The New Dragons of Krakow. A Watch over the Wisla.

The Underground Museum ought to be Boycotted until the Crystal Fountain is Removed !

2010-11-24T14:12:00.000-08:00

People should boycott the Underground Museum until the repulsive Crystal Fountain in Krakow or Fontanna kryształ w Krakowie is removed from this magnificent Renaissance Market Square.

This multicoloured pyramid of kitsch, part of the transformation of Krakow into a tacky multimedia spectacle, and goes against the UNESCO criteria making Krakow a World Heritage site.

As UNESCO puts it,

The historic layout of Cracow, with Wawel and Kazimierz, is one of the most outstanding examples of European urban planning, characterised by the harmonious development and accumulation of elements representing all architectural styles from the early Romanesque phase up to Modernism.

The importance of the city is evident in the urban layout, numerous churches and monasteries, monumental secular public buildings, the remains of medieval city walls, as well as urban palaces and town houses designed and built by high class architects and craftsmen.

The value of the ensemble is determined by the extraordinary accumulation of monuments from various periods, preserved in their original form, with authentic fittings, which combine to create a uniform urban ensemble in which the tangible and intangible heritage is preserved
and nurtured to the present day.

This video shows just how hideous the object is and it seems to be like some alien presence from a cheap sci-fi movie or from the BBC series Dr Who in the 1970s. All it needs is a collection of Cybermen milling around it. It almost passes belief that the Rada Miejska could have been so corrupted as to allow this to be built.

If this pyramid skylight is not demolished, then the Rada Miejska and President Majchrowski will be allowed to do anything to Krakow. Petitions should be drawn up demanding its removal and lawyers look at the legal situation. Poland should not allow the chiselling little rogues who permitted this to get away with this disfigurement of the Rynek Glowny.

The Wawel Dragon Theme Park

2010-11-23T04:17:00.000-08:00

"Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal."-Guy Debord.The area near the Wawel is now one banal zone of kitsch-the Michael Jackson Star, the Hotel Sheraton, the Wawel Tourist Centre that looks like a metro stop worthy of East Berlin, the tacky Hi-Flyer balloon, the plastic beach on the banks on the Wisla ( copied from Paris ). All crummy attempts to emulate some "Western model".

The star of Michael Jackson, promoted by the radio station RMF FM and the Cracovia Krakow Tourist board, is fundamentally cretinous. Jackson, to most people's knowledge, had no connection with Krakow, unless this cyborg performer somehow is seen as a totemic symbol of a consumerist non-culture.

Now in November 2010, the repellent skyblight that is the Hi-Flyer Balloon is set to make a comeback. The mushroom style kiosk has been plonked back down over the Wisla near Most Grundwaldski near just to the left of the grotesque Park Inn, a building that looks like a space station from a low budget sci-fi movie.

All that hotel needs, one in which the rapacious property developer Henryk Gaertner of GDK had a large role, is a giant metallic statue of Michael Jackson outside it, posing as he does on his album HIStory. After all, Krakow seems to have this fetish for "Americanisation" and showbiz stars. The central square in Nowa Huta is now named after Ronald Reagan.

The Hi-Flyer balloon when set beside the brutal Wawel Tourist Centre and the Kitsch Crystal Pyramid fountain in the Rynek now seems, by comparison, not that important. For these rapacious new developments are designed to be permanent, though nothing is ever permanent as is obviously shown by the predatory schemes of those blighting Krakow with total junk.

Krzysztof Jakubowski seems to have got it correct when he described the Crystal Fountain the "ulcer between the sacred historical landmarks - St Mary's Church and the Cloth Hall." These ulcers are proliferating around Krakow's old streets. From the cretinous Art Boom gimmicks of the summer of 2010, which included having a giant yellow microwave in Plac Matejki.

Such installations are a colonisation of public space by talentless pseudo-artists playing at being half serious or "ironic" in order to defend themselves from having their trash judged as the pathetic kitsch that it is. If it were not for being placed in the centre of Krakow, the object would have no use value as nobody would have to look at it.

Meaning that the installation is inherently worthless and therefore not worth of being placed in the centre of Krakow. The only meaning that could be given to such an object would be to destroy it. As surely it would be in slapped down in Nowa Huta or on some large estate without the consent of the residents or the protection of private security guards.

The Hi Flyer Balloon was originally shoved as near as possible to the Wawel by being dumped by the Skalka Church outside residential flats on the Kazimierz side of Most Grundwaldski. Its forthcoming repositioning is a slight improvement but will still see the object looming over central krakow as a superfluous distraction from viewing the city as it should be.

As for the Wawel Tourist Centre, it detracts from the beauty of the Wawel Castle and the forecoirt looks as though something designed for tourists who want to see the Niagara Falls. The Wawel Castle was not meant to be offered up for re-presentation as such. And it's construction involved stripping the area of greenery. As the the Poles would say Po co ?

The banalisation of Krakow into a second rate theme park symbolises the utter irresponsibility of the Rada Miejska and the mediocrity of the grasping profiteers who regard the entire fabric of the city as a "product" to be mercilessly marketed. The Old Town of Krakow being rather small is being relentlessly blighted simply in order to squeeze as much profit as possible.

The result will be Krakow losing much of its charm and becoming so boring at street level, that it will cease to be the special place it once was for those who loved it for what it was and not just for what the greedy and rapacious want to make of it to turn a quick buck. Unless, the trend is reversed Krakow will be spiritually impoverished, a sterile museum.

Kitsch Krakow.

2010-11-15T15:42:00.000-08:00

From whichever camera angle, whether by day or by night, the pyramid fountain remains a blight.

It's a pile of pyramidal kitsch, both puny and pathetic dimensions, merely a glorified skylight blighting the Rynek and looks like a tacky DIY job that could be decorated with gnomes. It would be difficult to get planning permission for that in a suburban cul-de-sac in Birmingham never mind one of the most beautiful cities in Europe.

The level of kitschification of Krakow is reaching such proportions that little stained glass pyramids could be sold from vendor around the pyramid which also glow at night. Perhaps the hapless, bungling and incompetent Mayor Majchrowski should erect a huge one at the end of his garden that glows all night complete with strobe lights.

Thoughts on Krakow.

2010-11-12T18:33:00.000-08:00

Most definitely compared to the city as I knew it back in 1998 much has changed in Krakow.Not all of it bad. The point is not that a lot of changes needed to be made but that the wrong ones in architectural terms have been. It needn't have been so.

Some real improvements have been made. The restoration of buildings after the neglect of the Communist period have often been positive. But in recent years the trend has been more towards the negative, as the restoration was what was to be expected after 1990.

To place the future evolution of the city within sensible bounds and outside the hands of those who live there in such a way as has been achieved in recent years will create alienation and a sense of disenchantment.

Disneyfied kitsch re-presentations of the city, no less that cretinous planning blights such as the Wawel Tourist Centre and the Park Inn Hotel and elsewhere will only lead Krakowians to feel they are living in one more ubiquitous nowhere land.

A deracinated society is one that becomes discontented and resentful. Dangers always lie ahead when this happens. The nasty form of Sunday school ultra-Catholic nationalism represented by Radio Maryjais but a symptom.

Thus far, Krakow had avoided many of the idiocies of urban planning in Western Europe. The opportunity after 1990 was squandered. It did not have to be that way. It should not be accepted as "progress" now.

Those who will no doubt say that Krakow has been conserved, no building in the Old Town has been demolished, and many renovated obviously have a legitimate point.

Yet the trashy imitation Louvre pyramid in the Rynek Glowny and the awful Fountain Di Trevi of Rome knock off in Pl Szczepanska are additions that attempt pathetically to get around the UNESCO criteria.

At the gates of the Old Town, the predators are there, waiting to brutally shove the next ugly hotel as close as possible to it without legally affecting its status. So beauty ringed with junk is just fine then.

For the Old Town becomes not the centre of a city that can radiate out beauty towards the circumference and act as an influence. It is a pure product, a commodity to be ringed in, fenced and reduced to pure kitsch.

In attempting to do this the Rada Miejska betrays the people of Krakow. It matters that buildings outside the UNESCO zone blight the nineteenth century architecture in the way the bug eyed Hotel Logos does.

It matters that Podgorze does not see buildings stripped of their craftsmanship and exterior decoration ripped off in the cause of "renovation". It matters that buildings there with charm are not left to rot so that they can be replaced.

It matters that tawdry self important installations are not plonked in Independence Square like Balka grotesque statement in concrete as if this was an empty zone needing to be filled with "something".

It matters that with regards Bronowice the cretins of Skyscraper City who have lauded the tin can edifice of "Salwator Tower" are told that their values are perverted and fundamentally wrong and at odds with its history and do violence to the place.

The New Tourist Centre-Like an Soviet Era Bus Station.

2010-11-12T16:18:00.000-08:00

The New Tourist Centre looks like a metro stop that's been plonked at the foot of a historical bastion of Polish culture but which would look more in place in some inner suburb of Berlin.

The soulless technocratic achievement of Krakow's catastrophically and terminally incompetent Mayor Majchrowski will be to disenchant people with Krakow in favour of the voyeur tourist who needs to have the place packaged as a one stop stop off before hopping back on a coach elsewhere.

It is time to face reality. Krakow is in the hands of those ignorant of Krakow's true and enduring nature, of those who love Krakow for what it is and has been for generations and which survived the Second World War and Communism. Only to be blighted by an irresponsible form of rapacious neoliberal capitalism that sells out the city for pure gain.

By disenchanting people in subjecting Krakow to this kind of architecture which offers the place up in such a way that the deep and abiding sense of home will be destroyed and rendered a Disneyfied spectacle in which local people will feel alienated from the city as a repository of imaginative inspiration and through which a living community can forever recreate itself from within.

This is a tragedy for Poland. Truly this and the tacky fountains in the Rynek Glowny and Szczepanska represent a "Cultural Chernobyl" . The Wawel will now take its place as a sterile museum, an obvious point missed by those idiots who continually opine that CUE and those devoted to Krakow want it as some "Skansen".

From where we are now, in 2010, there does need to be a real effort to challenge the power of those who have foisted such trash upon Krakow.

Unfettered money power creates a hallucinogenic world in which just anything seems possible and justified if it rakes in a sure return.When unaccountable power goes unchallenged, it is equally sure that malign individuals will get away with what they think will be passively tolerated. The task is to prove it shall not.

Exposing why this can happen ought to be the job of investigative journalists. To continually ask questions and ask "who really benefits from this? " Directly. For clarity and facts are all important.

From what I can see, those who truly have the enduring interests of their city and country at heart cannot benefit from this greed fuelled drive to package Krakow as a repellent Disneyfied Santa's Grotto of pure fairytale kitsch.

Krakow becomes Central Europe's Premier Bulwark of Kitsch

2010-11-10T02:47:00.000-08:00

"I could sum up the future in one word, and that word is boring. The future is going to be boring."-J G Ballard.

"A mental disease has swept the planet: banalisation"-Ivan Chtchlegov.

The new Tourist Centre at the foot of Krakow's Wawel Castle accompanies the repellent new piece of kitsch installed in the Rynek Glowny termed "the Crystal Fountain", a protruding glass pyramid flanked by water jets spraying water and that glows in multicolour during the night.

Near the New Tourist Centre is the ghastly Hotel Sheraton, a facadist structure that is an apt symbol of the vacuity of the boring and banal spread of the cult of the Marriott Men in Poland's cultural capital, a globalised nowhere land that even sports an absurdly entitled "theme pub" termed Bar Some Place Else.
Increasingly the "re-presentation" of Krakow as something akin to a sterile museum proceeds to replace the really living city as it was. The new tourist centre has detracted from the view from the foot of the Wawel by paving over a green area with concrete and to try and ram more and more into the old town into order to squeeze it wholly for pure profit.

In the process, Krakow's Rada Miejska has colluded in the killing off much of the unique charm the city had even until the first few years of the last decade.

The Tourist Centre, The Rynek' "Crystal Fountain , the grotesque new fountain in Plac Szczepanska, a tacky and vulgar Fountain Di Trevi knock off that has blighted the quiet square on to which the Stary Theatr looks, have aided in this process which had been going on at an accelerating pace in the appropriately named "noughties".

Just as the absurd and ill-fitting pyramid in the Rynek Glowny is a cretinous replica of the one outside the Louvre. the Fountain ( shown below ) is a feeble attempt to upgrade Krakow to a "Second Rome". Krakow is thus run by those who have failed to understand its unique beauty and so the contrived attempts to be more Western merely look paltry and pathetic.
These are Mayor Majchrowski's "gifts" to Krakow. Whilst this visionless technocrat will be long forgotten in future years, the permanent blighting of the Old Town and its overcrowding and pollution will be legacies that could last for a long time to come. Krakow is governed by fools who have no idea how to run such a city beyond the short term rapacious greed.
Not only is the new tourist centre a symbol of the banalisation of Krakow there are reports from Dr Monika Bogdanowska of the campaign group CUE that in the construction of the centre peoples lives and health were affected. She writes,

Many residents of Plac na Groblach lost their lives and health during the fight for their homes (one may imagine few years lasting digging and building works by a house all noise and vibrations and dust) many had to leave, there is a group of 150 who still live there but they tend to move away... ( In ) building tourist centre they paved 16 thousand square meters - removing historic paving and cutting away green areas, many old trees from the boulevard were removed and lawn was covered with concrete...

All culturally important cities have gone through this but irresponsible forms of mass tourism, with the conversion of cities into theme parks for brainless voyeurs, represent a particular tragedy in Krakow's case where the old town is rather small compared to that of Prague and far more concentrated than in places like Budapest or Paris.

The centre of Krakow has become a bulwark of confectionary box set of kitschy treats radiating out from the Rynek with a quaint architectural backdrop, a tourist trap that many will seek to avoid and which in turn will lead to ever more gimmicks and moronic Art Boom type trash used to stimulate the illusion that Krakow is somehow at the cutting edge of "culture".

The old culture will remain in the catacombs but will be obscured and overshadowed by the stultifying and suffocating dominance of kitsch such as the Disney style Crystal Fountain which produces cheap thrills that could exist just about anywhere other than in Krakow. Such fountains produce mere sensation but disenchantment for Krakowians and lovers of Krakow.

Yet even as an attempt to stimulate tourism it is a failure as it detracts and distracts from the former ambience of the square. By try so desperately to package the Old Town of Krakow in such a banal way with a lamentable lack of sensitivity and imagination the Rada Miejska threatens to kill off the form of tourism that would have suited a city much better.

In recent years, Krakow has shown the wrong way to develop a city as a global tourist destination. The integration of Poland into the EU and the growth of Balice Airport and cheap flights from around Europe has led to the development of Krakow's culture being overshadowed by it becoming a playground for Stag Nighters attracted by cheap beer.

The Hi-Flyer balloon too, until it was moved away from being plonked outside the Skalka Church and residential flats, was a colossal blight on the skyline which likewise encouraged a superficial and voyeuristic view of the city as opposed to one where the city was viewed from the Wawel, The Kosciuszko Mound or Lasota Hill in Podgorze.

Krakow will remain an attraction for those who have never visited it before but nothing special that a person would wish to come back to unless they already had a deeper knowledge of the city. In which case, it stands to reason that Krakow should have attempted to encourage the right sort of ethical tourism and not reduce the city to a package tour of kitsch encounters.

The city was beautiful enough as it was. Far more so without banal multimedia exploitation, laser light shows, and vulgar kitschy gimmicks and cosmetic enhancements to try and package the atmosphere and and experience of the city as insubstantial representations of the real thing which was already there if people cared to look for it and at it.

The Disney Style Fountain in Plac Szczepanska.

2010-11-08T07:31:00.000-08:00

The new ghastly fountain in Plac Szczepanska accompanies the "Crystal Fountain in the Rynek for its utter lack of taste It has totally detracted from the quiet charm of the square. As this video clearly shows. It's Disney style kitsch blights and trivialises the place completely. This is part of the banalisation of Krakow.

This is re-presenting Krakow as some fairytale caricature, reducing the city to the banality of something from Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Next there will be some Polish version of Riverdance showing up in the Rynek or Jean Michel Jarre turning up to do some tacky music show.

Only the quick buck is the consideration and trying to please undiscerning tourists instead of serving local people and, in the end, destroying the unique nature of Krakow that draws people in. Meaning it has to compete by further recourse to tacky gimmicks. It did not have to be like this. The muttonheads who permitted this have to be challenged directly.

An Illuminated Pyramid is Plonked in the Krakow Rynek Glowny

2010-11-07T13:34:00.000-08:00

This is truly the most mindblowingly dumb thing to have foisted on Krakow's historical Rynek Glowny. It cost a staggering 3m zl to install this glass pyramid, a tacky replica of the one by the Paris Louvre and equally as insensitive. Clearly the sterile mindset of Krakow's Rada Miejska reflects the simple minded one that if its Western European in origin it just must be good.

This ghastly glass pyramid, however, clearly violates the UNESCO World Heritage criteria. Such a repellent and ill suited innovation reflects either corruption or incompetence or both. It is symbolic of the systemic mismanagement of Krakow and the moral and aesthetic bankruptcy of the Rada Miejska and Mayor Jacek Majchrowski.

Poland needs a conservation movement and responsible citizens to put into practice vocal and consistent opposition to these increasingly pointless and expensive follies. These spineless bureaucrats can not be depended upon to preserve Krakow as a unique and beautiful city from the forces of rapacious greed.

Krakow needs to avoid the process of Disneyfication and banalisation, turning a city into a ghastly and more overcrowded version of Prague which is at least big enough to absorb large numbers. The irresponsible way that so-called planners have blighted Krakow with ugly hotels such as the Park Inn and the Hotel Sheraton is an international disgrace.

The unique ambience of Krakow is being slowly eradicated as soulless, self serving third rate bureaucrats and bland technocrats along with craven politicians genuflecting before global financial power combine to convert the city into a theme park as opposed to an organic really lived in historical centre where a cup of coffee is even more expensive than London.

The new glass pyramid is as vacuous and empty, as devoid of meaning and belonging as a branch of McDonald's or Planet Hollywood. The globe is suffering from a spreading malady of homogenisation where life is being drained of its charm and becoming ever more boring. Greed and a shoddy craving for cheap tourist lucre moulds the townscape.
There needs to be vocal protest and a conservation movement to reclaim the streets of Krakow from the stupid and rapacious back to the people the politicians are meant to serve. It's a massive own goal. It makes no sense even in attracting tourists. It's just an attempt to be trendy and "with it" for the sake of it.

But the charm of Krakow lies in the way it has avoided silly gimmicky architecture and design. Obviously the RMK had to see to it that Krakow was not left behind in competing to sport cretinous innovations that make no aesthetic or even financial sense. Can it get worse than this ?

A Repeat of the KTVI Interview

2010-07-15T09:42:00.000-07:00

As mentioned before the KTVI interview made for TVP Krakow will be aired in September. Having fixed my digital camera in London, I have some extant shots of the Wintery Krakow where I first got in to gear with the "Protect Krakow Heritage" Campaign.

It was during that Winter of 2009 I made the interview that would later lead to the regional TV appearance. I went to the TV studios to watch the TVP "Profil Aktivny Programme and much was cut but it had to be as TV stations demand snappy shots and comments.

The Original KTVI Interview is presented here once more, as well as some of the photos of the hideous Skalka Balloon which blighted the approach to the resting place of Czeslaw Milosz and Jan Dlugosz, the earlier chronicler of the city.

http://ktvi.pl/film,396,10,0,informacje_ktvi.pl_-_wydanie_szesnaste.html

ktvi - Informacje ktvi.pl - wydanie szesnaste

ktvi.pl

Henryk Gaertner-A Predatory and Rapacious Property Developments

2010-06-27T19:16:00.000-07:00

This Henryk Gaertner, the man whose G D & K Group has blighted the view from the Wawel and the Skalka Church with the repellent Park Inn, a building that looks like a Lunar Space base whose lunacy is plain for all to see apart from the tourists who stay there.
Next on the list in this atrocity exhibition is the foul 12 Kupa Street erection built with a facade of Pincow limestone but from the Issac Synagogue looks like any bland block that could just as well be in an industrial estate and not in Kazimierz in the UNESCO World Heritage zone.
Then there is the hideous plan for the Treimorfa Tower which Jacek Majchrowski, the President of Krakow proudly displays on his Facebook site-as if it were actually something to boast about
The farcical waffle about a "buffer zone" by the RMK is evident in the claim that Treimorfa Tower was a one off "exceptional" building. Exceptional it is, of course, in its ugliness and proximity to the Old Town.

