If you want to take a whirlwind tour through Polish history as well as Polish art and architecture, the place to start is Krakow’s Wawel Royal Castle and the Wawel Cathedral.
We wanted an intense tour, so we employed one of our favorite strategies: Step 1) go to the site in question; Step 2) look around with mixture of interest and confusion; Step 3) wait for a private guide to swoop out of the crowd and pounce, offering services at a negotiable fee.
It took about 30 seconds before a high-energy guide named Elizabeth approached us. Although we had intended to see the Castle first, we knew the real story lay inside this richly appointed Cathedral that had witnessed so many of Poland’s royal coronations, social upheavals, and national tragedies.
Elizabeth offered us a normal 90-minute tour. We agreed on price, and that’s where “normal” ended. She forgot to tell us to fasten our seatbelts.
Three hours later, when we crawled out from the last crypt, beaten down by ponderous, vivid, and detailed information, we were dizzy from her passionate teaching. It wasn’t a cathedral visit. It was Time Travel.
With facts, legends, and artistic analysis, Elizabeth drove us mercilessly from the 11th to the 21st centuries and back again—at least three times. By the end, we could almost recall which Medieval half Swedish-half Polish king (or was it half Hungarian-half Polish?) had begotten which set of heroic (or miscreant) offspring, and to what glorious, or disastrous, effect. Fortunately, there was no final exam.
We ended at the present: the tomb of Poland’s President Lech Kaczynski and his wife Maria who perished on 10 September 2010 in a plane crash that some Poles believe resulted from a conspiracy against their nationalist-minded leader. Elizabeth informed us that every 10th of the month, citizens gather for special masses celebrated in the memory of Kaczynski both in the Wawel Cathedral and across the country. People do not want the story forgotten.
History is never forgotten here. The hordes of school-children visiting Wawel will learn it. They will learn that the Polish people have repeatedly sacrificed for the very nations who would later conquer them, dissipate their national borders, or seek Poland’s annihilation in some kind of trade.
Our young US history differs vastly from that of the East Europeans. One wishes our American students could stand before such historical monuments and relate their stylistic features, or incongruities while weaving them into the broader historical tapestry. How many American school children even remember that Poland’s heroes stood with the American “freedom fighters” in our Revolutionary War?
What one does not wish for, however, is for our children to live through a history as tragic as that of the Poles.