Recently, I took a trip to Poland with my girlfriend to visit relatives and see the country. We had been wanting to go for quite a while, and this August was a great opportunity: my lab was moving to a new building and I couldn’t do any experiments.
I found this truly fascinating. As someone of Jewish heritage, my family history is deeply connected to these places. One of my grandparents hailed from Ozarow, while another originated from Czestochowa (apologies if I've misspelled it). My understanding of the Holocaust in Ozarow has been significantly enriched by the works of Lukasz Rzepka. Regarding Czestochowa, I've learned it was a hub of religious fervor. Intriguingly, my grandfather's family was engaged in the cloth manufacturing business, catering primarily to the clergy. This connection to my ancestral past provides a unique lens through which I view our family's journey and resilience.
When I visited Poland, I enjoyed Krakow more than Warsaw. The people in Krakow were friendlier (maybe that's just the nature of smaller cities). The salt mine was definitely very cool. Small kids licked the walls during our tour. Hehe.
Poland is a catholic country. People are becoming more secular, especially in the big cities however. I hope that trend reverses. Their faith held the country together during communism. Their faith turned the tide against the Ottoman invasion of Europe at the gates of Vienna in 1683. Their faith will preserve and hopefully reinvigorate European culture.
1. You missed out on the most iconic crop of at least Silesia - rapeseed. (You can't really mistake Poland for any other country in late spring / early summer when it flowers.)
2. The grandmother's "ł" is, I'd assume, the OG "ł", a sound markedly distinct from "l" (yet similar enough to come to be represented by "l" plus a diacritic). The modern pronunciation as [essentially English "w"], though now universal except for a few holdouts, is, well, recent enough that it postdates modern Polish orthography.
3. There are now pride parades (called "equality marches" in Poland) going through every major city (and some smaller ones) every year, to nearly universal support. That we don't display the flags all year long is more about not treating it as a new secular religion the way the liberal corners of the US do. (Similarly, not restructuring our language around contemporary US mores does not make us "conservative", it just makes us not the US.)
4. The Copernicus statue was at one point asked to recite pi. It proceeded to do just that, and eventually had to be restarted.
5. The pierogi aren't even Russian ("rosyjskie"), they're Ruthenian ("ruskie"). And while "Ruthenia" can refer to each and all east slavic territories, including Russia, in this case it refers specifically to [essentially modern-day western Ukraine]. I want to shout "they're already Ukrainian, stop interfering with language for vacuous virtue signaling" at everyone who does that. (Which is disappointingly many people and businesses. Including, and this really should not be a surprise, a supermarket chain that otherwise continues to operate in Russia.)
I found this truly fascinating. As someone of Jewish heritage, my family history is deeply connected to these places. One of my grandparents hailed from Ozarow, while another originated from Czestochowa (apologies if I've misspelled it). My understanding of the Holocaust in Ozarow has been significantly enriched by the works of Lukasz Rzepka. Regarding Czestochowa, I've learned it was a hub of religious fervor. Intriguingly, my grandfather's family was engaged in the cloth manufacturing business, catering primarily to the clergy. This connection to my ancestral past provides a unique lens through which I view our family's journey and resilience.
What about the food? Did you have a lot of pierogi?
When I visited Poland, I enjoyed Krakow more than Warsaw. The people in Krakow were friendlier (maybe that's just the nature of smaller cities). The salt mine was definitely very cool. Small kids licked the walls during our tour. Hehe.
Poland is a catholic country. People are becoming more secular, especially in the big cities however. I hope that trend reverses. Their faith held the country together during communism. Their faith turned the tide against the Ottoman invasion of Europe at the gates of Vienna in 1683. Their faith will preserve and hopefully reinvigorate European culture.
1. You missed out on the most iconic crop of at least Silesia - rapeseed. (You can't really mistake Poland for any other country in late spring / early summer when it flowers.)
2. The grandmother's "ł" is, I'd assume, the OG "ł", a sound markedly distinct from "l" (yet similar enough to come to be represented by "l" plus a diacritic). The modern pronunciation as [essentially English "w"], though now universal except for a few holdouts, is, well, recent enough that it postdates modern Polish orthography.
3. There are now pride parades (called "equality marches" in Poland) going through every major city (and some smaller ones) every year, to nearly universal support. That we don't display the flags all year long is more about not treating it as a new secular religion the way the liberal corners of the US do. (Similarly, not restructuring our language around contemporary US mores does not make us "conservative", it just makes us not the US.)
4. The Copernicus statue was at one point asked to recite pi. It proceeded to do just that, and eventually had to be restarted.
5. The pierogi aren't even Russian ("rosyjskie"), they're Ruthenian ("ruskie"). And while "Ruthenia" can refer to each and all east slavic territories, including Russia, in this case it refers specifically to [essentially modern-day western Ukraine]. I want to shout "they're already Ukrainian, stop interfering with language for vacuous virtue signaling" at everyone who does that. (Which is disappointingly many people and businesses. Including, and this really should not be a surprise, a supermarket chain that otherwise continues to operate in Russia.)
It’s quite good 👍
:Kuba