Gaertner's partner in starchitectural criminality is Symon Duda who bragged, like some Master of the Universe, that this would be "Krakow's Rockefeller centre" and "even higher than St Mary's Church" next to the beautiful and historical Rakowice Cemetary.

This is hardly surprising as Gaertner boasts that he aims to build "only in central locations" and has blighted Rakowice Street at number 9 with his hideous new block where G D & K has a base.
Note the drab similarity between the side profile and that of 12 Kupa Street. It's the same bland generic trash. What Gaertner calls "Class A" block space. And the interiors of his awful buildings ( what he calls "Investment decisions" ) look like Gestapo interrogation HQ.
Gaertner seems to have a fetish for interior designs that look like a replication of George Orwell's Room 101 in 1984. He could be of service to authoritarian regimes in setting up surgical torture laboratories.

Indeed so dominant is Gaertner's influence on Krakow that he denies the UNESCO World Heritage lisiting is of a "legally binding nature" and is "purely discretionary". What special relationship does Gaertner have with the Rada Mieska ? Why is he in a position to decide?

Where are Krakow's investigative journalists probing into this man's affairs? Where is the concept of civil society, once lauded in post-Communist Europe ? The answer is there are none. This is shameful.

This vampire of finance who knows nothing of what public architecture should be may well have as his motto that of O'Brien in 1984 in regards to Krakow and his contempt for the residents of this historical Old City when he snarls,

"We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves" ( Orwell 1984 )

The Blighting of Podgorze

2010-06-25T03:03:00.000-07:00

One of the most important parts of the forthcoming TVP Krakow interview is the blighting and neglect of important historical parts of Podgorze, until 1915 a separate part of Krakow run by a different Rada Miejska and which has had it's own unique identity.

Naturally, to "attract attention" to the town, the RMK just had to place a repellent piece of Tate Modern style tat in Plac Niepodglosci.

Meanwhile, the authorities "sell" the "Pearls of Podgorze" on a Tourist board where the buildings bear no resemblance to the depictions on the board. On the tourist board, the C13th Sw Benedikt Church is portrayed in pristine condition.

The reality shows a derelict building, shrouded in scrub and undergrowth whilst the Art Boom Project below gets money with the total thumbs up from the RMK, which funds Cracovia Krakow, and the Krakow Mayor Pan Majchrowski.

Those like Majchrowski have no conscience and no integrity for failing to protect one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. Their shameful incompetence reveals a lack of will power. Majchrowski is just a plodding and dull witted technocrat without real vision.

The next piece of idiotic governmental failure is to preserve historic Podgorze from buildings being used as billboards whilst billboards set up for that purpose are often unused for a time. Buildings are buildings. Billboards are for adverts. Laws need to stop this vandalism.

The Korona, a Communist era building that aged relatively gracefully into Podgorze is now plastered on all sides by these hideous and gaudy adverts. This blights Plac Niepodglosci completely, though not permanently-unlike the wall that ought to be demolished.
Shame. When attending a conference on how to revamp the Podorze Rynek nearby, it became apparent that some believed the main point was to draw yet more tourists and put their needs before the people of Podgorze as it becomes "Yuppified".
New money coming in might improve some run down buildings but the danger is that the Habsburg period ornamentation will be stripped off and rendered over blandly to take away the nineteenth century charm. This might not necessarily be the case.

Yet the Rada Miejska can not be entrusted to enforce that. Private aesthetic taste could. So the Rada must be forced to insist on stringent laws preventing substantial alteration of Habsburg period mitteleuropean buildings in Podgorze. The alternative is blandness.

Protect Krakow Forts !

2010-06-24T07:34:00.000-07:00

Teaming up with Andrzej Zaręba and Tomasz Basarabowicz I have had the idea of creating a Protect Krakow's Forts Facebook Group and even an Anglo-Polish website on the topic, which will include photographs, petitions that something be done to preserve them better.

Dr Monika Bogdanowska, whose father the late Professor Janusz Bogdanowski wrote extensively on Fortress Krakow, revealed the reason why the Rada Miejska has failed in preserving one of Poland's and Europe's most unique system of nineteenth century fortifications.

There were plans made years ago how to make these military artefacts the Trial of Kraków Fortress along with historic rail and many other attractions. Military Activists prepared the plan - and what? Nothing, why? Because it is much 'easier and better" to sell forts or rent them tor private business and it gives more "profits" for the Rada Miejska

The Blighting of Bronowice

2010-06-23T11:55:00.001-07:00

Bronowice was once a village that became a suburb of Krakow in the course of the Communist period as large nondescript and often ugly bloki were built, dwarfing the small wooden houses and villas that dated back before the Great War.

It was in this village that Wyspianski set his famous play Wesele, the name of the street in which I have lived in and seen rapacious property developers destroy the village feel that persisted even until the turn of the twenty-first century.

The repellent Salvator Tower blighted the view to the West of the city by creating this enammelled tin pot monstrosity which looks like a beer can with an appended descended layer of steel shoe boxes coming down from it.

This picture shows three blights in one and the Gate of Bronowice and Salwator Tower were not only mindless examples of bad planning decisions by the imbeciles in the Rada Miejska who care nothing for Krakow's residents but only for rapacious global construction firms.
Even more stupid is the fact that Salvator Tower, a sinister looking gated community with CCTV cameras and high steel fence protection, is not even a response to the actual needs of young Krakow professionals, many of whom cannot even afford to buy a flat in it.

Directly next to it is a massive green and white block that exceeds anything the Communists could have managed in terms of repulsive ugliness, bad design, ill thought out positioning or utter folly. As the pictures below clearly demonstrate.

In direct proximity to it is that plate and glass monstrosity pretentiously termed the Gate of Bronowice, though, of course, Bronowice covers a large area and Bronowice Wielki extends out beyong the so-called Gate of Bronowice along the railway line and to the north.
Even Salvator Tower, blazing out the name in English in a quintessentially Krakowian suburb, is a violation of geographical accuracy, unless the aim of this kitsch was to be seen from the area of Salwator, a beautiful area which lies at the foot of the hill leading up to Kosciuszko Kopiec.
Where once there was a view of trees and greenery this atrocious lunk of junk now stands blocking the view and looming over Bronowice and blighting the view from Salwator and from the little Rudawa Strumek ( stream ) that runs close to Wola Justowska.

Though Salwator City is just off this picture one can see the three new corporate blocks which run along Armii Krajowe and have all the aesthetic appeal of an internal combustion engine car battery. Not to mention the grotesque BNP Paribas Forte Block
The Rada Miejska and Mayor Majchrowki should resign and Krakow get people who actually might know how to manage real city planning, the clear zoning of a city into office blocks in separate sectors from the areas where people live, work and eat.

The Panorama from Krakus Mound-Unblighted by the Hi-Flyer Balloon.

2010-06-23T09:08:00.000-07:00

The Mound of Krak is the legendary hill with a history said to date back to the 7th century. As such it has been seen as a burial mound for the Avars and the Celts, a part of pre-Christian Krakow like the other somewhat smaller Wanda Mound at Mogila in Nowa Huta.

The panorama offered from the Mounds allows one to see the connection between various parts of the city and the spires of Krakow's Churches which , alas, are now being threatened by new high rise office blocks such as the Bank Pekao Building and the Skeleton (the soon to be Treimorfa Tower ).
These Mounds are the real vistas from which Krakow have been viewed from time immemorial. Aesthetically attractive they harmonise and have represented the contour lines around which Krakow was not just founded but built around.

Until recently when rapacious predators and the vampires of finance decided that Krakow ought to be repackaged and re-presented for lazy voyeuristic tourists who are offered a static one way up bird's eye view of Krakow.

At present the repellent and philistine Hi-Flyer balloon has been taken away back to the UK to have an advert stitched on to it. Rumours it would be back in June have not materialised-yet. Christopher B Gray's campaign against it continues.

If Gray and others suceed Krakowians will be permanently freed from a dictatorial blighting of the skyline, the dictatorship of rapacious commercial forces and greed, then we can reclaim the city for those born, brought up here and those who came and learned to love and adopt it as their own.

The Neglected Forts of Fortress Krakow

2010-06-23T08:58:00.000-07:00

One of the problems is that access to many Forts is obscure or "out of bounds". Kosocice East ( see above ) is gated up.

Fort Pasternik is "Teren Privatny". Though this is because it is still used by the Polish Army, though when trespassing the 'Entry Forbidden' signs. I noticed its condition was not very good.
Fort Bronowice is encompassed by the Polish military complex near Lobzow. Even Sw Benedikt is just surrounded by bars. A Polish Fortress Heritage Society should be created.

The Historical Significance of Fortress Krakow

2010-06-23T03:04:00.000-07:00

The architectural and historical significance of the extensive forts, that were built by the Habsburg Monarchy from the end of the ill fated Free City of Krakow ( 1815-1848 ) to the disillusion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 has seldom been appreciated. The Rada Miejska stands responsible for a major failure to protect a vital part of Krakow's past.

By the 1970s many of them were simply left to rot and decay, especially the smaller infantry and artillery Forts and magazines built around 1897 in the third concentric ring outside the boundaries of what was termed by the late nineteenth century Wieki Krakow ( Greater Krakow ).

The forts now wear a melancholy aspect of neglect today though for their time they were once one of the most unique examples of extensive military fortifications to ring a city that lay just a few kilometres from the Russian Empire to the north and West and a first line of defence against ant Russian invasion.

Nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian Empire was obviously not encouraged by the Communists but the Rada Miejska of Krakow too has taken scant interest in the fate of any of the Forts other than those connected with Kosciuszko Kopiec, a bastion of Polish national revival as Krakow became "the Piedmont of Poland".

Though the initial second ring of Fortresses were built after the demise of the Free Republic of Krakow for internal repressive purposes, it is often forgotten that Polish freedom fighters such as Pilsudski were generally far more pro-Habsburg than often known, though for tactical reasons.

That's why Pilsudski's troops were allowed full freedom to perform military manouevres on the Blonia Meadow which lies just below the Koscuiszko Kopiec and which has a Museum devoted to Pildudski's Legions. But the neglect of the other parts is a serious dereliction of cultural responsibility by the Polish state.

It is as if the British state allowed Norman Castles to fall to pieces simply because they were "alien" impositions. The fact is that Norman Castles, no matter their oppressive functions after 1066, are architecturally a part of the history of England and thus protected by groups like English Heritage.

Emperor Franz Joseph I ( 1848-1916 ) had never envisaged that the Austro-Hungarian Empire could conceivably be dissolved shortly after his death and so the Fortress Krakow, though never actually used, is an important reminder of the illusory and transitory nature of all Imperial Power.
The decay of the Austrian Forts in outlying areas could have been excusable by the lack of funds as Poland emerged from 50 years of Communism but the sheer lack of effort or concern on behalf of the Rada Miejska is a sign of a lack of willpower. The neglect of Fort Sw Benedikt on Lasota Hill above Podgorze has been one such example.

Advertised as a "Pearl of Podgorze" on the tourist noticeboard in Plac Niepodglosci, the Rada Miejska foolishly believed that spending money on a trendy Concrete Tunnel by the so-called "artist" Miroslaw Balka was more important that renovating the "Pearl of Podgorze" and making use of the building for the public in Krakow.

Unlike Kosciuszko Kopiec, the collapse of which was treated as a national emergency in 2005 by President Alexander Kwasniewski, the fate of two key forts, that of Fort Luneta Warszawska and Sw Benedikt Fort, has not even been discussed or debated. Fort Nowy Kleparz is used as a Disco Bar and a Car Park.

The condition of Fort Luneta Warszawa is even more disturbing. Part 3 of the Twierdzy Krakow book series makes it clear that its condition is listed as "Zly", this is very bad and it a major fort just opposite the road dividing it from the Rakowice Cementary. Signs say "work in Progress". No workers have been there for years.Built in the 1850s Fort Luneta Warszawska is as important a part of Krakow's history as the Barbikan near the Florianska Gate, the walls having been demolished not, as is often thought, by the Austrians but by the Poles during the era of the Free Republic. The same fate of neglect is evident with Sw Benedikt.
Left to rot behind rusting iron gates, creating a Museum here and restoring the building would have been a better use of money that the recent craze for Art Boom projects and placing plastic trash around Krakow's dignified historical streets. Meanwhile nothing has been done to renovate and open up Fort 31.

Sw Benedikt is a unique military fortification built between 1853-1856 by the architect Feliks Ksietarski. a "Maximillian Tower" that Podgorze Council correct describes as "the only type of fortification in Poland and one of the few in Europe". No funds have to date been allocated for its status as a part of Poland's history.

The fort does exude a somewhat foreboding psychical ambience as do many corners of forgotten Podgorze which might come from the fact that Jews from Amon Goeth's Plaszow Concentration Camp were transported along the railway line to the north of Krakow near Fort Nowy Kleparz.

Both Fort Nowy Kleparz and Fort Luneta Warsawska were prominent artillery bases used first in the 1850s for repressing any internal uprisings from within the city as had happenened under Eduard Dembinski in 1846 and whose rebellion was swiftly crushed outside Podgorze by a few hundred Austrian troops.

These forts formed part of a second ring of Fortification, the original one having been the medieval walls of which Florianska Gare and the Barbikan are remnants, as well as certain additions to the Wawel Castle in the very heart of Krakow which also was the site for an Austrian barracks and several fortified brick additions to the walls.

The second ring stretches around where the busy Aleja road now runs and down southwards towards Rondo Mogilskie where Bastion V now exists as an extant fragment excavated with a large traffic roundabout and which will be flanked by futuristic new bastions of corporate building power shoving back the Botanical Gardens and in view of Krakow's first "skyscraper", the Treimorfa Tower.

To the south the fortification system went down to the natural barrier provided by the Wisla River, across which Podgorze was reached by a railway bridge.

Montelupich Prison is another repressive Austrian building in which Jews were tortured and then ferried back to Sw Benedikt down the railway line to be summarily machine gunned dead by vodka fuelled Ukranian SS officers in 1943. Such a place would make a more fitting Museum of Remembrance than Balka's repellent concrete AUSCHWITZWIELICZKA tunnel.

The Railway network which came to Krakow in 1847, just a year before the Free Republic was destroyed and incorporated into Austrian Galicia, accounted for the location of many of the key Forts. Including the Westernmost Fort Mydlniki close to the line coming from Chrzanow and Katowice.

According to Ostrowski

"The Austrian government started an intensive fortification project, including some in the town himself ( like the Wawel Hill ) and environs. This system of forts, still partly preserved, is a rare example of military architecture from the middle of the last century ( i.e the C19th ).Defensive needs spurned another important undertaking-railway development"

This is shown by the integration of the railway system with the need for modernisation of the railway infrastructure across the Habsburg Empire to get men and materiel to Fortress Krakow, what A J P Taylor termed the importance of anticipated "War by Timetable" .Hence the juxtaposition of the Lobzow Barracks next to the train station.

This Fort is in a terrible condition but all of them are important as part of a system of extensive fortification unique to nineteenth century Europe. The position of the Forts determined the history and development of Wielki Krakow as it expanded. Even today the Forts and the Szlak ( trail ) connecting them forms the current boundaries of Krakow now.

Yet though the second ring of Fortress Krakow was a repressive enterprise it has been forgotten that the third ring was built after the liberalisation of the Austrian Empire after the Ausgleich in 1867 which gave limited but substantial enough autonomy to Polish Galicia for it to fear the Tsarist Empire on its doorstep far more than Vienna.

Hence the Pilsudski Hill commemorates the independence of Poland in 1918 by having it in Lasek Wolski, an ancient royal hunting forest, where he carried out military exercises. No such respect has been according to other nearby Forts such as Klepak which lies almost ruined and full of graffiti.
Fort 31, Sw Benedikt, was in close proximity to the railway lines heading East and South towards the Forts Borek and Lapianka which again lie in terrible states of dereliction when they should be integral part of Krakow's architectural heritage and not a site for jabcok drinkers and vandals. Below is Fort Borek.
Fort Lapianka is in a worse state. Curiously because the Fort was Austrian somebody has written "Hitler" on it, perhaps a Polish neo-Fascist with a minimal number of brain cells, or someone who sees these Forts as alien 'Germanic' impositions. Who is to say ? But the ruins present a melancholy picture.

So Fortress Krakow reflected not only the railway network but also the topography of the city itself to which it in turn defined its extent and physiogamy as Forts were built near to or on Krakow hills and high points. One such example being Fort Mogila to the far north east near Kopiec Wanda, an ancient pre-historical burial mound.
The Forts running from Fort Borek eastwards and around to the Wisla south reflect the way the Forts were strung out along elevated ridges of upland with commanding views of Wieki Krakow as it developed up to the border of the unitary authority under the Rada Miejska in 1915 when Pogdgorze was finally re-incorporated.

One of the most mournful losses exists with Fort Rajsko which lies derelict. It could make with appropariate investment a wonderful wine making centre, set back into the hills like the Hungarian Pince of the Tokaj region, as the panoromic views of the city are stunning, and the leafy country lanes lovely to stroll down.
Fortress Krakow was and remains an instrinsic part of Krakow's historical fabric and it's evolution of the city during the nineteenth century. To neglect them is to neglect the history of the city. The current Rada Miejska simply does not have any visionary capacity to see the past in Krakow's present nor to preserve it for future generations.

