July 18, 2013

July 18, 2013

Poland has had a difficult history.  I think Poland’s experience can best be explained by Risk, the board game I often played as a teen.  When countries and continents of the world are divvied up, the most coveted were those with few borders making them easier to defend.  The least desirable were territories like Eastern Europe. With enemies on all sides they were hard to hold and defend. And so it went with Poland.  At one time there was a large thriving Polish Empire.  But more often the Poles were defending themselves from attack in every direction.  If it wasn’t the Germans from the West, it was the Swedes from the North, or the Austrians from the South, or the Russians from the East.  On more than one occasion, Poland was carved into pieces and obliterated completely from the map.  Despite these setbacks, the Poles kept their Catholic Slav identity separate from their German Protestant and Orthodox Russian neighbors.

Our first morning in Poland, and not surprisingly, we are up early. We are going to start by exploring the bright side of Warsaw history. We catch a city bus that takes us to Wilanow Palace on the bank of the Vistula River. It was built in the late 1600’s by King Jan III Sobieski as his summer home away from the city center. It is considered the Polish Versailles. I recently read a book on Vienna history in preparation for this trip. Sobieski gained lasting fame as the Savior of Christendom when he arrived on the scene just as Vienna was about to be overrun by the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire.

The palace was modest as palaces go but highly decorated in the Baroque style. Unfortunately both of us thought the English audio tour was unexciting. Part of our problem may have been that with no air-conditioning and no air flow we were sweating. Finally back outside, we walked the gardens surrounding the palace. Even though it is much cooler than Tucson, we are no longer used to the humidity. In the sun we are roasting but in the shade it is comfortable.

 

Feeling a little jet lagged we stop at a nearby cafe and have a lunch of meat-filled pierogi and a coke to wake us up.  Refreshed we take the bus back to the center of town and stop at the Old Town of Warsaw.  As we approach both of us think it looks right out of a Hollywood set.  Probably with good reason.  It was destroyed during WWII.  This "Old Town" is brand new.  We stroll past Zygmunt's Column, the Royal Castle, through the main square and end up at the Barbican, a small section of the old town’s original fortified wall and gate that survived.We finish our day walking to a few nearby memorials, dedicated to the hell that Warsaw experienced in WWII.  That history will have to wait till tomorrow.  We are not used to all the walking and head back to our hotel to rest.