive icon of pro-Western sentiment or a kind of cultural crocus, a symbol of Glasnost in a Soviet Union that somehow took three decades longer to implode.
The hotel we stayed in was an appendage of the "Museum of Nature and Forest," which occupies the former site of King Augustus III's palace (ripped down by the Soviets in 1944). The fields spreading out from the main building were once the palace grounds. I spent a lot of time out here by myself, and it was here that I realized that the older I get, the younger spring inspires me to feel, the more it seems to renew me. It's one of the few times I feel grateful for my age rather than anxious about it.
Doesn't capture the flowers' colors as I saw them that afternoon. Sigh.
Most of the white-barked trees in my neck of the woods are grey birch. It's a fast-growing and relatively short-lived tree, which may account for why most of the specimens I see in my hometown are already on the ground, and why the standing ones always appear a little stymied, never entirely healthy. Having come to associate silver trunks with decrepitness, I was scarcely able to believe a scene like this. (I'm guessing these are aspen or alder, but can't be certain.)
This was also new to me: when we looked into the Białowieża forest from the outside on a cloudy day, the interior actually appeared dark. It went a little ways in explaining why perhaps the woods beyond the village are traditionally invested with mystery, fear, and mystic possibility in European folklore.
Obviously a dandelion, but not the kind of dandelion I know. My prima facie guess was that this was a European dandelion of a different strain than the ones native to the American continent—and I was wrong. There are no "native" dandelions in North America. They're a European import, but it's hard to say when they arrived, or which contingent brought them over. It follows that every species of dandelion in the United States must also exist in Europe. So what kind of dandelion is this?
From what I've browsed, the only dandelion in the United States that exhibits such coloring in its immature florets is the desert dandelion. Is that what this is? Don't know. Can't say. Googling "malacothrix glabrata europe" doesn't turn up any useful results. Searches for "european dandelion species" and "poland dandelion species" have been equally unhelpful. Next time I'll smuggle back specimens in a shampoo bottle.
To the right: Scot, my father, Beth. To the left: João, our guide. (Your intuition is correct: "João" is not a Polish name. He's from Portugal.) There are different layers of accessibility in the primeval Białowieża Forest. There are outer areas that are open to the public, inner areas that require an authorized guide, and the deepest places are only open to scientists who have received permission from the authorities. (Incidentally, those same Polish politicians who coronated Jesus Christ as Poland's king are hellbent on logging Białowieża. We were half-expecting to see Greenpeaceniks chaining themselves to tress during our visit, and I was half-expecting I'd end up joining them.)
Within twenty minutes of listening to João talk about natural cycles, networks of interrelation, the follies of industrial agriculture complex, and the absurdity of the urbanist lifestyle, I knew he was into permaculture. When I asked him about it, it was only for the sake of confirmation. Permaculture heads are easy to spot, I've found—not just for their interests and worldview, but their temperament is a dead giveaway. They're critical of authority and "conventional wisdom." Having done what they can to disconnect themselves from the late-capitalist production/consumption mechanisms, and eschewing its typical vocations, they tend to condescend, if only slightly, to those who have not. They're totally convinced of their own brilliance and savvy, and are bit self-congratulatory, even smug. But it's hard to hold it against them when they're pretty much always as smart and competent as they believe themselves to be.
So here are some sundry photographs from inside the primeval forest (both the public and guide-only areas):
Just for comparison, here are the woods I haunt in Jersey, snapped a day or two after my return to the States:
The Białowieża forest is home to the endangered European bison (Bison bonasus), which was hunted nearly to local extinction in the first half of the twentieth century. We didn't see any of these out in the field either, but spent a good hour or so gawking at them through wire fences at the display reserve. This was a drowsing female whose eyelashes, of all things, caught my attention. The first time I read the Iliad, Homer's frequent description of the goddess Hera as "ox-eyed" struck me as something much less than a compliment to the Queen of Olympus. During subsequent readings over the years I accepted that the Greeks perceived something in bovine eyes that the modern American doesn't. Strange to say, after meeting this bison up close, I think maybe I caught a glimpse of it myself.
A digital simulation of what its deployment might have looked like:
And that's all I got.
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