( Below Fort Prokocim )

<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_RPukOfWMPJM/TCHr8Bxsy1I/AAAAAAAAB7g/a4NhrHq2K18/s1600/Image006.jpg"></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_RPukOfWMPJM/TCHlG0eLjOI/AAAAAAAAB7Y/-ZhxiQrKdNM/s1600/FortKleparzcarpark.jpg"></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_RPukOfWMPJM/TCHiTNw0uGI/AAAAAAAAB7Q/H1o4NJnS8V4/s1600/FortKlepak.jpg"></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_RPukOfWMPJM/TCHiLMdqirI/AAAAAAAAB7I/2a7RTXd6e7Y/s1600/FortBorek.jpg"></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_RPukOfWMPJM/TCHh-Wmb6II/AAAAAAAAB64/Gfy8UAVbXYo/s1600/FortProkocim.jpg"></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_RPukOfWMPJM/TCHh4kkzmXI/AAAAAAAAB6w/Qs_Zm_gF3Xc/s1600/Image004.jpg"></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_RPukOfWMPJM/TCHhozfiLiI/AAAAAAAAB6g/BE3WHJ5owtk/s1600/InsideBorek.jpg"></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_RPukOfWMPJM/TCHhg_NITNI/AAAAAAAAB6Y/qWkkkIOBEAA/s1600/InsideMydlniki.jpg"></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_RPukOfWMPJM/TCHhZ6an1GI/AAAAAAAAB6Q/F7usXPp00MA/s1600/KosociceEast.jpg"></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_RPukOfWMPJM/TCHhT6HfaaI/AAAAAAAAB6I/axQd2AusGnU/s1600/Lapianka1.jpg"></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_RPukOfWMPJM/TCHhM-wJD9I/AAAAAAAAB6A/lywT5M-6EQo/s1600/Lapianka3.jpg"></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_RPukOfWMPJM/TCHhHgMwZlI/AAAAAAAAB54/_Dm9Y3lsDoc/s1600/RajskoFort2.jpg"></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_RPukOfWMPJM/TCHhA0cwVRI/AAAAAAAAB5w/tf8KmFu8vvc/s1600/RajskoFort.jpg"></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_RPukOfWMPJM/TCHgoKw7RaI/AAAAAAAAB5g/x3vJ2BaCbQw/s1600/TwierdzaKrakow.jpg"></a>The architectural and historical significance of the extensive Forts, that were built by the Habsburg Monarchy from the end of the ill fated Free City of Krakow ( 1815-1848 ) to the disillusion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 has seldom been appreciated. By the 1970s many of them were simply left to rot and decay, especially the smaller infantry and artillery Forts and magazines built around 1897 in the third concentric ring outside the boundaries of what was termed by the late nineteenth century Wieki Krakow ( Greater Krakow ). The Forts wear a melancholy aspect of neflect today though for their time they were according to Ostrowski in his Cracow one of the most unique example of extensive military fortifications ring this Fortress City that lay just a few kilometres from the Russian Empire to the north and West. Nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian Empire was obviously not encouraged by the Communists but the Rada Miejska of Krakow too has taken scant interest in the fate of any of the Forts other than those connected with Kosciuszko Kopiec, a bastion of Polish nation revival. Though the initial second ring of Fortresses were built after the demise of the Free Republic of Krakow for internal repressive purposes, it is often forgotten that Polish freedom fighters such as Pilsudski were generally far more pro-Habsburg than often known, though for tactical reasons. That's why Pilsudski's troops were allowed full freedom to perform military manouevres on the Blonia Meadow which lies just below the Koscuiszko Kopiec and which has a Museum devoted to Pildudski's Legions. But the neglect of the other parts is a serious dereliction of cultural responsibility by the Polish state. It is as if the British state allowed Norman Castles to fall to pieces simply because they were "alien" impositions. The fact is that Norman Castles, no matter their oppressive functions after 1066, are architecturally a part of the history of England and thus protected by groups like English Heritage. Franz Joseph I ( 1848-1916 ) had never envisaged that the Austro-Hungarian Empire could conceivably be dissolved shortly after his death and so the Fortress Krakow, though never actually used, is an important reminder of the illusory and transitory nature of all Imperial Power. The neglect of the Austrian Forts in outlying areas could have been excusable by the lack of funds as Poland emerged from 50 years of Communism but the sheer lack of effort or concern on behalf of the Rada Miejska is a sign of a lack of willpower. The neglect of Fort Sw Benedikt on Lasota Hill above Podgorze has been one such example. Advertised as a "Pearl of Podgorze" on the tourist noticeboard in Plac Niepodglosci, the Rada Meiejska foolishly believed that spending money on a trendy Concrete Tunnel by the pseudo-artist Miroslaw Balka was more important that renovating the "Pearl of Podgorze" and making use of the building for the public in Krakow. Unlike Kosciuszko Kopiec, the collapse of which was treated as a national emergency in 2005 by President Alexander Kwasniewski, the fate of two key forts, that of Fort Luneta Warszawska and Sw Benedikt Fort, has not even been discussed or debated. Fort Nowy Kleparz is used as a Disco Bar and a Car Park. <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_RPukOfWMPJM/TCHiFDNjIBI/AAAAAAAAB7A/NCTcS3rtrw0/s1600/FortKleparz.jpg"></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_RPukOfWMPJM/TCHlG0eLjOI/AAAAAAAAB7Y/-ZhxiQrKdNM/s1600/FortKleparzcarpark.jpg"></a>The condition of Fort Luneta Warszawa is even more disturbing. Part 3 of the Twierdzy Krakow books makes it clear that it's condition is listed as "Zly", this is very bad and it a major Fort just opposite the road dividing it from the Rakowice Cementary. Signs say "work in Progress". No workers have been there for years. Built in the 1850s Fort Luneta Warszawska is as important a part of Krakow's history as the Barbikan near the Florianska Gate, the walls having been demolished not as is often thought by the Austrians but by the Poles during the era of the Free Republic. The same fate of neflect is evident with Sw Benedikt. <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_RPukOfWMPJM/TCHhxODiCtI/AAAAAAAAB6o/7OYcQGrltB4/s1600/IMG_0420.JPG"></a>Left to rot behind rusting iron gates, creating a Museum here and restoring the building would have been a better use of money that the recent craze for Art Boom projects and placing plastic trash around Krakow's dignified historical streets. Meanwhile nothing has been done to renovate and open up Fort 31. Sw Benedikt is a unique military fortification built between 1853-1856 by the architect Feliks Ksietarski. a "Maximillian Tower" that Podgorze Council correct describes as "the only type of fortification in Poland and one of the few in Europe". No funds have to date been allocated for its enhanced status as a part of Poland's history in culture. The Fort does exude a somewhat foreboding psychical ambience as do many corners of forgotten Podgorze which might come from the fact that Jews from Amon Goeth's Plaszow Concentration Camp were transported along the railway line to the north of Krakow near Fort Nowy Kleparz. Both Fort Nowy Kleparz and Fort Luneta Warsawska were prominent artillery forts used first in the 1850s for repressing any internal uprisings from within the city as had happenened under Eduard Dembinski in 1846 and whose rebellion was swiftly crushed outside Podgorze by a few hundred Austrian troops. These forts formed part of a second ring of Fortification, the original one having been the medieval walls of which Florianska Gare and the Barbikan are remnants, as well as certain additions to the Wawel Castle in the very heart of Krakow which also was the site for an Austrian barracks and several fortified brick additions to the walls. The second ring stretches around where the busy Aleja road now runs and down southwards towards Rondo Mogilskie where Bastion V now exists as an extant fragment excavated with a large traffic roundabout and which will be flanked by futuristic new bastions of corporate building power shoving back the Botanical Gardens and in view of Krakow's first "skyscraper", the Treimorfa Tower. To the south the fortification system went down to the natural barrier provided by the Wisla River, across which Podgorze was reached by a railway bridge. Montelupich Prison is another repressive Austrian building in which Jews were tortured and then ferried back to Sw Benedikt down the railway line to be summarily machine gunned dead by vodka fuelled Ukranian SS officers in 1943. Such a place would make a more fitting Museum of Remembrance than Balka's repellent concrete AUSCHWITZWIELICZKA tunnel. The Railway network which came to Krakow in 1847, just a year before the Free Republic was destroyed and incorporated into Austrian Galicia, accounted for the location of many of the key Forts. Including the Westernmost Fort Mydlniki close to the line coming from Chrzanow and Katowice. According to Ostrowski <blockquote style="font-family:courier new;"><span style="font-size:85%;">"The Austrian government started an intensive fortification project, including some in the town himself ( like the Wawel Hill ) and environs. This system of forts, still partly preserved, is a rare example of military architecture from the middle of the last century ( i.e the C19th ).Defensive needs spurned another important undertaking-railway development"</span></blockquote> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_RPukOfWMPJM/TCHr8Bxsy1I/AAAAAAAAB7g/a4NhrHq2K18/s1600/Image006.jpg"></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_RPukOfWMPJM/TCHhg_NITNI/AAAAAAAAB6Y/qWkkkIOBEAA/s1600/InsideMydlniki.jpg"></a>This Fort is in a terrible condition but all of them are important as part of a system of extensive fortification unique to nineteenth century Europe. The position of the Forts determined the history and development of Wielki Krakow as it expanded. Even today the Forts and the Szlak ( trail ) connecting them forms the current boundaries of Krakow now. Yet though the second ring of Fortress Krakow was a repressive enterprise it has been forgotten that the third ring was built after the liberalisation of the Austrian Empire after the Ausgleich in 1867 which gave limited but substantial enough autonomy to Polish Galicia for it to fear the Tsarist Empire on its doorstep far more than Vienna.

The Beauty of Dolina Bedkowska and parts of Unspoilt Malopolska.

2010-06-21T04:50:00.000-07:00

Some three weeks ago, on visiting Dolina Bedkowska I was impressed by the beauty of the natural environment surrounding Krakow in contradistinction to the way the green areas in and around Krakow have been gradually encroached upon by predatory financiers.

Across Krakow, trees are being sawn down, as here above in the Lobzow District, presumably to dave the elegantly graffitied wall, and the Blonia is under encroachment from rapacious forces no less than Zakrzowek.
Once nearby Ojcow was a place of great charm but now it too has been despoiled by those who simply can not abide leaving things alone and insist on trying to hawk trashy souvenirs and tatty crafts to undiscerning tourists who often litter the place.

The Malopolka region of Southern Poland along with the neighbouring region of the Carpathians that extend down into Ukraine, the area known as Bieszczady where bears and wolves still exist as do European bison in Mazury, where the vodka Zubrowka derives from in Bialystok.

As for Dolina Bedkowska, it lies in the stretch of highland punctucted by limestone valleys and is far less crowded than Ojcow. To get there just take the bus to Olkusz and get off just past the Szlak ( trail ) to Ojcow. Head south rather than north.
Even here there were problems though. Some people, simply too lazy to get there by foot, insisted on trundling their repellent SUV's down the narrow lanes nonchalantly, alonst knocking the walker into the bushes.

The best undisturbed wildernesses can still be found in Bieszczady. Zakopane is now a repellent and choked hole full of traffic and it's main streets full of touristy tack and the gut wrenching smell of waffles and ice cream.

On the roads going through Poronin, where Lenin once lived preparing his revolution just across the border under 10km from what was then the borders of the Russian Empire, the traffic belches petrol fumes.

The problem is that the PKP train network is slow and underfunded, another example of what the economist JK Galbraith called "private affluence, public squalor". Excessive car use is ecologically unsound and reflects what is called a "collective action problem".

Even so, if a traveller knows the South of Poland well he will know that one of the best routes is across the Pieniny Range from Kroscienko pod Dunajecem up to Pryhyba and then down the Pope John Paul II Szlak to Rytro near the lovely unspoilt town of Stary Sacz.

Appropriating Famous Dead People To Advertise Your Kitsch

2010-06-20T15:04:00.000-07:00

The tacky pink sticker outside the Fanciful Skip is called "Stanislaw Lem". Lem died a few years ago and it is difficult to believe Lem, as a real literary artist and leading science fiction writer, could of approved of his name being used to sell this trash in his city.

It's a sign of the feebleness of this "conceptual art" tat, that the "artist" felt the need to use this man's name to market his rubbish and create interest. Perhaps next some Art Boom dolt will create a huge brain like object termed The Captive Mind and use the late Milosz as a brand.

The only Captive Mind on offer is that of the RMK, the imbecile Janusz Majchrowski, the Mayor of Krakow, the promotional idiocy of Cracovia Krakow and the other morons in corporate promotions who are blighting the city with it all. Shame.

It's My Museum. And It Is All About Me.

2010-06-20T14:57:00.000-07:00

This advert for an exhibition at Krakow's Ethographic Museum summarises best the new spate of kitsch blighting the dignified and historical streets of Old Krakow. "My Museum, a Museum About Me".

That is what Art Boom is about. Corporate tat and the personality cult of frantic posuers desperate to make a name for Me, Myself and I. This malignant egotism is in inverse proportion to the talent such people have.

The Plague of Art Doom Kitsch Proliferates.

2010-06-20T14:36:00.000-07:00

This is yet another example of "Art Boom" Trash in Krakow.

Dr Monika Bogdanowska, a leading light in Cracovia Urbs Europaea, Krakows's conservation group and expert in the history of Krakow's architecture, put it best when she wrote of this rubbish and she criticised the excuses made by it's apologists,

'This is very easy and common excuse: "Oh come on, this is not permanent". So I want to ask "Why should we not react if we are deprived the beauty of our city even if it is not permanent..and for what reason?

And the only reason is that someone is making money out of our common space!" one not permanent crap is being replaced by another not piece of impermanent crap - again and again. Finally people get used to devastated place - as it is with Rynek - I am sure many would be surprised when it is finally cleaned and all these scaffoldings, cranes, and wooden huts removed.

I dare say many would complain that it is too empty there...And this is how works aesthetic demoralisation! These spaces should shape young tastes, young people should become sensitive to the beauty of ancient city!

And they got clear message of how to get profits out of it - end of story..

As to Art Boom-let me appeal to the artists: take the challenge and please make your art in space which is an artistic desert - not in excellent historic spaces - for it is so easy! if it is not permanent...and for

The best place for this rubbish is in the Tate Modern in London, what the late great JG Ballard termed a Middle Class Disco in his satirical novel Millennium People.To advertise yourself, your name, your brand by placing these Things near historical monuments and buildings of great beauty shows the insecurity and inherent lack of talent these poseurs and frauds have.

A Ball made of Satellite Dishes, It Plays Tinkly Chopin tunes.

2010-06-19T15:25:00.000-07:00

Another piece of corporate and cultural bureaucratic kitsch is this installation which is , mercifully, like Balka's Tate Modernist kitsch-offensive, deliberately ugly.

Only Balka's faceless, blank concrete trash is PERMANENT and not temporary like most Art Boom dross blighting the centre of Krakow.

This latest piece of meaningless crap is a football made of satellite dishes. Guess, what it does ? It has a Chopin tune playing machine inside for the proles.

Perhaps taxpayers money could have been used to fund discounts for Chopin concerts. But that would be a sane decision. So it won't happen.

Art Boom is, of course, a corporate financed arm of admass propaganda machine. "It is different" is always the sales pitch of the advertiser. This kitsch is funded by Cracovia Krakow, kbf and another sponsor. Art Boom is mostly promoted by Tauron Energy .

Self promotional dreck.

A Juxtapositioning of Total Trash

2010-06-19T14:58:00.001-07:00

I think this photo says it all really. Trash architecture looming behind an ad for total trash. All given the express benediction by the imbecile who is the Mayor of Krakow plus the energy company Tauron. Sounds a bit like Taurine, the ingredient of Red Bull-( shit )

The Fanciful Skip.

2010-06-19T14:38:00.000-07:00

Art Boom is funded by Cracovia Krakow which is, in turn, funded, by the Rada Meijska. This means Krakow tax payers are paying to fund the placement of pseudo-artistic installations across Krakow. How many people really want this kind of crap plonked about.

This looks like a skip. The best thing would be for the citizens of Krakow to treat it as such and throw bits of cast off plywood or plasterboard cut offs into it. Or aluminium cans. That would be better as Krakow's poor could either,

a) Use it as a temporary homeless shelter.

b) Collect aluminium cans from it in order to survive.

c) Smash it.

Heatwave Krakow: The Microwave

2010-06-19T14:09:00.000-07:00

Art Boom is exploding across Krakow. The most repellent one yet is in Plac Matejki.

Not only is the pink Chopin Piano bad enough, now a huge yellow microwave has been plonked next to the Grundwald Statue and in view of the Barbikan. Words fail me. Utter cretinism.

I suppose the reaction to this might be for all of us to take a lot of ready meals or try to open it and put a cold omelette in it. If it won't open, just pelt it with eggs in protest at our denial of free cooking facilities.

Usually I scowl at these things. This time I just spontaneously burst out into laughter. Tears flowed down my face in bitter laughter at this utter absurd trash.

Better still, I just wish it really was operational. I could stick the frying pan in there with the eggs in it , turn it on to full power and watch it blow up and malfunction.

That would be a real "boom". And a hell of a lot funnier than the piece of kitsch itself which Scruton calls "pre-emptive kitsch": that is kitsch which hedges the issues of whether it is 'serious' or not. Because there is no artistic integrity behind it.

The thing about this Thing is that it only laughable to laugh at at but it doesn't contain even a scintilla of real wit. Only witless banal cretinism produced by a sterile non- culture.

Are these dolts who install this this junk drunk on Jabcok ? One job creation scheme could include getting the nureks to redesign the city. They might create something better.

This was the city that produced Wyspianski, artistic genuises, great architects. What went wrong ? Why is our civilisation so devoid of real artistic merit ?

Why does Krakow feel the need to ape the most mindless and stupid tends in "the West". To be "with it" ? Are even tourists going to be impressed with such street junk ?

Lifeboat Ltd's Promotion of the Vandalisation of Krakow's Planty

2010-06-12T03:08:00.000-07:00

The Krakow Post Facebook promotion site proclaims,

In May 2008, Lifeboat Ltd., parent company of Cracow Life, acquired the Krakow Post. May 2010 saw our two-year anniversary issue, and we'd like to thank all of our readers, writers, advertisers and partners. Join us at our anniversary party at PROZAK on Friday, June 18th, starting at 8:30 pm.

At 9 pm we will have a raffle to give out an assortment of prizes from our partners.

Jolly good. Now can they can tell Cracow-life.com then to stop "having fun with spray cans" by putting unsightly stencil based graffiti in Krakow's elegant Planty ? A form of crass vandalism which is based on setting an official precedent.

If a large printing company can spray graffiti all over the Planty, then there is no reason why just anybody cannot "have fun with spray cans" as Cracow-Life.coms site brags, as if vandalism were something to be proud of.

A Plague of Telescreens.

2010-06-10T11:28:00.000-07:00

There is a plague of telescreens appearing everywhere in Krakow. Every space seems to be invaded by the damned things. They are even on the modern trams like this one taken on one. Naturally, there was no air conditioning and the digital sign with the stops wasn't working.

It might have been one of the new buses. I cannot remember where it was taken, but under multicoloured flashing screens and crowded buses and trams where you can't see out of the windows, then these things offer something distract the passenger.

Yet when faced with airless, stuffy and even scorching trams were people might actually faint due to heat exhaustion, at least there are these telescreens to cosset the weary bus and tram traveller from thinking about his own life. Or those suffering from TV withdrawal.

Yet Digiwalls as they are called presented by LED's GO are popping up everywhere. The first was on the Bagatella Theatre. Then they appeared outside Galeria Krakowska a huge repugnant telescreen advertising H & M with a concrete base.

This blight appeared for a week, though it looked as though it was permanent having a concrete base. Fortunately, it was not. However, such blights are hardly impressive for those who might actually not have the desire to look at adverts for bra wear in such a location.I asked some Norwegian tourists what they thought and they said they agreed that such a hideous videoboard should not be blasting out neon and obliterating the view of the nineteenth century railway station ( though the Galeria Krakowska bunker has done that ).Comically, the authorities who allowed this thing to be installed this thing only to remove it a week or so later, also has signs saying don't go on the grass. When removed it had left a large square of half dead grass.

So the rule is don't do as we do: just do as we say-unless a corporation insists on plonking a massive digital screen there.

Now across Malopolska, videoscreens or Digiwalls, huge kitschy plasma screens and baring out neon flashing light so frantically that one in Chrzanow obliterated the relaxing and newly renovated square outside the culture and film centre which took about two years to finish.There's no escape from the damned things. Even in Andrychow down the road from Wadowice, the birthplace of the Pope, there is a telescreen placed advertising the kitschy DinoZatorland despite Zator having no connection with Dinosaurs of any kind.

Carmaggedon in Krakow.

2010-06-10T04:26:00.000-07:00

This a now a typical scene from Krakow near Bronowice where I live. To walk to the centre means running the gauntlet of cars and vans swinging on to the path in front of the pedestrian and causing stress and anxiety for them.

This was taken on approaching ulica Rydla which connects this part of town to Lobzow and Krowodrze just south of the main trunk road Opolska which leads to the centre where it can join Wita Sztosza going East or North along Aleja 29 Listopada.

To head south along Rydla brings massive traffic jams to the main high streets in Bronowice. In fact it is impossible to really speak of a "hight street". Roads are merely conduits for traffic in and out of the centre where far too many office blocks have been located.

One problem is that rapacious developers such as Henry Gaertner claims "to aim only at central locations" and shoves hulking plate and steel glass shells like the ugly Meduza M65 block ( which shines like a "jellyfish" ) and 9 Rakowice.

Though Gaertner is not the only predator wrecking Krakow, he is one of the most prominent and want to show it by showing his contempt for the UNESCO status of Krakow which he describes as "discretionary" and "not of a legally binding nature"

That is more a statement of intent than one of fact. If it is not "legally binding" it is only because the RMK has not specifically put into place the zoning and plans required of a UNESCO World Heritage City.

That is why Gaertner is able to weasel out of them with his mutually beneficial partnerships with the RMK, global investors, the WSE and financial advisors in Luxembourg which await the Treimorfa Tower to be built off ulica Lubomirskiego.

