Majowka to Lancut - May 2013

It is good to make a Majowka - a traditional Polish road trip in May. If you want to start it somewhere you might as well start it from Jaslo. Jaslo is a good Sub-carpathian place to leave.

Jaslo at Szaszica street - plastic girls in an ancient villa.

Hitting the road towards east. You are leaving Carpathian mountains behind. The landscape flattens down.

The every-day zombie apocalypse when driving through sub-carpathian towns. Can't believe people actually live there.

Arriving to Lancut - inhabitants seem not to believe themselves to be living there.

However there are entire busses full of tourists on pilgrimage to this far east place in southern Poland. There is the biggest and best preserved magnate residence in the country, with a number of representative baroque and rococo chambers furnished opulent and lush.

The town itself is a good example of how this part of Europe looks like - a synagogue belongs to it like churches and the castle. And a certain resignation and stagnation. Well, globalization does not have to go everywhere! For that reason they close the castle for tourists for a week in May (who wouldn't?) due to the fact that they organize there a music festival. Naive of me not to have checked the Polish internet site - apparently information on that was only in Polish. I have only checked the English version. At the cash desk, a highly unmotivated woman, to my request for tickets, had only pointed to the information above her head without losing a word. The information said that the cash desk is closed. Poor woman could not hide without a glass window between us so I asked how I could buy tickets. Only then she informed me - annoyed by my stupidity - that the castle is closed due to the preparation for the music festival. I required more information and made her tell me the we could go and visit the collection of carriages as it is a separate exposition. Tickets to be acquired somewhere else. Good bye.

The spirit of communist times couldn't be more alive than here in this aristocratic residence. 

Some more unfriendly museum guards later, we reached the carriage museum. Guards unfriendly and bored. Strictly forbidden to take pictures inside (do I have to mention that I hate it when they not allow photography?).

As revenge to this unbelievable unkindliness I took secretly a few pictures (BUAHAHA!). but I couldn't take a lot, the guards were sensing something and kept on following me everywhere I went. Just when I thought I am in prison and this will be a place to hate, a guard came up to me and started talking. The old guy seemed to be bored a bit and a bit embarrassed too, I think he realized I do not enjoy what I see. He started telling me the stories of the carriages and soon I was sure he red and memorized everything about the collection and he basically loves this place. It melted down my resentment.

Mr. Domino - so the family name of this guard - kept on talking about the collecting passion of earl Roman Potocki. We stood in a spacious coach house adapted for its purpose out of baroque stables belonging to the castle. On the walls, paintings of hunting scenes and aristocrats on aristocratic horses. Trophies: usual north European and some exotic - African. Black and white pictures of a safari. Men in flat large hats, wearing shorts and handling overdimensioned rifles.  

Potocki family gathered on the break of 19th and 20th century the biggest fortune among Polish noblesse and by their roots the most widespread network of connections to noble houses and royal families in Europe. Their life was glamorous, money was there in extravagant amount. Passion for cars is common among such lucky people, therefore no wonder the counts Potocki ordered by master craftsmen across Europe a huge number of coaches, including unique exemplars made according to their own extravagant wish. Representative, well preserved, state of the art, fancy and unusual, these words sum up the collection well. Coaches for all kind of noble affairs: hunting, parade, prom, theatre, business, royal weddings and even casual traveling. A seat for your wife installed backwards to enjoy the landscape? No problem! Huge coaches for hunting - separate for males and females, the first need to be able to shoot and change their guns (while servants were reloading), the second need to watch, admire but not get too much sun. Check.

The coolest detail though where the head lights. The huge front lamps, meant to be powered by fire not electricity, were designed with transparent white and blue stripes on the glass bulb. These were the colors of the family armorial bearings. Mr. Domino explained that when the earl was traveling by night, other people approaching in the dark could easily recognize who is coming. So that they could give way to Potocki coach.

Today pedestrian tourists need to give way to richer tourists who hire a carriage for a joyride.

The park surrounding the castle is a sleepy place. 

The garden is not what we know from other European baroque garden reconstructions. A little wild and abandoned.

But it is a nice place for all the young couples who have nowhere to go due to the fact that most people in this part of Poland cannot afford their own apartment and live with their parents till they marry. Sometimes even longer. And you are not supposed to have sex before marriage when you are conservative Catholic. 
I have spotted some couples making out, but won't put their pictures here though. Who knows what kind of trouble they would get into in case the pictures make a round.

Now and then you can see a naked butt between the columns and green branches.

Some neoclassical sexual phantasies of Polish aristocracy.

Here, some more impressions of the well preserved and perfectly renovated facade.

Doesn't look like turbulent life when they close the castle for tourists. 

There are worse places to clean windows.

Nevermind. If they close the castle, there is still plenty to do in the region. What you will though never find in any tourist guide is a tiny place called Giedlarowa. It is a village next to Lezajsk. Lezajsk is known for many things, a wonderful baroque monastery, a festival of pipe organ music and a brewery. Giedlarowa is known for nothing. But among my family and friends, Giedlarowa is a place to go.

The village has 4000 inhabitants. Wikipedia mentions two rivers and the parish church dedicated to Archangel Michael. And this is where we are heading to.

In my family women live very long, too long to still think properly. When they get dementia, they suddenly remember details from the past which seem to be not important at first. But they repeat them and the only thing you can remember after they die, are these fragments. Our old aunt who we called Cioteczka (Auntie) lived almost 100 years and died in the end of the 1990s. She would walk around in the house wearing just her negligee from the 1940s and pearl earrings repeating a phrase "The son of the bitch, parish priest of Giedlarowa, did not pay to our daddy..."

