Literacka Małopolska

Krakow

Is it at all possible to describe literary Krakow in a dozen sentences? To try to select the names of the people who were born or educated here, who worked in Krakow or died in this city, who recalled their memories of it?

Or possibly one needs to stand in the middle of the city and open up to the surrounding world, to the roads which lead to places we do not yet expect to discover? Which we have not read yet?

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Krakow

Is it at all possible to describe literary Krakow in a dozen sentences? To try to select the names of the people who were born or educated here, who worked in Krakow or died in this city, who recalled their memories of it?

Or possibly one needs to stand in the middle of the city and open up to the surrounding world, to the roads which lead to places we do not yet expect to discover? Which we have not read yet?

The city lies on the Vistula, Poland’s main river. [...]

A radiant city; it does not mean it is bright, but concentric. Similar to the sun, as if the sun faded, fell to the earth and was cooling down in bloody fumes and ashes. That is the colour and structure of the city. Red brick with patches of dampness, greenish copper, yellowish leaf, wet cobbled road, a day rises form mist and sets in mist, because the city hid in a basin, amongst river overflows. The river turns here, reverses and splits. A limestone rock, rammed into the valley like a wreckage of a ship, blocks its flow. On the rock there is a castle, because the place is good for defence. The city at the foot of the rock; like a thicket of moss, fern and bilberry bushes overgrowing a trunk of a fallen oak; like a draped train at the feet of a great lady; like a procession of lord’s attendants, like a dark furrow left behind by a white ploughshare cutting into soil; and like a wake seen from far above.

The heart of the city in the Market Square, where the town hall is; all around a crowd of churches, which carries, like an armed navy, sharp towers and steep roofs and plated domes over a misty plain. From here the beams of streets lead to all four sides of the world, at right angles and orderly, inscribed in the circle of the Planty gardens. Beyond this circle, there is a new city rising: streams of rails glitter and glass halls with their necks of chimneys in white smoke – a new city, as wide as a bell, moving, hearted, awaiting for the circumference to come to be able to make a sound – hanging at the top, like a sleeping bat (Dziecko przez ptaka przyniesione [A Child Brought by a Bird] 1968). [ezp].

Pic. Grzegorz Ziemiański, www.fotohuta.pl

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Krakow

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