Moreover property developers by doing so ensures that there is no systematic planning. Plans are postulated, come in fits and starts and depend wholly on short term needs and demands of investors who insist on concessions from the RMK.

Yet it's the taxpayer and the public who picks up the bill for creating the infrastructure, assuming it even receives attention at all . As the new high rise building of Kazimierza Wielkiego proves, there is little demanded off them.

The corruption of the city is evident. No thought is given to principles of the good neighbourliness apart from building higher and using that as a precedent to build higher yet. That can be seen in this buildings proximity to the first high rise of Biprostal, built in 1964.

Cars park along Kazimierza Wielkiego, in fact in most places in Krakow, on the pavement, their bonnets parked diametrically across it facing the wall, so that the pedestrian is forced to weave his way around.

The RMK consists of the same tired old post-communist time servers who are not up to the job of planning a C21st City. Partly this is because the elites are not living as others do. So they remain indifferent.

Though it's now impossible to turn the clock back, the clock is ticking towards midnight. That's the hour when vampires of finance like Gaertner strike. They have the RMK in its hands. They know it and they are ready.

They prey on the incompetent, possibly corrupt them, and get access as the RMK dithers ( possibly on purpose ) so that the vampires grinning at the door can get in. Waffle about "buffer zones" means nothing.

But the RMK and botched "plans" also contribute towards greater road congestion as city streets in the heat become unbearably hot, SUV's trundle through the Old Town and traffic reaches maniacal proportions.

Yet these offices are sold as being in central locations as if it was a good thing whilst having zero responsibility for road infrastructure or public transport. If Krakow is a body, like, all cities it has lost it's head. The RMK is certainly not a brain.

So vampiric is the right word as developers are clogging up the arteries of the city by centralising things so much with "Class A" block space. It is A for atavism, to make a killing in one fell swoop. And to hell with others.

The Killing of Krakow by these black besuited predators and vampires of finance is easy as he is allowed to stick his fangs into the heart of Krakow by a supine city government.

The roads are like arteries entering the heart. And the arteries bring cars in and out of the centre but the body of Krakow can no longer operate without more and more ruinous roads being built through it.

The problem with Krakow is that with those like Gaertner trying to centralise everything, the historical core and the immediate inner suburbs are having to carry the weight of too much traffic heading towards it.

Krakow was an Old Town which became an agglomeration only patchily under Communism. Now "turbo-capitalism" has filled in those gaps haphazardly and still the RMK has failed to come up with comprehensive zoning and planning.

Up towards ulica Conrada where the decayed Motel Krak stands derelict, they are widening the road, with trees being sliced down and this to do what. Ease congestion for a few years at best? Until the next scheme.As is said, widening roads is like giving an obese man a bigger pair of trousers as part of a diet plan. In other words, it encourages even more traffic by stimulating greater car use, though pleasing the road construction industry

From Opolska down through Azory, Krowodrze down through Bronowice, back streets are now zoomed through by those desperate to get in to make money as they are to get out at night.

Cases of asthma, heat exhaustion, pollution are reaching greater levels. Krakow is dangerous for the pedestrian. Increasingly pathological behaviour is appearing. People who feel claustrophobically trapped will react to the stress.

Driving too fast along streets never intended for it, driving over pavements, and bibbing aggressively at old women who get in the way. Time is money. Traffic lights on the corner of Pilsudskiedo and Straszewskiego have not worked for months.

Every time a pedestrian crosses the road they have to run to avoid the traffic, as the lights are timely too quickly meaning they have to sprint across the roads. Green lights are regularly ignored.

Often there are no lights nor pedestrian crossings along Ulica Lokieteka leading from Nowy Kleparz out to Krodwodrze where Opolska booms traffic along the main north road into Krakow from the West through to the centre and north.For those heading south down Rydla and Wokieteka there roads are thin and narrow. At one bridge under the railway line and just near it I have seen two car crashes in two weeks running at the same time of day.SUV's regularly run over the pavement under the bridge ignoring speed limits which are 30KPH there, so you have to put your back up against the wall to avoid being knocked down.

Krodwodrze lacks any pedestrian crossings at all leading down towards Rydla and only a level crossing near Lobzow Train Station that causes massive tail backs of traffic and growling motors and motorists.

The solution is to try to decentralise Krakow. A lot of Class A business blocks need to be out of the centre. Park and ride schemes developed. Much more of the centre pedestrianised. Congestion Charges introduced. No more road expansion after the ring road

The Condition of Life viewed from Krakow.

2010-06-08T12:03:00.000-07:00

Private affluence and public squalor. Rapacious neoliberal forces and the absence of enough civic activism, Art Boom kitsch, deranged financiers and commodity fetishism-how these forces have combined towards the killing of Krakow.Idiotic art installations whilst an old hotel , The Forum, rots behind ( below ) and the rise of large gated communities in Krakow ( above ) .
One of the most brilliant and impassioned polemics I have read is Tony Judt's Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise On Our Current Discontents ( 2010 ). Though it studies the effects of neoliberalism in the UK and USA, much applies to Poland.

The reason is that the "Anglo-American model" has been touted as a universal panacea with Utopian doctrinaire zeal by many Polish politicians from the much diminished SLD or "Lewica" and centre right parties like the PO.

The fact that Poland has averted the crisis hitting harder is due only to the aversion for the consumer debt fuelled capitalism from a large number of Poles who are, nevertheless, all the more being chased by far more numerous banks offering credit.

Banks dominate nearly every high street in Krakow-Bank Pekao, Ing Bank, GetinBank, Citibank, G E Money Bank, Alior Bank, BGH Bank, ( part of GE Money Bank ), Polbank EFG, Kredit Bank, Lukas Bank, Millennium Bank, etc etc.

Clearly, Poland still has some way to go before it matches Hungary in it's hunger for credit fuelled booms. There is no idea as foolish and fundamentally unwise that it will not be accepted without any dissent. Before the big crashes come.

In ulica Zwierzyniecka, ironically where Lenin once lived just down the road from historical centre and the Jagiellonian University, I counted 16 banks in one short stretch of street. Streets are awash with leaflets offering better credit.

The political parties offer no choice: just neoliberal gruel, the privatisation of more and more of the health service along the lines set out by those like Leszek Balcerowicz who was an erstwhile supporter of the Chicago school of economics.

The result is pockets of colossal gaudy money bags consumption and a degraded public life and all of it on full display in Poland's cultural capital as it becomes strangulated by traffic jams, unbreathable smog, masses of tourists pouring in from the UK to get cheap alcohol.

For, despite being regarded as Catholic and "conservative, Krakow has become a rather crudely materialistic and certainly bent on selling itself out to investors and insensitive developments under its Rada Miejska, dominated by PiS and PO, and Mayor Majchrowski who is of the Lewica.

None of them mean much nor have they drawn up zoning and protection plans for Krakow, trying by hook and crook, to open up the city to rapacious financial power and ugly new "Class A" office space that have no architectural merit in a UNESCO World Heritage City.

Other than in their strategic location nearer and nearer to the Old City Centre, blighted by new hotels like Hotel Sheraton, a facadist monstrosity of plate and glass, and over the river from the Wawel, the Park Inn, a metallic Lunar Fortress Base.These glittering new malign palaces of wasteful consumerism and mind shatteringly ugliness embody the new spirit of Poland for blowing away its culture in the cause of the commodification of the entire city into one money making unit.

So full of hotels is such a small Central European city core that in the future apart from museums there will be only other hotels to look at. Plus plenty of urban street junk paid for by media and marketing corporations-like a football made up of satellite dishes.
This, they say, is the new Krakow. Financed by an energy corporation Tauron, "Art Boom " is designed to fill the vacuum of creative life in the public sphere in Krakow now. It's installations are, like Miroslaw Balka's AUSCHWITZWIELICZKA concrete wall, ugly on purpose.For if buildings and "public works" are all about relentless self-promotion, then they have to stand out and refer to themselves rather than fit in with the old dignified streets of older Habsburg Krakow. As Balka's wall proves.

What is meaningless about all this junk which floats about through easy money whilst historical buildings outside the immediate cash making centre fall to rack and ruin, is that they mindlessly ape all the worst things 'the West' has to offer.

Moreover, in the neurotic frenzy to be be more Western than the West after 50 years of Communism, a Western ideology and not a Russian one as most conveniently think, is that few ever challenge mindless tenets of the purported "free market".

Giving over Krakow to unfettered free market forces has not only ripped out the real living heart of this bastion of Polish culture by turning it into Disneyfied kitsch.

As with following the herd to Mass out of habit rather than conviction or practising actual Christianity, so there is a new anaesthetic to console Poles for the new found forms of feeling the emptiness of life-the promise of pure consumption.

What Judt claims is true of the decay of the USA's and the UK's civic life and fabric applies almost word for word to Poland, where the most messianic tub thumpers for Transatlanticist zeal dwell and where it can be said;

"Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty ( in Poland twenty ) we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material interest: indeed this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose

We know what things cost but have no idea of what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair ? Is it right ? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world ?

These used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn again how to pose them. The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition".

The neoliberal universe is one dominated by a driven existence, madly driven by cravings for security and for a comfort so strong that they are manifestations of deep seated insecurity, unease and anxiety.

Such desires have been rationalised into illusions through the abstraction of taking the supposed "logic of the market" to absurdity , as if it applied to each and every part of private and public life.

Money is the greatest of these illusions as it is confused with wealth, an illusion that allows commodity fetishism to flourish, in both ideas and things whereby the satisfaction and consumption of images replaces confronting the reality of life.

Conspicuous consumption and the endless growth Utopia are running up against the stark facts of environmental degradation, depletion of fossil fuels like oil and ruinous and futile endless high tech wars in far off places like Iraq.

Few public thinkers seem to be dealing with posing these as dilemmas: most take refuge in abstractions, in Poland not through God and Country any more but God and Greed. Or God, Creed and Greed.

To those who say it was ever thus are just trying to evade the central problems: money, greed, war and hypocrisy are perennial features of human history but not before have they threatened the entire human race with destruction.

What has changed is that too many in the West are comfortable in a material sense or actually believe that they will be in the close future ever more wealthy. There is no evidence that will be the case. It is unsustainable to live on debt based consumerism indefinitely.

The frenzy of conspicuous consumption in Poland show the reality of the world process at the level of a city where the city as a body is infected with a fever, as it's green spaces are built on and hence its lungs removed.

The main arteries are clogged with traffic, gridlocked, stinking and choked with ever more cars. Even the swollen rivers from the recent flooding show the total disregard for the power Nature will inflict on people if they disregard her.Yet Polish politicians deny the role of humans in creating global warming: Balcerowicz has denied it. So no flood prevention measures had been taken since the last dangerous flooding in 2001 and the disaster in Wroclaw in 1997.All around in Krakow is what a better economist J.K Galbraith called private affluence, public squalor. An aesthetically blighted city, failing rail services, traffic jams, smog, unemployment, alcoholism, homelessness and gated communities.

Where the authorities in Poland are beset by crude rationalism and utilitarian cost and benefit analysis which extrude the idea of trust, by mistaking it with easily attainable short term goals, ( more cash, more spending power ), there is no certainty in human life.

Trust can only be restored where there is more than merely banal rhetoric, economistic determinism, fake kitschy religion adhered out of fear and insecurity, and where taxes are set at levels that can allow long term goals and plans to flourish.

Where citizens are active and public minded in challenging authority instead of assuming those with "responsibility" will do so or else retreat into cynical private consumerism as a cheap substitute.

In Krakow that means holding to account the rapacious forces of unrestrained financial capitalism and profiteers who are allowed to build ugly glass cubes and the corruption of the moral sentiments of the Rada Miejska in allowing it to happen.This would be better than allowing religion to become the opiate of the people in was for Marx. Banal Pope Paul II kitsch, pope trains to Wadowice, pilgrimages and tourism, will not save the Krakow that the Pope said was 'close to his heart'.

Only by more people waking out of their slumber and taking responsibility for themselves and for the actual actions of others can this shattered city be repaired and healed from the corruption and degradation in has plunged to in recent years.

The Lunar Space Station-Out of this World...

2010-06-05T17:45:00.000-07:00

It's now 247AM. I'm still unwinding after the interview for TVP Krakow via KTVI. Tomorrow I will still get up fairly early to go to the country to get out of Krakow. Having looked at all these blights has made me feel good for having thundered at them. But weary too.

When it all started at 10.30am this morning upon the Mound of Krakus, the interviewer Magda asked this question ( I think I might have requested it, since ultra-nationalists in Krakow have continuously attacked my criticism of Krakow's development as a "foreigner"

So Magda asked "Some people may ask what right a foreigner has to criticise Krakow?" . I answered,

"Well,it's a World Heritage city and I count myself as being from Planet Earth, unlike those who build Hotels like Lunar Space Stations and like those so-called planners who seem to be on another world from the one I live in. Including those people who say I do not have to right to say what I will about Krakow etc "

I was never stumped for an answer when Magda asked me "So what's wrong with this? " about each and every eyesore and blight from tacky plastic signage coming out from Krakow's historic streets with "Asia to Go" food signs on Szewska and the repellent Jazz Club sign that looks like a huge piece of shrapnel had embedded itself in one of its old buildings

In response to Gaertner's Lunar Space Station ( Hotel ) I laughed out loud and said,
"Can anyone see what's right about it. Look at it ! It's positioned so that tourists can look at the Wisla and the Wawel according to its promoters. But they never understand the opposite view 'Who wants to look at a Hotel like a futuristic Lunar Space Bastion from the Wawel ?'"

The interview or documentary took eight hours in intense heat.

So strong passions were at work. Blightvertisements, the horrid concrete Miroslaw Balka Wall in Podgorze, the neglected state of the "Pearls of Podgorze" including the old Sw Benedikt Church left to rot amidst bushes and weeds but presented near the wall on a tourist board in mint condition as white and creamy. In fact, it is grey and crumbling.

So thickly covered was the Church in undergrowth that I was saying "I can't see it. I can't see it. Ahhhh, there it is. My, it doesn't look like the picture representation down there". Whilst moving through tall bushes and mud swiping them to one side to emphasise the neglect of these pearls.

If such a building was a "Pearl of Podgorze", then "why isn't a pearl treated as a treasure instead of left to decay". I continued "It's hardly a pearl, as it should be, but a neglected tooth. Look, even the brickwork is falling to pieces. I touched a piece that was crumbling and loose. Why have they wasted money on Art Boom trash whilst this is allowed to happen ?"

As for Gaertner's Space Age Station, it was juxtaposed with images of me leaping over the barren stony earth before it as an astronaut would towards the lunar module. We had a laugh though but it exhausted me, Dark laughter of course.....As I did so I might have been singing those word of the old pop song by The Police.

Giant Steps are what you take, walking on de Moon...da da da...
I hope my legs don't break
Walking on the moon
We could walk for ever
Walking on the moon
We could be together.

Some may say
I'm wishing my days away no way
And if it's the price I pay, some say
Tomorrow's another day, you'll stay
I may as well play

The banality of the blight was matched by the song which is running through my head now. Well, it's time to go to bed now. It's 3.12am. I'll have visions of the insanity, the whole screaming insanity of it all in weird nightmares as I often do where I dream of the balloon mutating into a huge jellyfish and landing in the Rynek to suffocate me......

The Wasted Land-Krakow Reconsidered on Public TV.

2010-06-05T13:04:00.000-07:00

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, 20
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock, 25
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

This is the way Krakow is being "upgraded" by rapacious financial power. So I took the KTVI into the shattered crater where communist neglect has continued, it's wasteland replaced by an upholstered wasted land.

Wasted and exhausted, today the interview or documentary in one took us on a blightseeing eyesore tour showing how the vampires of finance and greedy and shifty lawyers have connived to make a killing-the Killing of Krakow.

The enchanted and deeply lovable and livable city of Krakow can be conceived of organically as a body, with its ever receding green spaces being built on, trees destroyed, its lungs removed as the centres chokes on traffic.

It's river was dirty and brown carrying yet more wreckage from upstream down away, it's arteries , whether the river or the roads and choked and clogged, the Wawel strangulated by the vulgar new tourist centre, the Hotel Sheraton and a new Hollywood path of fame along the Wisla.

Worst of all was the trashy piece of polished enamel tin pot Park Inn which looks like a Lunar Space Fortress and cast its malign glittering presence in the June sunshine, blaring out its ugliness.

People often ask me "but why are you so obsessed with all this, you're supporting a doomed cause"? My answer is that my conscience forbids anything less than to at least shame the Rada Miejska for creating a desecrated city.

In Tony Judt's new work, Ill Fares the Land, he compares those who have grown up into adulthood today in the "aughties" to the 'lost generation' of the 1920s.

I tried to settle in a place that was a definite somewhere and they blew it all away. Blew the chance after fifty years of communist blighting. Exchanged it for shiny new blights on the cityscape being scraped away by ugly new office blocks.

I grew up in an England being despoiled in the 1990s, it's public and civic life in decay and decided I had had enough and sought solace elsewhere. Then inexorably the same forces of rapacious and all devouring neoliberal globalisation killed the city I had come to love for a brief time.

I'm tired. Weary.

The conservation movement has to get into gear quickly here in Krakow. We are an hour from midnight and the clock is ticking away as the malign forces despoiling Krakow gnaw away at from within.

The way Krakow, as a World Heritage city, has been treated is an international disgrace. My job is make this known. Tak Trzeba.

In 1922, that era of a 'lost generation' T.S Eliot wrote The Wasteland and this section reminded me of the hollowness and shallowness our decayed civilisation had fallen into then , the cultural abyss and dead end we are in again now.

'My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.'

I think we are in rats' alley 115
Where the dead men lost their bones.

'What is that noise?'
The wind under the door.
'What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?'
Nothing again nothing. 120
'Do
'You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
'Nothing?'
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes. 125
'Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?

Culture Wars in Krakow. The Battle Against Kitsch Must be Won.

2010-06-02T04:04:00.000-07:00

The constant and relentless attack or the enblightenment of Krakow continues. Words fail to describe how fundamentally doltish the Rada Miejska is and how Cracovia Krakow squanders money on total junk just to get "with it". So new words must be invented.

Just because Bratislava in 2005 had plastic cows and Berlin huge plastic bears, does not mean Krakow, the cultural citadel of Poland's culture and history just must follow suit. But the cretins at the Rada Miejska insist upon it.

Absurd gimmicks reach a new pathetic low as here in the upside down house outside the rotting Hotel Forum and Plastic Beach, a crude and insensitive statement given the chaos caused to homes by the floods.

There is now no depth of depravity to which pathetic pseudo-artists and the RMK or Polish politicians and the "culture industry" won't sink. The only good thing would have been for all this junk to be washed away in the recent floods or Biblical "Potop" proclaimed by Polityka.

This area is on the Wisla next to a trashy imitation of the Paris Seine beach outside a derelict hotel, not so far from the rapacious financier and devious lawyer Henryk Gaertner's atrociously ugly Space Age Lunar Fortress, the Park Inn Hotel.

According to one commenter, the "upside down house" is the replica of the Szymbark house. The original was a comment on how everything was "turned upside down" during Communism and wasn't an absurd gimmick.

Now intelligent opinion would know that Communism was absurd and was just so over some 20 years after its demise. Now the house proves neoliberal capitalism is just as absurd and the gimmick is thus just dated , boring and out of context. Clearly, Market Bolshevism lives on.

The thing is a jokey building like that is also a replica. If 20 plastic or plaster statues of David were plonked around Krakow or anything else the words fake and kitsch come to mind. Again this shows bad planning ( if that word has any meaning in Krakow ) and lack of context.

The problem with the idea that maybe this building represents how the world has been turned upside down by capitalism is , again, Tate Modern style self referential fake protest, the tiresome "post-modern" joke that strangulates itself because it is part as the commercial world of the sales pitch advertising world it superficially criticises.The AUSCHWITZWIELICZKA concrete tunnel is a perfect exemplar of that. The inscription tells the observer what "statement" Balka is trying to make about it taking the average tourist 8 hours to see the beauty of the Wieliczka Salt Mines and the Auschwitz Death Camp.