Her father and my grand grand father was a sculptor. He would receive orders from many different small and bigger churches in south of Poland for the nave altars, side altars and pulpits. The architectural state of the art back then was neo-gothic. A neo-gothic church needed a neo-gothic sacral furniture. When you were a skilled artist or craftsman you had a free way to fulfill the church's needs. Due to the gothic altar by Veit Stoß in Cracow, the mother of late medieval altar art, you had a perfect blue print in your hand in this part of the world. My grand grand father and his apprentices accomplished countless altars for churches between Lviv and Cracow. The documentation about all his works has been burned down 1945 by retreating Nazi-army as they burned down the entire city of Jaslo. The documentation was kept in the house in Jaslo where formerly the workshop of the artist was. It disappeared in the flames. Only scratches of Andrzej Szayna's workshop remained after the revenge on Jaslo by German occupants. The family had other problems than reconstructing the road map of grand grand father's craftsmanship. After the reconstruction of the house after the war, the family moved back in and lives there till today. 

This is the only picture that remained from the flames documenting the work shop - my grand grand father (to the right) and his students in the studio.

Due to my dement auntie and her obsessively repeated sentence the grand children of the sculptor had one hint concerning the location of one of the altar pieces. This is how the research started. It helped that when I got to preschool I met my best friend whose mother comes from Giedlarowa. 

By meeting this family we became insiders to the small parish community . This melted the first ice with the parish priest back then in the late 1980s. Local authorities back then mistrusted people from "nowhere" who seemed to have any kind of claims towards any goods from before World War II. Due to lacking documents or to ignored possession rights and because of the lack of former owners due to deportations, displacement, war crimes, holocaust, a lot of Polish real estate, artworks and other precious goods would be in hands of people whom they did not belong to. People would be careful with strangers because they feared of legal processing and losing of their goods. 

On the floor of the church - inscription commemorating the 100th anniversary of the church.

It was winter when in the end of 1980s we first came to Giedlarowa. Snow was lying everywhere, filling the horizon, snowdrifts ending above our heads. It was Lenten season. According to tradition, the altar was closed in the time before Eastern revealing only the reliefs on the outside of the triptych. Because we came to the church with our friends from the village who are respected members of the village community, the parish priest agreed to open the altar piece and show us the major scene of the piece of art.

On the picture above: The triptych in Giedlarowa by my grand grand father Andrzej Szajna. Below you find the "Mother of all altars", the late medieval piece of art by Weit Stoß in St. Mary's in Cracow.

Weit Stoß' piece of art in Cracow St. Mary's is the biggest medieval altar in the world. The blue print for neo-Gothic altar art.

A detail from Andrzej Szajna's altar in Giedlarowa

I remember it being a big deal to my mother. I thought however only about snow fights and sliding with my best friend Ewa. And I was pretty enthusiastic about life in winterly Giedlarowa. On the frozen meadows belonging to Ewa's grandprents we would ice skate all day. In the forrest, we would slide down the hill on linen bags filled with hay. Grandma would make the best bismarcks, filled with rose jam. And we had self made bread for breakfast as well as milk directly from the cow. 

My mother has spent the last decade tracing her grand father's altars in the territory of Galicja (southern Poland and western Ukraine), finally she wrote a book about Andrzej Szajna. She terrorized us all into the making of that book, including my friend Ewa who did a great job on the graphic design of the album. I paid my duty by translating a preface by an art historian into German. 

I guess my mother is designed to talk people into her plans. She talked enough parish priests into opening their altars and archives to her. And many friends of hers continue to play the game of tracing the altars of Andrzej Szajna in the sub-carpathian region. 

The vestibule of the church - one of these guys must me be the "son of a bitch who did not pay to daddy".

So here I am, ringing the bell of the parish church. The village is silent, nobody on the streets. Some one opens the door. The parish priest looks at me with question marks in his eyes. I say, I am the grand grand daughter of the altar artist... Another male head appears behind the priest. Both jump back with grief on their faces. The reaction surprises me. And they ask stammering: The artist's lawyer?...Then I laugh. The word grand grand daughter sounds almost like lawyer in Polish: Prawnuczka versus Prawniczka. After I repeat the right word emphasizing the right pronunciation they smile at me with relief. And start discussing how to keep me in the village (they offer to find me a husband) and after I politely turn down their offer explaining that I already have a husband, the sexton explains: oh yes, indeed, there is a man sitting on a bench in front of the church...

They open the doors of the church extra for us and illuminate the altar. We can take our time, the sexton is polite and talkative.

We are leaving Giedlarowa after visiting the altar. The Pope is saluting us.

We leave behind Rzeszow, the capitol of the Sub-Carpathian voivodship, on our way back. We see all these grannies coming back from the grocery store. I have learned from my American friends that it is a gift when you can make groceries by foot.

We arrive in Jaslo, we park at the house, rebuilt after the World War II, where Andrzej Szajna used to live and sculpt. Today his grand children live here. Grand grand children are spread in Rzeszow, Hanover, London and New York.

During the making of this post, the Giedlarowa-grandma of my friend Ewa died. The funeral is today, the service takes place in Giedlarowa in the very church described above.

In loving memory of Mrs. Sliwa from Giedlarowa.