What this halfwit seems terminally incapable of grasping is that his concrete monument is not only hideously ugly, looking like a segment of the Berlin Wall, but also simply makes the paradoxically snobbish assumption that because some tourists do this that all of them do so.

What makes Balka so sure that this is the case is just the deranged juxtapositioning of the idea that profiting from tragedy can be re-presented by a shoddy concrete instalment that ironically does just what the installation is ostensibly protesting against-profiteering from Auschwitz.
The inscription above makes it clear that Balka, having "made it", into the Tate Modern Gallery in London where junk is dumped for the perusal of fake poseurs admiring or putting on the pretence of admiring fake substitutes for art, a total corruption of moral sentiments.

The patron of Tate Modern is the dolt Charles Saatchi who claims he "gets inspiration in the lavatory". It must not be from reading on the pan or by memories of Duchamp's Urinal but from staring down the pan that he must be inspired. The choice is shit all around really.

Some even claim a tin of shit can be art. As for "Artboom" in Krakow how about a rebranded movement called Art Fart ? With all the follow through depositories it entails; at least if something is shit, the people who coin these doltish promotions should be honest.

After all, they do not really take themselves seriously as "artists" do they? After all, that is what post-modern "anti-art" is all about and has been since the chump Duchamp made a mildly amusing joke in Paris almost a century ago. It's now very tired, routine, repetitious and plain boring.

Yet the relentlessly boring monotony and lack of artistic integrity involved in the works of installers, satirised so brilliantly by the French novelist Michel Houellebecq in Platform, is matched only by the stupidity of the cultural bureaucrats who waste money on such self-promotional corporate tat.

In Platform, Houellebecq's jaded character, Michel Renault, works in the cultural sector and makes common place observations of the sheer idiocy of the "artists" so-called "projects", all the more cutting as satire because delivered in Houellebecq's deadpan style.

At the "Ministry of Culture", Renault simply does the accounts and comments,

"Although strictly speaking Marie-Jeanne does nothing , her work is, in fact, the most complicated job: she has to keep abreast of movements, networks, trends, having assumed a level of cultural responsibility, she constantly runs the risk of being thought reactionary, even obscurantist: it is an accusation which she must defend herself and her institution"

Houellebecq, Europe's greatest living novelist, gets Renault to go on to say later ( page 183 ),

"Deep down I had little respect for the contemporary art scene. Most artists I knew behaved exactly like entrepreneurs:they carefully reconnoitred markets, then tried to get in there fast.

Houellebecq, with the precision targeted and venomous satire of the greatest of French novelists and writers like Guy de Maupassant or Gustav Flaubert, who also loathed the stupidity of the moneyed classes with more money than taste or style-as all true artists and writers tend to-then goes further,

"...In July there was the Bertrand Berdane exhibition....he was chiefly famous for leaving rotting meat in young girls panties, or breeding in his own excrement...he stubbornly persisted in a rather dated 'trash' aesthetic..."

The institutionalised nihilism that Houellebecq lampoons in Platform is in 2010 rapidly developing in Krakow. This trend is lamentable and needs to be subjected to visceral criticism and wholly rejected as well as the vampires of rapacious financial gain sucking the lifeblood from Krakow.

Beavers are the "Enemy Within"-The Evasion of Collective Responsibility by the Polish Elite

2010-05-31T06:48:00.000-07:00

Whilst Jerzy Miller blames beavers for the floods in Malopolska and Krakow, the Russians are now using this absurdity to have a good laugh at Poland and the idiocy of numerous members of its political elite.

As The Voice of Russia states,

The number of beavers in Belarus is increasing but they are unlikely to cause a powerful flood similar to the Polish one, a researcher Pyotr Kozlo told Interfax news agency. Earlier, Poland’s Interior Minister Jerzy Miller said beavers destroyed dams which protected the cities from Vistula burst banks and caused floods which had already killed 15.

The argument of Miller is factually surreal as well. Beavers actually BUILD damns. They don't make holes, though they might gnaw away at trees. Polish government information services have actually praised beavers after their breeding was encouraged after they had become endangered.

"Poland also has a sizeable population of beavers. Endangered in the 1950s, they were saved in fenced breeding stations. Currently there are about 20,000 beavers in Poland. These skilful rodents are called river architects. They build dams to lift water and keep it in their lodges which can be up to 2 metres high and 30 square metres big"

http://www.msz.gov.pl/publications/2002/cd2/mszpromo/en/2_3.htm

English Tutors-Always Drunk and in Debt.

2010-05-31T04:06:00.000-07:00

On reading Adam Zamoyski's biography of Chopin:Prince of Romantics, I noticed with interest it is written that Chopin in Warsaw was contemplating a visit to England around 1829,

"for he was now, along with Julian Fontana, taking English lessons-from an Irishman called McCartney, who was usually drunk and trying to borrow cash from the two boys".

The reputation and standards of English teachers as drop out drunks has a long pedigree. !

The Targets of the TVP Krakow Interview.

2010-05-30T05:21:00.000-07:00

The TVP Interview will go ahead. All the targets selected in the past months will be named and shamed. The station is actually on the same cain of hills where Sw Benedykt lies rotting whilst Miroslaw Belka's pathetic lunk of concrete kitsch, called AUSCHWITZWIELICZKA, will be ridiculed. I will call on those in Podgorze to demand it's removal from Independence Square.

It was in Independence Square in Podgorze that Poland declared independence from Austria after 123 years of being part of the Habsburg Empire. To place a concrete wall that blights the square, is on no artistic merit and looks like a section of the Berlin Wall is desecration. It is a waste of money when advertised "Pearls of Podgorze" look more like neglected teeth.

Like Fort Sw Benedikt, of great historical importance and, sadly, where Jews were massacred by Ukrainian SS officers during World War Two. If the Rada Miejska had any intelligence or sensitivity it would have restored it and the C13th Church next to it on Lasota Hill and not plonked an ugly self-referential piece of kitsch upon people in Podgorze.

Other things mentioned I intend will be the rapacious Henryk Gaertner ( yes, he''ll be thundered at too with his paltry Meduza "jellyfish" ).

-The Hideous New Hotels-Five Star Blights
-Gaertner's Lunar Space Module
-The Neglect of the Fortresses.
-Wasted money on Art Boom.
-12 Kupa Street.
-Adverts draped over entire buildings.
-Telescreens and the one outside the Station.
-That the RMK is breaking UNESCO's criteria
-That Gaertner dismisses UNESCO rules as "discretionary".
-Gaertner's Treimorfa Tower and verbatim quotes

Blame the Flood on the Beavers.

2010-05-30T04:01:00.000-07:00

On TVN the "blame" game for the incompetence of the authorities in proving incapable of planning flood protection in Krakow some 13 years after what happened in Wroclaw continues. The Rada Miejska blames the central government and they blame the river authorities.

So another target was literally found-to shoot beavers and muskrats who are now "the cause". A man in Andrychow, near Krakow, agreed that the maximum use of guns would most beneficial in dealing with the problem.

He said the politicians should do themselves a favour and take the guns out and blow their own brains out .Thus serving the nation far better. A cull of all existing politicians might be one solution. I had to disagree with him here when demanding they "blow their brains out"

"There is one thing you have forgotten. The politicians in Poland don't have much in the way of brains to blow out. The phrase is wrong my friend. The correct one is to require them to blow their heads off".

"Ah, yes. Sorry. Thenk you for English lesson. All gratis !"

The correct phrase is always important. As for the beavers and muskrats, they have my sympathy. This cull is literally a pathetic form of evading collective incompetence and lack of wisdom and foresight.

Postscript.

From the Daily Telegraph,

"The greatest enemy of the flood defences is an animal called the beaver. They live everywhere along the levees on the Vistula (river) and cause a lot of damage to them," Jerzy Miller said.

An estimated 50,000 of the large, mostly nocturnal, semi-aquatic rodents live in Poland where they enjoy a degree of protection, animal welfare services say.
However, local authorities have upped hunting quotas for the animals in the wake of the floods.

"Beavers dig tunnels in the flood defences, weakening them from inside. But they are not alone, there are also water voles," Pawel Fratczak, Poland's national fire brigade spokesman said.

Torrential rain in Poland's mountainous south have caused rivers, including the Vistula, Poland's largest, swell to levels unseen in more than a century.

The Krakow Post reports,

As the nocturnal rodents are known for building dams, canals and lodges as their natural habitat, beavers complicated and interfered with efforts undertaken by emergency forces to fight the floods. By gnawing through dykes, digging tunnels in dams and thus sapping protective barriers from the inside, beavers caused further flooding. So far, the flood claimed 16 victims and around 4,000 people had to be evacuated. Overall, about 20,000 people were affected by the deluge.

During the course of the catastrophe, local governments increased the hunting quota on the apparently unconcerned beaver to mitigate the problem. Hitherto protected by the state, the Castor fiber (European beaver) seems to have lost its environmental immunity in Polish inshore waters. The number of the semi-aquatic rodents living in Poland is estimated at around 50,000.
Ironically, beavers have just been recently repopulated in Poland and other European countries, after having been over-hunted. Almost extinct in the middle of the 19th century, the beaver experienced a huge comeback due to successful protection programmes and advocacy by conversationists.

Yet, blaming and preying on the beaver appears, once again, to be a way of dealing with the unforeseen consequences of human actions. It is not the first time that Poland experienced such a devastating flood. In 1997, when the country was hit by the most severe deluge in recent history, 54 people died, more than 150,000 people were evacuated and the overall damages accounted for billions of euros. The question remains, what measures have been taken to prevent and deal with such emergencies?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It's obvious that the Rada Miejska and the central government are incompetent and negligent, as well as showing their contempt for managing the environment

It is obvious that the floods are caused by climate change and also the fact that flash floods are known to be common in southern Poland and have been for a very long time. The highest river levels occur in summer during maximum precipitation and melting snow.

It looks as if the doltish Jerzy Miller couldn't pass a high school exam in basic Polish geography. Wroclaw in 1997 was a warning sign. Nothing substantial elsewhere was done. There were disastrous floods in 1846 and 1934 which were the worst before that.

As K Harasimiuk and J Radzos write in Poland: Man and Nature on a similar flood in 2001 in the Wisla basin

" The tragedy of the events was aggravated by the careless actions of man. Large parts of the river basin had been built up and it was these areas that suffered the most damage from the flood".

These are man made problems as well as compounded by lack of action by the authorities. This is Poland. Not Bangladesh.

In actual fact the Wisla basin flooded in 2001. Southern Poland is prone to it and the authorities have shown negligence. In demented anger, they must be seen to cull beavers and water voles just to prove they are not to blame and are "doing something".

Our attitude to the way we treat animals and nature shows what we are.
The politicians in Poland who ordered this cull are animals themselves but even worse perhaps-animals do not try to exterminate or blame other animals for what they do. Animals do not exterminate other animals for having the wrong beliefs.

The contempt Polish politicians have for Nature is part of the rigid monotheistic form of dogmatic Catholicism-that we are the Overlords of Nature and follow the Will of God as a Great Architect. There are other traditions within Catholicism-think of Francis of Assissi's love of Nature.

Where is the Church protesting against such cruelty ?

The Struggle of Memory Against Forgetting

2010-05-28T05:12:00.000-07:00

This is one building that doesn't "maximise space" in Kazimierz. I'm taking pictures of every building that might be under threat in the future. It also serves the purpose of remembering how Krakow was.

The struggle of Krakowians against rapacious money power is that of the struggle of memory against forgetting ( to paraphrase Milan Kundera ). It will also serve as an antiquarian record and picture gallery, far more important than gimmicky "art boom" installations.

On that note I'm off again to take more photos. I never stop. The "cause" is now a major part of me, as all these buildings are. As many old friends have fallen, we can at least document the destruction. And mourn their loss.

But it can and will be stopped some of the time. Victory in defeat is an old Polish refrain. And in the end battles will be lost but also won. Nobody will say that decent people didn't try. And the war is not over yet. It is just beginning.

Krakow Street Paths are Car Parks

2010-05-26T14:49:00.000-07:00

In some streets it is now almost impossible to walk down a street, as shown here in Aleja Slowackiego, without struggling to get past car owners who do not seem to realise that pathways are for pedestrians and not cars.

From time to time I have found myself accidentally almost knocking of wing mirrors in trying to get by or else scraping my coat against building walls. The incompetence of the Rada Miejska in not having parking metres in such places defies belief.

The worst example I have come across is on Ulica Sad where a hulking lunk of an SUV blocked the path completely, forcing me to go around it by walking into the road where a speeding imbecile nearly flattened me.

Just across the road was a virtually empty car park which charged 3zl for one hour of parking. Again parking metres and traffic wardens are badly needed in Krakow to ensure road pricing and clamp these things if they do not pay and tow them away as in London.

Thoughts from Krakow.

2010-05-26T10:47:00.000-07:00

Recently I have noticed posters going up in Krakow advertising "Zen", though what kind of Buddhism, of which Zen is only one branch of Buddhist thought, is unclear as this might advocate it more as a stress relief technique than a philosophy.

As youth becomes disillusioned with the dogmas of Catholicism, this could merely lead to modish desires to embrace something "exotic" and "different" and thus better. The same thing occurred in Britain in the 1960s.

However, the important thing to note is that Zen Buddhism has much in common with ancient Taoist thought about the 'way of liberation' from conventional thought categories and much of it contains profound wisdom of which consumerist Westerners stand in need.

Zen became popularised in the West by a British philosopher Alan Watts in the 1950s until his death in 1973 after he saw that the craving for the "herd instinct", security and so forth was being satiated by the diversions of the burgeoning consumer economy of post-war USA under Eisenhower.

Poland is undergoing "Westernisation" in this sense now. Church attendance in Poland is diminishing. In Krakow it remains at around 70% but in Lodz it is 30%.

Watts, himself a Presbyterian minister, rejected the formalistic dogmas of Christianity and saw the urge to "conquer Nature" as a great error in Western thinking. It is common to the Catholic Church and secular ideas of Progress.

Yet Watts never rejected Western civilisation. He saw that "the West" was rejecting and undercutting its own foundations by promoting consumerism as a palliative to the consciousness that the work ethic had somehow become somewhat meaningless.

In Poland, where all Established politicians are bound to want to "catch up" with "the West" it is hardly surprising that people are being forced into a US style work hard to earn the merit of playing hard routine.

Only a hypocrite, it could argued, would seem to say that disillusioned "Westerners" would want a lack of commercial development in Poland simply because they fled "the West" through sheer boredom at the suffocating entertainment, shopping and sex non-culture.

The point though is that a city such as Krakow can develop commercially without losing it's unique character. It was built and its beauty created by Renaissance wealth and by German and Italian artists.

Moreover, it is simply obvious Poland is inextricably part of what is "the West", having gone through early Catholic conversion, as well as the the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and the Enlightenment.

Yet there seems to be a constant feeling that Poland has not been "really" accepted as part of "the West". This has lead to a neurotic reaction which appears to be at the root of the mistakes being made by the Rada Miejska in Krakow and, more generally, in Poland.

The RMK seems intent on taking all the worst aspects of "the West" and in promoting bad architecture, the destruction of green spaces for rapacious global corporations from elsewhere and for some Poles to "make a killing" in financial terms in the process.

There are far more gas guzzling SUV's in Krakow than in even British towns. Environmental concerns are not taken into account and the city is a microcosm of the now discredited neoliberal form of unstable capitalism at its worst. Uncritical "Americanism" is the order of the day.

Yet there seems no reason, apart from the dogmas of US trained economists to promote this pseudo-libertarian creed and give over the future of Krakow to a mixture of botched "planning" and leaving it in the hands of corporations.

As Krakow's population has increased from 750,000 in 1999 to a million in 2010 and Krakow noe becoming an agglomeration full of migrants as the provincial towns continue to stagnate due to the excesses of Balcerowicz's "Plan", new thinking is necessary.

Not only is Krakow, a a concentric city that radiated out in the nineteenth century now clogged with traffic streaming in and out as those like the rapacious Henryk Gaertner of G D K Group aim at putting offices "only in central locations", the traffic situation is now dangerous.

Krakow is going to suffer a massive coronary heart attack, as those who want to work in centrally located offices insist on using their cars, but smog levels are reaching unhealthy levels.

At rush hour drivers drive manically through the back streets to take short cuts to the main roads leading in and out of Krakow, leading to constant speeding, parking on streets without parking metres, even when across the road there are 3zl per hour parking spaces.

Now, with regards the countryside, many wealthier Krakowians speed out towards Szczawnica or Zakopane leading to more congestion out of Krakow and even traffic jams leading into Zakopane along the roads around Poronin and other small towns.

Somehow people need to learn that there are such things a "collective action problems": that manically speeding out of the stress and bustle of Krakow just defeats the object of what it is the car driving weekend trip driver actually wants.

This double bind paradox is why it is so essential to rethink the nature of the hyper-consumer economy as based on asocial and so-called "rugged individualism". A fool who thinks the large high octane economy of the USA is one to be copied in Poland is just not thinking.

It is unfair to to blame Poles for wanting "return to Europe" but even Vaclav Havel complained about how democratic ideals and the intelligent development of Western civilisation and the struggle for liberation had ended up with credit fuelled consumerism and technological determinism.

Havel, as well as notables like Walesa, a Noble Prize Winner, have supported the cause of a Free Tibet. That's a debt position when since the Chinese invasion of Tibet in the 1950s, Tibet has been crushed and its culture subjugated by a large and nominally "Communist" neighbour.

But the flaw is that both have thought that consumerism can be separated by supporting what might be termed "Westernism" in foreign policy, supporting the inexorable spread of Western ideas of individualism and self-autonomy across the globe.

In reality the right to be "autonomous" is an illusion: man is inseparable from Nature and the obsession with "being different" and that humans have "free will" to the extent that is thought is also an illusion: it all ends up with the "rebel sell" where people attach their identity to consumer objects.

In the case of cars, that means an increase in the demand for oil, embroilment in dangerous areas where human rights can act as a pretext for such catastrophes as the invasion of Iraq in 2003 in the hope of controlling the world's third largest oil reserves.

It seems unlikely that anything resembling an "international community" will resolve overpopulation, excessive demands made on the Earth by rapidly idustrialising nations and the illusion that material possessions lead to genuine happiness.

China is not going to listen to the West and, as happens when people are told to give up on their cars and use public transport, the reasoning is always "you first" and that there seems no advantage to be gained by giving up on these things if others do not as well.

But the real question is the one posed by Leo Tolstoy: "too many people think about changing the world and too few about changing themselves". They are not prepared to give up on their frantic quest for more and more useless possessions over and above what is needed.

Consumerism since the Second World War has been touted as Aldous Huxley predicted in Brave New World as a way of stopping the children thinking too much and only about trivia in the cause of "stability".

As rapacious capitalism and consumerism lay waste to whole tracts of the Earth no less than Communism did, the real problem is that this "stabilty" is one way of mollifying enough people to ignore the evidence of their own senses. To make them insensible.

Global heating, imminent Peak Oil crises, resource wars will be a feature of the C21st, along with the development of new nuclear, biological and even genetic weapons designed to exterminate competitors or have the bargaining hand over them.

The American Dream is nothing but a nightmare delayed which is perhaps why Hollywood propaganda specialises in disaster movies: it makes people think the stuff of catastrophes are only nightmares that will be solved by technology and that the USA will be "safe".

Technology will not "solve" the world's problems not the USA's: at best they will stave off imminent catastrophes and Green humanists will not "save the world either" because in their scheme of things humans are still central.

Anthropocentric thinking, Man as the Measure of All Things, is a progressive myth, whether its neoliberal capitalism, now being extended by military force by NATO's "military humanism", or forms of populist authoritarian capitalism as in China and, to a lesser degree, Russia.

The only sensible way to look upon impending catastrophes is to accept that they will happen and governments will belatedly try to repair, with a greater or lesser degree of success, remedial measures. Utopian global schemes will achieve nothing.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Alan Watts, Huxley and other thinkers knew that this would be the case. Watts thought that if the direction of Nature was given back to Nature more the world would stand a chance.

Across the globe people are trapped in a scheme of things in which "motivation" is provided by the nonsensical idea that by working harder and mastering Nature, people will become happier and live better than they have ever done in history.

The question is even if such a Utopia of continual pleasures was earned by working hard, that sheer boredom will lead to the demand for ever greater freedoms and pleasures as satisfaction is a negative and experience that rapidly palls.

Once people have made their money, they simply get bored, as is seen by the "sea of trivia" people are subjected too, the return of cruelty in sexual relationships where "partners" are to be mutually interchangeable and "dumped" for the next better deal on the market.

The fault lies in those '68ers' partly who confused sexual liberation with "freedom" instead of a new form of servitude.

Daniel Cohn Bendit, a student radical then who congratulates himself on this, is now a Green Euro MP who hypocritically calls for NATO expansion to protect pipelines. His friend Adam Michnik supported the Iraq War as "Poland is an ally of the USA" So that's that then.

A great many Westerners have been infantilised and hardly care or know or care to know or, even when they are dimly aware, of impending catastrophes, just "wanna be happy" by buying more as a diversion from confronting facts.

Western civilisation is a shell: vast tracts of Europe consist of zones of sterile non-culture where nothing is cultivated but culture ransacked for fragments of it that can be packaged, re-presented and made the children feel safe.

Politics has been reduced to a shallow pantomime where there are no real policy alternatives and the most important decisions a person makes are in shopping mall, the new Cathedrals of Consumerism.

People tend to deserve the politicians they get when they stop thinking for themselves and facing facts: the 1990s until 2008 was a period where neoliberals embraced Utopian thinking, that the world would come together and converge on the US model-"there was no alternative".

The return of catastrophes, privation through years of debt repayment, resource wars, terrorist backlash from occupied Islamic states, the "savage reservations" as Huxley satirised them in Brave New World , will prove there is and that it will nor be pleasant.

All of that can be gleaned from walking around in Poland in Galeria Krakowska or looking at the sheer scale of young people born in the 1990s who linger around shopping malls for safety and comfort just as their parents went to Church-only Catholicism had some redeeming aspects.

The real world has already intruded. Cut throat competition for scarcer jobs, xenophonia in Britain and Poland, mental breakdowns, an increase in Prozac use, more frantically sex obsessed nightclubs are all symptoms of people afraid of life and motivated by the "death instinct".

As with wars, the consciousness or catastrophe leads to an anxiety alleviated by frantic and transient sexual relationships, valuing what is fleeting and transient and, as the late great J G Ballard knew, consumerism could lead to Fascism. Where workers are "human resources" and others means to one's own pleasure only.

Ballard who grew up in China in the 1930s Shanghai, a place of extravagant decadence and then war, knew that civilisation was fragile: 60 years of no war in Europe whilst wars raged across the globe even during the "Cold War" and the threat of nuclear extinction have not gone away.

Yet the way that infantile consumers will spit out the comfort dummy when the going gets tough will lead to new permatanned creeps and demagogues tapping into the" new emerging psychopathologies" of which the Iraq War was the prime example.

Ancient Chinese philosophy has much to offer: that humans are sunk in illusions few will never be free from and there is no future Utopia or better future for our children but that contemplation and the advocacy of plain wisdom means salvation from history.

The TVP Krakow Interview-"Profil Aktivny"

2010-05-26T05:57:00.000-07:00

In early June I will be appearing on TVP Krakow to put forward the case for careful zoning, respect for the culture and conservation of Old Krakow against rapacious and pathologically "goodfella" style financer capitalists like Henryk Gaertner of G D & K Group.

But Gaertner's blighting of Krakow, from 12 Kupa Street next to the Isaac Synagogue to the Off White Hotel, to the Space Age bastion style Lunar Moon Base that is the Park Inn are due for a lambasting of the likes never before seen on Polish TV.

Every quote from Gaertner, his contempt for the UNESCO World Heritage conventions, his lack of aesthetic education and crude view of architecture as engineering will be reduced to the pitiful bunch of bragging and marketspeak he offers when he "aims only at central locations".

But Gaertner is not the only fool in Krakow who puts his greed and stupidity on public display both with his lame jargon ridden and cliched website. Gaetner and the oafish Symon Duda condemn themselves from their own statements. Let the people of Krakow hear them.

When this sly financier and lawyer rests at home at night ( I wonder if his house looks as ugly as the trash he imposes on Krakow with a hypocrisy similar to Richard Rogers ) how does this miserable bean counting neoliberal spend his time.

Perhaps pretending with the delusions of grandeur he and his partners in starchitectural crime that he is also a beneficient force in Krakow's public life, when his unbecoming vulgarity is manifest in the M65 Meduza Building which is meant to shine "like a jellyfish".

Yet his profundity is matched as a money grubbing person who terms architecture as "Investment Decisions", but also, in some ways worse, by the corruption inherent in the false delusions created by money power and idiotic cultural bureaucrats.

The Installation theme will be a major target of the interview. Cultural bureaucrats paying out money for concrete tunnels like Miroslav Belka's repellent installation ( it is NOT a sculpture ) called AUSCHWITZWIELICZKA.

This idiotic self promotional heap of concrete dreck has been plonked on a square in Podgorze where Poland declared independence from Austria in 1918.

Plac Niepodglosc then sufferers the indignity of organisations like Cracovia Krakow ( funded by the incompetent RMK ) placing a pseudo-monument claiming to protest against mass tourism.

The sheer cretinism of this is astounding.

The RMK funds an organisation that pays a talentless pesudo-sculptor to impose a hunge concrete tunnel as a protest against thw way Krakow has been packaged as a tourist commodity, that tourists can see a death camp and the Salt Mines in just eight hours.

So what? Not every tourist buys those packages. Some may visit the Wieliczka Salt Mines without going to Auschwitz and not on the same day. Some might visit the one and not the other.

The installer of the concrete tunnel thinks he's making a "statement" and, of course, indeed he is-in particular he is advertising what a banal commercialised and self promoting talentless fool he is.

That's why his other work is in that temple of trash called the Tate Modern Gallery which British writer and a genuine avant-garde writer and appreciator od surrealism J G Ballard laughed at as "Middle Class Disco".

So whilst much vaunted "Pearls of Podgorze" are more like the Fort Sw Benedikt or the C13th Church rot from vandalism and reek of urine and are more like decayed teeth, Pan Belka's tunnel in Plac Niepodglosci looks like a segment of the Berlin Wall.

If he wanted to make a purely anti-tourist point he could do so but being a rapacious hypocrite Belka though he could get official funding to make a "statement" without using words, apart from yoking AUSCHWITZ with WIELICZKA to make the new word AUSCHWITZWIELICZKA.

Duh. How original.

Some comments on the TVP Krakow interview will thunder about "the English Urinal" in the Maly Rynek, the pointless a paltry Paris imitation beach on the Wisla ,the Hollywood Stars along the path beneath the Wawel and the way Krakow has been vulgarised by charlatans and foolish innovations just to be "with it".

From considering the fact that money has been squandered on total trash, like plastic Chopin pianos ( Chopin was Polish-no, you didn't know that ? ) , I have requested the TVP crew to go to the dank Fort Luneta Warsawska.

It's decay shows's the RMK's negligence and lack of concern for the city. Old Krakow continues to rot away in many places that are of no "use value" to the neoliberals who wear the mask of being "conservative" but are obsesessed with lucre like all banal mediocrities are.

What an irony.

In 1979 on the Blonia Pope John Paul II declared "every brick and stone is close in this city is close to my heart. The fake conservative and demagogues of PiS honoured these words by paying lip service to an idolatrous fetish for the Pope for commercial reasons and Mammon.

It seems as God Christians they have forgotten to remember Jesus in the Money lenders temple ! ) and the fact that "conservative" parties are not, um, conserving anything. They failed pathetically to ensure adequate flood protection for Krakow whilst the city was inundated with a swollen Wisla.

There is a, however, a New Fortress Krakow. These are the ugly Gated Communities, the SUV's charging around the streets and treating pedestrian like untermensch ( they must love the dolt Jeremy Clarkson ), promoted by websites like Skyscraper City.

Gaertner and the ring of new tyrannical fortresses of ugly hotels need to be named and shamed, as do to fools in authority who permitted outrages like the Park Inn Hotel to be built in view of the Wawel.

More specifically Gaertner as a rapacious property developer who brags arrogantly about the Treimorfa Tower being higher than St Mary's Tower and who wants to "change the face of Krakow" will be quoted verbatim in a TV station in a city where 70% of people still attend Church.

You cannot have you Kremowka and eat it: either the Good Christians respect Krakow's historical centre a reject the overbearing desecration being caused by unfettered neoliberal and US style "free market" solutions ( in reality all rigged ) or they do not.

They cannot act "dumny" and criticise the Outsider looking with what he sees visibly with his eyes. Either they give their support to civil society activists trying to protect Krakow's unique architectural inheritance or the heart of the heart of Europe will be torn out.

And a light will go out in Poland and the nation lose its sense of identity and culture as it is buried beneath an avalanche of starchitectural trash and advertising blights, thus destroying any reason why a responsible tourist would even want to set foot in the place at all.

The debate in long overdue. It must not be started. Not ignited nor raised. The debate over the Killing of Krakow must be detonated forthwith and civil society groups work within Polish culture and society to preserve the attacks by these spiritual zombies and cash hungry losers who are doomed, even on their own terms, to self defeat.

No Krakowian will remember Henryk Gaertner when he is stone dead in 30-40 years time as they remember, say, Wyspianski or Talowski or other great architects from the past who combined tradition with modernity and added something creatively vital and new.

Only wonder why on earth the RMK let this foolish man who prized his abstract obsession with money and commericial gain to build such repellent and desolate pieces of starkitectural junk all over Krakow.

The Uncertain Status of the Jurka Park

2010-05-25T04:57:00.001-07:00

The rapacious property developer Henryk Gaertner of GD & K Group has appropriate public space. Jurka Park is NOT to my knowledge owned by him. Yet access is blocked with "Entry Forbidden Signs". When work is going on, the gates are open and there is no "Private Property Sign". The status a Jurka Park is unclear.

Both on the entrance to Jurka Park and the nineteenth century Palac Tarnowskich is a banner with "Keller Developments" on it. There is no information even letting the public know what Gaertner has planned , apart from what he states on his G D & K Group website as the "revalorisation" of the building to create an "Economy Class Hotel".

Krakow's Floods in Pictures

2010-05-21T14:14:00.000-07:00

Some pictures of the floods affecting Krakow. It is astonishing that The Polish government still have not learnt the lessons of Wroclaw in 1997 and invested in adequate flood protection defences of what is considered its second city.

Just near the banks of the Wisla this is how the authorities thought one building might be protected.

The others are taken in and around Most Grundwaldski. The washing away of the grotesque Paris imitation beach was the only good thing that might otherwise come from the awful non-stop deluge of water.

Potop

2010-05-20T02:20:00.000-07:00

"Climate change" is often the mealy mouthed term for the more obviously accurate one which is global heating. When you say that some keep saying, when faced with rain showers and below average temperatures, that this means global heating, is a myth. Well, the earth does not become hottter all over at once but displays symptoms of a fever.

Many Poles call themselves "climate sceptics". But this is semantics for meaning inability to face facts. Most of the IPCC agree, advocates like George Monbiot ( though his preachy trendy leftism sticks in my craw ) and the wonderful James Lovelock ( see his brilliant Revenge of GAIA ).

A discussion of global heating and freak weather conditions affecting Krakow, with its specific microclimate and rapidly changing weather ( proximity to the Tatras ) is essentially for for understanding how the Polish government consistently fails to put in place contingency plans to prevent another Wroclaw style disaster as in 1997.

Yes, the climate is changing. But politicians like most people, to use Freud's world "can only bear a certain amount of reality". Consumerism acts as one palliative that blots out consciousness of private debt fuelled affluence and public squalor. Likewise people might not want to spend money on long term flood protection.

Similarly populists want short terms results and have not learnt the lessons of Wroclaw in 1997. Out of sight of of mind. Short-termism is one of the main features of neoliberalism as it encourages living only for "the now" whilst glorifying some future progressive Utopia.

Yet the neoliberal model of capitalism is not the only factor to blame: the idea that if we treat the environment merely as a place for the satiation of out immediate and infantile desires, then the Earth with destroy us like the "straw dogs" of in the Chinese Tao Te Ching, "Heaven and Earth are heartless / treating creatures like straw dogs".

Catholicism, unless we draw on the traditions of those like St Francis of Assisi, is hostile to the Natural World, seeing God as a Monarch and Great Architect. Such anthropomorphism is no different categorically from secular atheists or the neoliberals creed of history as a drama of redemption from evil.

Atheists witter about belief in supernatural forces being irrational, as is true. But they inherit the though patterns of the monotheism they are conditioned by in cultural terms. The belief in Progress as an inexorable linear process is from a specific concept derived from mainstream Christianity.

Greeks and Chinese thinkers would be more sensible.They had no messianic tendency to see history as catastrophes from which there is a dialectical process were conflicts lead to a higher resolution and progressive change. Much suffering is meaningless, painful and pointless from which nothing better comes.

Progress in technology will aid man in fighting the worst affects of the threats to our cities. It will also be used to advance genocide, missile shield, rapacious wars over diminishing oil and gas. Poland is dominated by an Establishment infused with this narrative. As is Britain under all three parties. The idea the future might be worse than the past is unthinkable.

As global heating is now irreversible, Poland and Krakow specifically need to plan for freak weather incidents more coherently. It can't be done if the elites deny global warming, spend Polish taxpayers money on 12 dud Patriot Missiles of zero use, and act as supplicants to the USA's megalomaniac strategy for dominating Central Asia and pathological struggles over oil.

Regime change starts in Poland. A sweep out of many existing politicians is needed through non-violent means. Poland is a land of some of the finest minds I have ever met. Yet it is led by total fanatics, credulous fools and the corrupt who spout phrases about civil society rather like the Communists talked of "The Workers State".i.e it's more of an abstract fiction.

Strong language, forthright polemics, defence of Poland by civic patriotism, the "Conradian ethos", is the only hope left. Somehow politicians will accept all this about global heating as orthodoxy. But much of Poland's environment will have been despoiled and desecrated by that stage unless activists get to work.

Atavistic Polish Nationalism-Monty Python Style

2010-05-13T03:05:00.000-07:00

At first I though Leszek Bubel's PPN was a satirical party rather like the Monster Raving Loony Party of Lord Sutch, a 1960s rock musician. Some Polish populists at least have the merit unlike in Slovakia where Jan Slota's SNP is really quite vicious ( he talks of driving tanks to Budapest and whipping gypsies ) of being unintentionally funny at times as Bubel ( Polish for 'trash' ) proves.

2010 sees the year of many anniversaries in Poland-Pilsudski's defeat of the Bolshevik invasion in 1920, the Katyn Massacre by the Soviet Union ( note not "Russia" ) in 1940 and Bubel's attempt cash in on the defeat of the Teutonic Knights in 1410 whilst claiming the Germans are invading and colonising again, this time by money and "stealing women".

Curiously, it was Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf who made the allegation that Jewish youths preyed upon blonde maidens and poisoned the blood, a point lost on Bubel because the man who set up a Beer Drinking Party in the 1990s must have thought up this video after canning about 10 cans of Tatra Pils Mocne.

Good Soldier Svejk, Czechoslovakia and Poland

2010-05-12T15:47:00.000-07:00

Despite the fact that Good Soldier Svejk was Czech and it's writer a representative of "Bohemia" in the sense of the lands now taken up by the Czech Republic during the Habsburg period, "Svejk" is still a popular character in neighbouring Poland, even though curiously both of these Central European nations tend not to be very curious about their neighbours.

The reason is, of course, because Svejk and the author Jaroslav Hasek belonged to the same Habsburg Imperium as the Galician Poles and both the Czechs and Poles chafed under the rules of the Austrian Kaiserreich or the dysfunctional 800 year old Empire which contained eighteen nationalities spread across various miscellaneous old principalities and kingdoms.

Though Habsburg rule had been very harsh in repressing the 1848 Revolutions by the Hungarians and, indeed, Austrians themselves, it had also crushed Polish aspirations for freedom and ended the Free City of Krakow that had existed between 1815 and 1848, turning Krakow into a "Festung" city against enemies within ( rebel Poles ) and later against enemies without ( the Tsarist Empire ).

After 1867 and the Ausgleich had led to a gradual liberalisation of of Habsburg rule as the aim was to inspire loyalty to the Habsburg crown by stressing the royal heritage rather than the fact it had always been an Imperium. That did not stop both Poles and Czechs often loathing it and in Galicia Poles and Ukrainians loathing one another.

As Robert Musil wrote of "Kakania" "by its constitution it was liberal but its system of government was clerical, but the general attitude to life was liberal" and it was that clerical administrative power of the Church and the Military that Hasek, an anarchist loathed even before the outbreak of World War One and the total incompetence of the Austrian War Effort.

The trend towards nationalism ensured that in Galicia despite an element of loyalty to Franz Josef II, there was gowing up a whole host of petty atavistic nationalisms that were not much more pleasant or less aggressive than the brutality inherent in the Austrian militarist mentality Hasek hated and satirised so much.

Which is one reason plucky old Svejk is venerated in what is now Malopolska and still appears on adverts for beer halls, where ordinary Krakowians fed up with the incompetant stuffed shirt nonentities of the Rada Miejska in 2010, with its incompetence and corruption, love a good laugh and joke at their pomposity, no less than many did against both the Habsburgs and later the prim and grim culture of the USSR's domination.

The key difference is, however, that Hasek represented a tradition of anarchy and rebellion distinctly Czech and his portrayal of Polish Galicia in Good Soldier Svejk is actually not particularly flattering. That was probably inspired by Hasek's visceral detestation of the Catholic Church whether preached by drunk Austrian chaplains or Poles.

Poland has virtually no history of anarchism amongst the common people. In Krakow there was "La Boheme", the anti-clerical satires of Boy-Zelenski and those who were connected with the Mloda Polska movement who performed satirical cabarets at the Zielony Balonik ( Green Balloon ) at Michalik's Den on Florianska Street.

Consequently, in Good Soldier Svejk, though all idiotic forms of militarism and lunatic orders are satirised, the multinational force find a Galicia that conforms to the idea that this was the most miserable and backward province of the Austrian Empire as they pass through the Carpathians through Lupka Pass to Sanok.

In Sanok there is now a bronze statue to Svejk in the centre but his account of everything in this part of Galicia, where he was being chivvied by the higher authorities to "go down" in history ( literally ) against the Russians, showed a place of bullied Jews, wretchedly thin cows whose meat tasted like leather and false notions of propriety in the brothels.

What's more, the Polish Catholic priests are lampooned for poisoning the wells as a means of killing Russians in such a way that they only end up giving the Habsburg Army ( including Hungarians, Czechs, Austrians and Poles ) typhus, the shits, and having recourse to carousing the bars to drink the only poison that wouldn't kill them-alcohol.

In Tyrawa Wolska, miles from the battle lines, the local priests have poured citric acid down the wells whilst the Catholic Priests proclaim sententiously "Now God in his Justice had punished him ( man ) with stinking tepid drinking water"

The "drinking water" is so yellow that it looks like sliwowica and which the bullying Czech officer Lieutenant Dub drinks when snatching it from Svejk to drink it and prove he's been getting drunk again, resulting in him getting ill for weeks as the whole regiment falls into disorder.

Getting drunker and more disorderly, the Austrian troops scurry about for clean water to get rid of their atrocious hangovers only to find that the Polish peasants have nailed planks to the wells or again infected them in order to kill off any outsiders who do not belong there, which presumably meant other Poles serving in the army.

At Stary Sol, near Kroscienko, the Austrians celebrate the Gift of Holy Water by having a sententious hymn forced to be sung in German, though half the soldiers haven't got a clue what they are singing, called The Song of Lourdes,

"This bubbling spring calls Thee down from above
It should be the gauge and pledge of my love. Ave Maria"

Hasek then satirically observes there were many latrines and scattered over them were 'The Song of Lourdes'.

Svejk's decision to try on a dead Russian soldiers uniform then gets him arrested by the Austrians as a spy behind enemy lines, which once more prevents him ever getting near the Eastern Front. Perhaps one reason Hasek as a literary figure has never been popular in Poland is precisely because of his sarcastic attitude towards the Catholic Church.

Then again one reason why the Czechs and Poles tend to ignore each other culturally is the fact that the strong Hussite tendency in Czech culture and its secularism, as well as the number of Pan-Slavists like Hasek who hated the Austrian authorities so much that he preferred the Russians even,

Moreover, whilst Czechs are 90% atheist the same number in Poland are Catholics ( at least ritually ). In that sense the ultra-Catholic Poles of Malopolska are more similar to the Slovaks across the Tatras than the Czechs and Roger Scruton was correct to emphasise in The New Statesman that,

Slovakia is a deeply Catholic country with a rural economy, lost for centuries in the Hungarian ethnic muddle. It has a large Hungarian minority and a smaller, but very noticeable, population of gypsies.

The Czechs, by contrast, are sceptical, cosmopolitan inheritors of the cultural capital (in both senses) of central Europe. The modern Czech soul is a fully conscious actor on the stage of world history. The Czechs achieved male suffrage under Austrian rule at a time when the Slovaks were Hungarian vassals.

In cuisine, language and history, 'Czech and Lech' should have much in common. Both were dominated by the USSR. But one reason for the indifference is that from the Czech perspective one gripe could include the disputed Cieszyn or Teshen region back in 1938 and the involvement of Polish troops in the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968.

Yet this is old history subsequently blamed on the dual threat of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism that both the then Czechoslovakia and Poland both suffered from. The Polish and Czech dissidents maintained cordial reltionships and still call for a new central role for the USA in defending what both regard as "Central Europe" via the "Missile Shield"

From the Polish view of things, the Czechs are wealthier, have a better standard of living, better beer, and they always seem to be better with their smaller population and who are yet damnable atheists into the bargain. Few Czechs ever bother visiting Krakow or Poland and vice versa.

As one Czech girl told me in Hungary once during a hiking trip in the Tatras, she regarded Poles as a a bit "fundamentalist" for getting hammered on vodka around the camp fire at night whilst she went off to bed and then was woken by them getting up at 5AM feeling wretched to try to walk over the hills to a Church in Slovakia for Morning Mass.

A Polish scholar of Czech literature Mariusz Szczygieł said in Przegłąd "I don't know why other Poles like the Czechs but this is why I like them",

1) The Church in the Czech Republic plays no role in political, social or private life.
2) Every town and village tries to look like it comes from a fairytale.
3) Even in very small towns you can hire a bike.
4) On Fridays most people, even though they are at work, think about the weekend and make plans which involve more than just sitting at home.
5) They treat culture as an anti-depressant.

As for Hasek it is difficult to see how the writer himself could be a popular figure in Poland ( unlike the character Svejk himself ) given his cosmic hatred of Catholicism and Pan-Slavism, as well as his support for the Romanovs. That and his later abandonment of his dislike for the Bolsheviks to the point where he opposed the plan of the Entente to move the Czech Legion to the Western Front when he thought it should fight the Germans on Russian soil.

That obviously contrasted to the Poles who under Pilsudski's Legions wanted to concentrate on fighting the Russians who had never occupied Bohemia. That's why Hasek deserted the Czech Legion in Kiev and joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 were he went to the central Russian city of Samara until it was then occupied by the Czech Legion and he had to flee again into the Central Asian provinces.

As the eternal Bohemian he could never adjust to his like as Bolshevik Commissar Gashek or his like as Secretary of the Committee of Foreign Communists in Ufa, not least due to the revolutionary puritanism expected of him, and so returned to Czechoslovakia in 1920 to write articles for the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party in Rude Pravo.

As a literary and 'political' writer Hasek was far closer to the anarchists than the totalitarian Communists who proceeded to set up a mass system of murder under Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, as had been evident by the fact he had identified before the war with the circle of intellectuals favourable to the radical wing of the Austro-Hungarian labour movement.

Though according to Peter Demetz he styled himself a "Prague Maxim Gorky" he had no real connection with any authoritarian form of system, dropping his support for the Romanovs and supporting Masaryk's Parliamentary democracy even when still in Russia and joined the Social Democrats prior to the Bolsheviks which really out of tactical expediency-defeating Germany.

As such that position was no less inconsistent that the plotting intrigues of Pilsudski in Poland who had assisted Lenin and his couriers during World War One from Krakow simply because both the former and Lenin wanted the downfall of the Romanovs as much as Hasek wanted the downfall of Germany first and foremost.

Such nationalist and socialist agitation against the imperialism of the three imperial powers was all about what conservative critics tended to term "moral relativism" as Paul Johnson does in his Modern Times, where he writes that Central-Eastern Europe was ripped apart by irreconciliable nationalisms after the Versailles Treaty had introduced the idea of national self-determination in which,

"the lid on the noisome seething pot and the stench of the brew therein filled Europe filled Europe until Hitler first and then Stalin slammed down it down again by force"

Yet as Hasek's translator into English Cecil Parrott points out

Schweikism is a word often used to characterise passive resistance of the Czechs (but ) Svejk is not necessarily a Czech figure. He might be any Central European and is, in fact, a 'Mr Everyman' in the sense that he resembles any 'little man' who gets caught up in the wheels of big bureaucratic machine".

In Good Soldier Svejk the target was all military imperialisms and that could apply as much to the Poles as to Austria, Germany, Russia and then the USSR, not least a Poland which was torn between Pilsudski's federal ideals of the old pre-partitioned Poland and those who were advocating a greedy and bellicose version of Poland when it attacked Teschen in 1921 and failed.

The continuity between the 'National Communism' of Mieczyslaw Moczar in 1968 and the Polish revanchists in 1921 was one reason for the enthusiasm with which Poland actually participated in Hitler's destruction of Czechoslovakia in 1938, though it was in her interests to side with the cause of Czech independence.

As for Hasek he died of alcoholism in 1924 and never really did much in Prague public life as he wrote Good Soldier Svejk in the provinces and slowly drank himself to death, having returned a rather disliked figure in the new Czechoslovakia for being a "traitor" and also a bigamist who had rejected his pre-war wife Jarmila in favour of a Russian bride.

Bibliography.

Jaroslav Hasek, Good Soldier Svejk ( Cecil Parrott Translation )
Paul Johnson, Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1990s
Niall Ferguson, The War of the World
Peter Demetz, Prague in Black and Gold
Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism

Cool Polonia :The Ethnodesign Exhibition

2010-05-11T15:42:00.000-07:00

Obviously this meaningless exhibition of philistine kitsch had to be supported by Cracow-life.com. It contained an array of banal tat including a huge sandpit with some red planks leading towards it. Here are some deckchairs.

Reading the newspaper that accompanied it was hilarious. The commentary from the hapless Magda Zych was so full of gems I read them out to people in Kazimierz bars who started laughing at it as well.

The spiel went,

" A cramped showroom. We are crowded between hangers and shelves. A lot of clothes in a small area arranged by specialists like in shops for women. White walls, shelves, lots of light"

Cor, that's profound.

"It's like a giant wardrobe. A collection of skirts, corsets, shirts go flying down, etc etc"

The rebranding of folk culture to be "relevant" started to reach surreal proportions when I saw a rather large sandpit. Sandpits and beaches seem to be de rigeur these days in Krakow so I asked the girls,

"Is this art ?"

"Yes"

"As an installation does the artist create spontaneous vitality?"

Um, yeah.

" Can I get a bucket of water and throw some on the sand?"

"Why?"

"I want to build sandcastles. This in Britain is a popular aspect of culture. It would be great to remodel it along the likes of Margate Beach. The deckchairs remind me of Margate. That's where Tracey Emin is from".

"That might not be a good idea"

"Oh"

The newspaper blethered on that the fashion items demonstrated,

"Multiplicity of different types of wool, linen, cotton, blue Lemko printed fabrics, rhythmic Tibertan pinks"

I then proceeded to ask

"When were the Tibetans in Poland?"

"Errr"

" The Mongols were, so their contribution might have some relevance to ethnocentric exhibitions, given that this would reconnect a real past to the present. Did the Dalai Lama live in Poland. I keep seeing these Free Tibet stickers? "

"Um"

I walked off.

Then the Ethnodesigners, being "eclectic" ( often a key meaningless buzzword ) had decided that Ethnodesign in Malopolska was essential, not presumably to get money for making tat, but to play around with words in the usual self-presentational manner.

Even weirder was the claim that a festival called "The Malopolska Thing" had been mooted. Cleverly, it was thought this was "a pun" as Malopolska could mean a region but written as two seperatate words "Malo" and "Polska" could mean "not very Polish".

"If not from Malopolska region or not very Polish then what?"

To which my answer would be don't divide the damned word up then .

Naturally, Krakow as the regional centre of Malopolska should bring out the folk culture of the Boyko and and Lemko, Ukrainian Gorals who spoke Rusyn or a Ukranian dialect who were ethnically cleased by the Stalinists during Operation Wisla in 1947.

Moreover, Malopolska means lesser Poland because it is historically an area dominated by the Wislanie and has a different regional culture to Wielkopolska, or Greater Poland which has nothing to do with it being more "important". Its simply a historical term.

In the same way that "Wielki Brytannia" does not mean "superior" Britain or the Empire but distinguished from smaller Britanny which lies in north eastern France where Breton is the language. That does not mean Breton culture is not very important.

Clearly a chance was missed to bring out that culture in favour of silly meanderings about "authenticity" and so on and a "post-modern world" where "we choose who we are to a greater or lesser extent". This is just a symbol of the confusion. If a people have a future it is because it instinctively knows it constitutes a "we".

This need not lead to ethnic nationalism or rival atavisms nor to relativistic drivel about "selecting one's identity" as if one was in a supermarket looking or trying to fetishise identity, which indeed leads to the "culture industry" and the very thing the Ethnodesign exhibition was, if it meant anything trying to show.

POSTSCRIPT

The Ethnodesign exhibition is also promoted alongside a Witkiewicz Museum. The Museum in Plac Wolnica might redeem itself with a Witkacy Exhibition of some sort it is holding i.e by a real avant garde artist and not windbag parasitical "arty" students who tell you more about what the exhibition is instead of creating good new craft works.

Good art is recognised because of what it is and not what is said about it by self presentational posers.

Witkacy's words in On Narcotics, are as relevant to the far right halfwits and bigots as well as the radical ones. These artists were genuine radical individuals. In taking narcotics and painting, Witkacy predicted he would be morally condemned and wrote'

"I officially declare that I am writing seriously and I finally wish to do something directly ... useful, but there is no way of dealing with idiots and dishonest people...If you say to someone "You are stupid, learn and perhaps you will grow wise", it won't help at all because a stupid person is also conceited and even if he could grow wise through hard work, his presumption would prevent him from getting out of the vicious circle he's in.

To say to a scoundrel "It's not nice to be a stinker, stop and think, try to improve", is wasted breath: we fail to understand that the majority of rascals are quite consciously scummish-they know that they are and do not wish to be otherwise as long as they can mask their swinishness.'Can we pardon a stick for being a stick' as Tadeuz Szmberski used to say-and he was right.

Perhaps the point here is that Witkiewicz wanted to go about his business of creation without having to justify it before idiots. But artists or critics with strong opinions need to speak out against what is so obviously idiotic that not calling it idiotic would be idiotic.

This applies to PISites, idiot progressives, kneejerk reactionaries, atavistic nationalists, advocates of neoliberal globalisation, the "culture industry" churned out with EU grants and organisations like Cracovia Krakow.

They have no concept of what good art or literature is-it is spontaneous and produced by radical individualists, irrespective of their politics or whether they are conservative or radical politically and not by corporate sponsorship.

That applies as much to kitschy folk culture as much as the institutionalised nihilism of the Tate Modern whose junk is being dumped on Poland now in the form of the self referentially meaningless AUSCHWITZWIELICZKA installation by Miroslaw Belka.

Communist Tours Want You to "Feel the Power" of an AK 47

2010-05-11T03:18:00.000-07:00

Turning a catastrophe into profit is the hallmark of a civilisation that is deeply sick to the core. Before me I have a pamphlet advertising Communists Tours by "Crazy Guides"

This group are not to be confused with Crazy Tours, another bunch of rapacious money grubbing dolts who believe that treating Communism as "crazy","wacky" or "zany" is one way of laughing away this grim era of austerity and repression by laughing at it.

The Pamphlet states their Communist Tours are supported by Lonely Planet, Trip Advisor, The Guardian, Reuters. Michelin, Newsweek, The New York Times, TVN, the Financial Times and RMF FM.

In short, by corporate media outlets who really ought to know better when the nature of the tour is revealed and there is no historical context provided about Nowa Huta in Krakow.

Nor does the Communist Tour mention the era when the Armii Krajowe who had been crushed by both the Nazi's whilst Stalin's Red Army watched over the Wisla and in Krakow AK members rounded up and tortured in Montelupich Prison.

Now that no longer matters. Only late "Commie" kitsch is valued for its voyeuristic ability to bring in cash.

Any educated individual can learn about the inhumanity, torture and show trials that led to the set up of the Communist system in Poland. Get on Tram 4 and it takes any person there.

Reading a history book like that of Norman Davies will provide the overall picture of the enormity of what was done to Poland in general under Communism and Jan T Malecki's History of Krakow For Everyone tells the story of it imposition in Krakow in particular.

Anne Applebaum, despite he misjudgements about contemporary Russia and Putin's regime as a "Neo-Soviet threat" or as part of a "New Cold War" ( Lucas ), makes the appropriate moral position clear when in her introduction to Gulag: A History she asks

"the lesson could not be clearer:while one symbol of mass murder fills us with horror ( i.e Nazism ) , the symbol of another mass murder makes us laugh"

Applebaum perceived this hypocrisy and vulgarity whilst walking across the Karlov Most in Prague where all manner of Soviet paraphenalia was on sale-caps, badges, belt buckles and little pins, the tin Lenin and Brezhnev images that Soviet schoolchildren once pinned to their uniforms. The explanation for these double standards were well explained.

By the end of Communism the system was seen as a joke and, of course, some dark humour about Brezhnev being "dead from the neck up" after numerous strokes but still put on parade to show "business as usual" seemed to represent a system falling crummily to bits.

The era of James Bond films like For Your Eyes Only ( 1981 ) where the Soviets and Bond's rivalry becomes more jovial over time. But, as Applebaum, suggests, "the passage of time" from the immediate Stalinist period of repression meant few cared or were scared of Brezhnev or General Jaruzelski.

Despite the fact comfortable consumers contrived to ignore events in Poland, they now go to have a jolly jape in a Trabant and chauffered to Nowa Huta to voyeuristically look around a residential area where Solidarity activists in the 1980s were dispersed by ZOMO's batons, tanks and beaten up ( sometimes to death ) in police cells.

Nothing that the Communist Tour repackaging of the so-called "Communist experience" could not be done by knowing that Poles eat pickled cucumbers ( ogorek ), drink vodka and that some places can be found that look like "authentic" communist flats.

The crassest part of the Communist Tours "Other Stuff" that you can do for "fun" is go on a Kalashnikov Shooting outing which is advertised thus-"The Famous AK47 is the most popular assault rifle, used by all the Soviet storm troopers to Afghan shepherds-and now it's your turn to feel the power".

Curious enough, that's just what British troops serving in Afghanistan in 2010 are feeling. Is that funny though ? When dead British soldiers come back the maudlin tone of ITN presenters would suggest not.

For anybody with the attention span longer than a fruit fly will know that the Cold War saw the mass export, often without money being received by the USSR and Communist China, of AK-47s to pro-communist countries and guerilla groups such as the Viet Cong. The AK design was spread to over 55 national armies and dozens of paramilitary groups.

The proliferation of this weapon is symbolic of all those who would gleefully exterminate those Westerners on Communist Tours "feeling the power" of this weapon. The AK is included in the flag of Mozambique and its coat of arms, a reminder that the country's leaders gained power in large part through the effective use of their AK-47s.

It is also found in the coat of arms of Zimbabwe, where the mass murdering Mugabe is in control, the flag of Hezbollah, and the logo of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. It was an iconic emblem for the RAF terrorists in West Germany in the 1970s too.

Perhaps those idiots who want to "feel the power" of a Kalashnikov can go on an "authentic" tour of Afghanistan just like drugged up and terrified Soviet conscripts had to in that graveyard of Empires called Afghanistan.

They might then get a real adrenalin rush when they "feel the power" of being fired at by an AK 47.

The Mysterious Fate of the Palac Tarnowskich and the Park Jurka.

2010-05-04T14:46:00.000-07:00

This is the digging equipment being brought in to the land next to the sixteenth century Palac Tarnowskich where Henryk Gaertner want to build his "Economy Class" Hotel. Naturally, unlike the Treimorfa Tower or the Medusa Block or 7 Rakowice, there is no visualisation on his GDK website nor outside the building on ulica Szlak.

Katarzyna Szuminska helpfully adds, given the secrecy surrounding Gaertner's secretive operations,

Actually this was a public park (the Jalu Kurek park), and didn't belong to the palace grounds. Not recently, anyway. Might have, though at the time the Tarnowski family lived there - there are gates in the wall (now soldered or bolted) linking the present garden grounds to the park.

The building at no. 12A, Warszawska St. is a former gatekeeper's lodge which used to belong to the palace grounds. So the former grounds probably were later converted to a public park.

I don't know though how far the palace grounds stretched back then. The area south and east of the park belongs to the Sacred Heart church and the Daughters of Charity convent.

If true that's some good news then. It means Gaertner can't use up that green space at the rear. Merely blight it but some tacky plate and glass extensions. But surely with good planning the Palac Tarnowskich could be turned into a hotel and not blighted whilst the gardens opened up to the public from pathways leading from Ulica Szlak or Warszawska

Yet the mechanical diggers are obstructing the side view of the gardens. I tried to sneak into the area from the other side where, as you correctly say the J Kurka park is through entering a car park from the other side Sw Philipa ( I think ).

The whole area along Warszawska on the opposite side is crumbling to bits , there are fenced of remnants, the minibus depots and the whole place is a mess. As far as I could see from where the digging machinery has been placed there is some green space behind Palac Tarnowskich.

But I couldn't get near it as a Juventus security guard goon goon told me to "fuck off" when I had my zoom camera in operation. So something is afoot but I can't tell what as there is little information I can find and my maps delinearate the space vaguely.

But the path leading down the side of the Palac Tarowskich is blocked off now by the machinery. I need access to a better map or a helicopter. Yet as usual its impossible to know what's going on as Gaertner promotes "transparency " by supporting George Soro's Open Society Foundation but exempts himself from such notions.

Before the machinery went in a few weeks back, I could espy green land lying forlornly there with no clear walls between the Palac and the J Jurka Park. Just some garden like ornate pots made from stone rotting away. I'll try to break into the area tomorrow or to some place where I can see these green spaces better.

As my Polish is weak, I can't ask the relevant authorities what is going on. But Gaertner just knows he wants to "revalorise" the Palac Tarowskich as he only believes in "investment decisions" and not in civic responsibility or transparency. Unless building junkish Jellyfish plate and glass kitsch.

One way suggested by Martin Taylor is to zoom down on Google Maps

Google Maps in satellite mode to have a look behind the scenes Karl:

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=krakow&sll=49.952413,19.792073&sspn=0.569926,0.829468&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Krak%C3%B3w,+Krakow,+Lesser+Poland,+Poland&ll=50.058902,19.932804&spn=0.073838,0.169086&t=h&z=13

Zoom down to Ulica Szlak. There is a pthway, in theory leading down the side. But metal barricade block it off now. There are extensive gargens to the rear of the Palac Tarnowskich. There are well tended lawns to the rear but these are the well tended convent gardens. The rest is just a square space of trees still will ill defined boundaries

The trees surround the Palac Tarnowskich. Yet there is a patch of grass at the back but some of that land to the rear must belong to it as the grass patch is not rectangular. There is no clear boundary wall. I will see if Gaertner is using tree cutting equipment tomorrow. With pictures as standard evidence.

Dworzec Glowny: An Elegy

2010-05-04T07:07:00.001-07:00

Words do not need to be written to explain why this outrageous piece of utter vandalism has been imposed outside the historically important Main Railway Station in Krakow. The Rada Miejska by permitting this have finally proved they are incompetant and totally in the hands of those who seek to destroy Krakow as an elegant city for financial gain.

The building, constructed between 1844 and 1847 and designed by P.Rosenbaum), is parallel to the tracks.

The station was initially a terminus of the Kraków – Upper Silesia Railway (Kolej Krakowsko-Górnośląska, in German : Obeschlesische-Krakauer Eisenbahn). The design was chosen to allow for future line expansion. Trains entered the trainshed via an archway in a brick wall at the northern end of the station.

The station opened on 13 October, 1847, with the first train leaving for Mysłowice (the point where the Austrian, German and Russian Empires adjoined during their military partitions of Poland). Jan T Malecki writes in A History of Krakow that this station was a

"brighter moment" in the history of the city started under the auspices of the Free City ( 1815-1848 )."it was via this route ( the Krakow-Upper-Silesia railway ) that modernity reached Krakow, in the form of the technological achievements that transformed European civilisation in the nineteenth century"

Now is is regarded as nothing more than an adjunct to Balice Airport where modern shuttle trains ferry in tourists to Galeria Krakowska, a huge ill located hulking structure of concrete with tacky brand logos plastered all over it on one side and intruding on the station whose furthest left flank is obstructed from view.

The Railway Station was of seminal importance in Krakow's history and the idiotic decision of the Rada Miejska is shameful. Protests at this desecration must be forthcoming.

The Neglect of Forts Borek and Lapianka

2010-05-04T06:51:00.001-07:00

Unfortunately, many of the Forts are in a terrible state of neglect. From Kliny I walked last Friday to Fort Borek, the inside of which is burnt out and gutted.

The condition of Fort Lapianka is a sad state of affairs too. The exterior is defaced with graffiti, and has HITLER written.

Below are some more pictures Fort Borek. This place could be better maintained with appropriate renovation and investment. This is what the inside of Fort Borek looks like.

By the way if anybody seeks a really good cup of coffee, go to Fort Luneta Warszawskiego where a cup of freshly ground coffee costs 2zl or 3zl for one with cream. I had 5 zl and after having one with milk asked for another with milk. They waived the extra zloty. This is the generosity that was once so common in Krakow.

The condition of Fort Borek and Łapianka is disgraceful.

Instead of squandering money on rubbish like the Chopin dummy pianos and the Spare Parachute and numerous gimmicks these forts are now burnt out shells littered with cigarette ends and empty beer bottles. They could be converted into recreational sites.

Just because they reflected the Austrian occupation until 1918 is no excuse. The Tower of London was built by the Norman invaders after 1066. Many castles were built in England by French and Latin speaking elites divorced from the Anglo-Saxons.

That doesn't mean we let Kenilworth Castle or Ashby-de-la-Zouch rot into a place for bonfires, junkies and smashed bottles.

Henryk Gaertner's Lunar Module "Park Inn"

2010-05-03T14:09:00.000-07:00

Numerous times have I complained about this revolting piece of space age kitsch. The very thing that Gaertner's GDK brag about are precisely the things that are wrong with it. Again from Gaertner's GD & K Website this CAD visualisation was mendacious.

The grass verge opposite simply does not exist. Not the lamp posts depicted here. Elsewhere on this blog I have shown how this Thing, reminiscent of a futuristic Lunar Fort from a Science fiction movie, id located in the wrong place that Gaertner claims is right.

INVESTMENT DESCRIPTION

S.O.F. Park Inn is a hotel whose greatest asset is unquestionably its location. Situated at the crossroad of two important transport routes, i.e. Monte Cassino street and Konopnicka street near the Grunwaldzkie Roundabout, the hotel is easily accessible from any part of the city both by car and public transport.

An additional factor of great value to the occupants is a most spectacular view over Krakow, including The Manggha Centre of Japanese Art, Skałka and Wawel Hill.

What this total idiot never considers is whether people want to view this trash from Skalka or from the Wawel. That's too much for his stunted imagination to comprehend. Unless, he knows this and we know the reality-he is a rapacious developer who doesn't give a damn.

After all, it's an "Investment Decision". Nothing more.

Henryk Gaertner's GD & K Jellyfish

2010-05-03T13:53:00.000-07:00

As the rapacious Henryk Gaertner writes, barely using the word "architecture" ( the only thing he's right about ) he refers to his things as "investment projects" and buildings. The description is hilarious. Naturally, this powerful man like his position in the Gaertner zone near the ugly court buildings of Ulica Sad.

"Two factors that define the M65 Medusa development are modern architectural design ( yeah, of course Pan Gaertner ) and great focus on the aesthetic impression. ( What is an aesthetic impression? the impression of being aesthetic simply through use of the word as opposed to the damned thing being so ugly ).The office building was designed by architects and interior designers from GD&K Group, who have placed the highest importance on the qualities of timelessness and originality, but at the same time they did not neglect the details of the building’s finishing and the quality of applied solutions and materials.

M65 Medusa will be located in the easily-accessible and centrally-situated Office District of Krakow, close to key public institutions, such as the District Court, the Regional Court and the Customer Service Centre of the Krakow City Hall.

An additional asset of the M65 Medusa office building is its immediate location close to other office and commercial buildings, such as Cracovia Business Center, Nowa Kamienica and LUBICZ Office Centre, which will allow tenants to capitalise on the synergy effect arising from the accumulation of similar business activities in this area.

The crucial and most visible part of the building is its façade with a glossy and opalescent surface. The special curtain walling helps ensure thermal efficiency and there are also soundproofed interiors.

Upon touching the façade, rays of sunshine create a glossy and three-dimensional effect and are immediately reflected in a multitude of directions, thus reminding onlookers of the medusa jellyfish, which lends its name to the building"

Are you reminded of a jellyfish readers? Or just a banal sales pitch for a sterile piece a starchitectural kitsch which, in that sense, is certain Class A-i.e utter shit.

St Benedikt's Church Rots Whilst Tacky Concrete Installations are Given Money

2010-05-03T11:28:00.000-07:00

On the map in Rynek Podgorze there St Benedikt's Church is promoted as a "Pearl of Podgorze" with a photogenic depiction of it that bears no resemblance to the reality. When I went up to see it today it was not, as in the tourist promotion picture, looking in pristine condition.

Far from it. It was occluded by bushes covering it, barely visible after reaching it from Ulica Dembowskiego. St Benedikt's is a church dating from the 1oth and 11th centuries and rebuilt in the 12th with an early Christian cemetary long gone said to be near it.

But around the back, the church was suffering from graffiti and crumbling slightly. This shows the incompetence of the Rada Miejska yet again if it can find monet via Cracovia Kralow to plonk a repellent concrete tunnel installation on Plac Niepodglosc but not for St Benedikt.

( picture will appear soon ).

The Protest Against the Balloon Continues

2010-05-03T11:00:00.000-07:00

Christopher B Gray is often given a lot of stick for being an eccentric who is fighting a losing battle against the re-presentation of Krakow as a Theme Park. His campaign to raise consciousness might make him unconventional but at least he is prepared to be a radical individual.

Too many people these days are prepared to write people like him and myself as cranks and quarrelsome killjoys. Puritans who want Krakow stuck in an immediate post-communist time capsule as it provided a refuge from the excessive consumerism of "the West".

A fresh perspective is that Poland is obviously a part of "the West" and that the proliferation of tacky adverts draped over buildings, fetish for driving US style gas guzzling SUVs unsuited to Krakow and the hideous proliferation of life deadening shopping malls is a neurotic overreaction to 50 years of Communist privation.

If this reaction is so cranky, why is it that Vaclav Havel has criticised this and believed that the "return to Europe" by Central European nations would act as a moral lesson in the ideals of what civic society and the struggle for noble ideals was about.

Fighting for freedom under Solidarity and Charter 77 were about the values of civil society and consumerism seems to have deadened people to high culture and common culture and replaced it with a mass culture of mass produced pop pap, banks and credit fuelled debt.

Responsible tourism is good for Krakow and I only disagree with Chris Gray's use of the term "commercialisation" as Krakow is a city that was always, not least in its golden age built on commerce, the wealth created by trade, amber, mining products and its strategic location.

Without commerce, there would not have been the Renaissance buildings on the Rynek. Commerce and a thriving market economy rooted in the needs and endevours of the people of Krakow is to be welcolmed as is opening the city to the world.

What is not welcome is destroying the goose that lats the golden eggs by catering fror Stag Night Parties that offend local people, Cracow-Life.coms vandalism of pavements with green stencil designs and the omnipresent telescreensand Disco Chimneys flashing out neon light.
pollution.

Responsible tourism yes. Re-presentation of the city as a site by terminating the culture of the city and its unique atmosphere to cater for the lowest kind of EasyJet tourist is wrong. It gives Krakow a bad image it was able to avoid in the 1990s.

Cracow-Life Promotes Vandalism-Official News

2010-05-02T16:21:00.000-07:00

Cracow-life.com is behind the graffiti they have sprayed on the Planty and along the path before Most Grundwaldski. This vandalism ought to be named, publicised and shamed. They are supposed to be promoting the city and not vandalising it. They will be publicly named as vandals on any future TV interview in May.

They admit it on their Facebook Site, which predictably, give you only the authoritarian choice of"liking it". Well, I detest them as a bunch of banal vandals who are prostituting the city as a Stag Night destination in a way many people who live here resent.They are ethical equivalent of pimps and whoremongers.

The link is here for all to see,

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=706028421&v=wall&story_fbid=384574943421#!/photo.php?pid=185075&id=112899638736012

The fact is that Cracow-Life have no right to spray graffiti on Krakow's pavements, a banal promotion of a promotion. It is an offence to leave dog poo on the pavement with a fine of 500zl. If they have the right to spray can stencils on the pavements it sets a precedent for other vandals to splat paint all over the place. Why, I could drop a tin of Dulux on Grodzka.

Cracow-life must be made to scrub their mess up. They can have fun doing this by having a dissident re-enactment tor where they are degraded to cleaning tiolets as the Communists used to make the dissidents do. Then they can think of themselves as transgressive rebels as opposed to money grubbing halfwits.

Promoting sordid Strip Clubs and Gay Bars is another speciality of Cracow-Life.com, promoting the objectification of other humans as commodities in the market place, instruments for a persons pleasure and lust as opposed to the idea of seeing people as entire human beings,-"Th'expense of lust in a waste of shame"

The grubby little advert pipes out,

Prestige prides itself on its pleasant and professional service, its congenial atmosphere as well as its perfectly equipped bar. The club is delighted to help organize closed parties, especially those for young bachelors. Guests will no doubt be delighted to hear that Prestige is safe and discreet, whilst in summer, bon vivants are invited onto the terrace, which has a sweeping view over the city. Scantily clad ladies were also spotted in the club's whereabouts, often engaged in dancing of an exotic nature.

These stupid dolts are ruining the specific and once pleasant atmosphere of Krakow, its dignified streets and if they want to change Krakow against the wishes of most of the inhabitants they can do the only decent thing such people are capable of-just to get out of Krakow and go to Soho instead.

As Timothy Garton Ash has put so well in an article for The Guardian,

In Krakow, Poland's Oxford, the Brits don't have a good reputation. They pile in with easyJet for drunken hen, stag and thug weekends, carousing loudly, half-naked, through the cobbled streets of this conservative, Catholic city. And they call it "kraking". In some bars, I was told, there are signs saying No Brits Allowed. Even the Germans are more welcome.

This is actively promoted by the irresponsible style of Cracow-life-com's advertising which encourages drinking to the point of collapse and hollering, mewling and puking and pissing one's way through the streets, degrading the city by their ugly and unwanted presence on Stag and Hen Nights with zero self awareness or concern for other people.

Including the ex-patriate victims of violent attacks when someone beat me up for being English in Chrzanow or when a worker at a computer firm told me when I tried to make light of the Stag Nighters "You English act like pigs" I replied I did not."it's your culture, you act like pigs and we don't want you here".

Home Thoughts from Abroad-Goodbye to All That.

2010-05-02T05:07:00.000-07:00

If Poland in general, and Krakow in particular,need to learn lessons from England, it is precisely in rejecting its remanant civilisation, moronic populist non-culture of celebrity, tacky show biz values and transforming the nation into a mere Heritage Theme Park

Once a fine civilisation since the 1960s it has been declining, its culture consumed up, with only what Prof Scruton calls a "catacombs culture" remaining. With so many Poles in England their delusions about it being "better" must be repudiated and confronted.

On returning to Tamworth, some 15 miles outside Birmingham back in late March and early April Everybody seems to be identical driving silver cars and growing palm trees whilst Tamoorth Borough Council keep hacking down bushes and trees were me and my father would take our dog Jessie for a walk. "Health and Safety" they say.

When sitting at home in a dead suburb built in the 1980s with no local shops or stores, only car use can take a person round a series of mini-roundabouts decorated and cluttered with speed ramps, idiotic signage which has led to out of town supermarket killing off the town centre.

At home I can barely stand the TV. The maudlin reports on ITV News about the death of yet another British soldier in a futile and unwinnable war in Afganistan where the TAPI pipeline and the real geopolitics behind the war is verboten. It is impossible to have a functioning democracy where facts are just not even up for discussion.

The bleakness of bland suburbia is enough to drive you up the wall of to IKEA or into a silver car. True if one wants to be "different" it is possible that you can always opt for the square jawed hunky John Waynish SUV this moron over the road has bought into. Not the car, the myth.

On returning from Krakow on March 26 I was like a long forgotten traveller who had forfotten what England was like. My obligation to be there was essential as my father in in a nursing home in Nuneaton where he is dying slowly every day more and more. Go into a nursing home and see how the old die. One in three young people reading this will end up that way.

I thought I had had enough of the the annoying clanking of the tram doors and repetitive binging and bonging on the Krakow trams. But at least the clanking, scaping and grinding in Krakow has an effect on me for good or bad. Here i feel like I've winded up in a convalescent home. Not the house , but the entire suburb is just dead.

I was expecting phone calls. Everybody does. from time to time. Then I rushed to the phone and someone says in a robotic voice " do you want to pay off your debts?". "no,bugger off ". " If so there are multiple ways of minim...." Junk calls are a plague amidst the otherwise wholly denatured steet. No phone call seemed to be good.

I went to my bedroom where once I studied as a teenager awaiting what I believed would be my formative years at university. I was deluded. The students did not want to talk about anything bit "shagging, fucking or getting stoned". The corridors smelt of pot. At university I was informed of the sexual practice of "rimming" in a leaflet put under my door.

University lecturers cared nothing for their students and I could not blame them on the whole as few at such and age really could care about Martin Luther and the Reformation. Student Societies were pointless pretexts for guzzling beer and trying to "get laid". Where activism was concerned there were only mostly hard left societies like the Trotskyist SWP.

I stared forlornly out at the cul-de-sac. No children played out with their friends as I used to going down to Polesworth and getting filthy by playing around the slag heaps and the lakes where a quarry site once was. A property developer called ( appropriately )Peter Prat had his scheme for a Marina rejected by the council.

Back in Krakow they would bend over backwards to grab that investment. England is far from perfect but there are some attempts to preserve gree space but, as in Poland, the pressure for building like Karol Capek's Robots in R.U.R for the sake of building proceeds apace.Partly due to social atomisation and high divorce rates.

It was 8.38PM on the computer. I saw a gleam behind me A burglar light has gone on. It casts a wan glean on an oldish Fiat Tipo. At least, she's widowed and it isn't a thusting SUV. Or silver. I told my mother about everything in Krakow, about starchitecture, ranting about adverts She replied "have you really nothing better to do with your time ? " I said "No".

"Well", she sighed " I suppose we need people like you. I can't believe they knocked down that old railway station years back" It was on a calender in the kitchen. "Well, Krakow is protected but they still build rubbish where they can" I replied. " But can't you get a real job? You're 34 years old now"

I said my real job was my life. I don't want a job that takes up my time for something that is unrelated to my personal happiness life deadening and connected a meaningless consumer society based on credit debt binging and shopping in malls whilst our town centre has small shops boarded up and that will be turned into flats.

England has become a wasteland which palls in comparison with TS Eliot's vision of the place after the Great War. I went back to the computer. Outside there was nothing. I did not even see the silver cars coming back from Birmingham along the M42 to then slump in front of the TV to watch Neighbours or Coronation Street or "banal cliche ridden soap operas" ( Peter Hitchens )

It was 842PM What's on my mind? The gleam of the light has taken on a denser shade on the Fiat Tipo. Nothing has moved. It's getting dark. A street light has just turned reddish on Chiltern Road, to the north. Behind me too. It has just gone on. Darkness falls but never entirely. At night the sky is illuminated by an unearthly glow of orange.

From the back window I could see the use clanking warehouses where Poles work at night shifting boxes around. Surrounded by barbed wire, hence fences and with massive spotlamps, these places remind me of concentration camps or detention centres of illegal migrants encouraged by having a neoliberal US style economy without the dynamism of the USA.

People get tired of threnodies for England's decline from writer like Peter Hitchens or Professor Roger Scruton because the truth is often so hard to accept. The New Labour regime go on abou globalism, dynamism, putting Britain and the heart of the EU. I hope they don't , more for Europe's sake that ours.

9.10PM Jessie whimpers but I can't do it. I can't go out into the bleak illuminated blaze of orange. Tomorrow I shall take her to the fields. But I can't go out now. Unless for another bottle of Rose from the local Spar. I feel uneasy in my subconscience. There is nothing here for me now but I remember the optimism of my time studying at A-Level. It's gone.

I might do that.Go to the shops . I cannot see the stars. I can see a snaky gleam of orange and red dribbling down from the back window. It's the last of the communters from Birmingham coming home. The grating roar from the M42 is muffled in the distance and I see the planes on the horizon descending towards Birmingham Airport like little fireflies.

Divorces apparently happen in the cul-de-sac. Norman got divorced from Anita. I often wonder how the marriages ever began in the first place. They move off elsewhere into another nowhere that they live in and call a somewhere. Because they live in it. Then they get old. They get taken away to 'homes' . Sucked out from life. Forgotten.

In England: An Elegy, a book sneered at by intellectual pygmies from the pseudo-intellectual and trendy Metropolitan elites for commemorating "only dead white males", Scruton writes in The Forbidding of England much that people in Krakow must awken to if we are to make not just the centre but the whole Krakow district liveable and for its citizens make a settled home.

"Without what Freud calls the 'work of mourning' we are diminished by our loses, and unable to live to the full beyond them. It is right that the heirs to English civilisation should commemorate, it virtues, its achievements and its meaning. For dead civilisations can speak to living people, the more conscious they are while dying, the more fertile is there influence thereafter"

Gone are the institutions, the viallage shop, the market, the Saturday-night dance, tha bandstand in the park-through which local communities renewed themselves...The global economy, the democratisation of taste, the sexual revolution, pop culture, and television have worked to erase the sense of spiritual identity, where pity shored up local knowledge and local custom fortified the moral sense" "

In the revised United Kingdom, and the official map of The European Union, issued by the European Commission in Brussels..makes no mention of England. England has been disposed of. When Poland was partitioned, and the name that had existed for eight centuries as a sovereign state was removed from the maps of Europe, The English were appalled. To centuries later what was done to Poland by force is being done to England by subterfuge

"More importantly, the most heart rending part of Scruton's deeply powerful and moving elegy is this and it must act now as a warning to those who want to impose what Scruton terms "the culture of repudiation" on Poland too

".....the landscape that was inscribed upon the countours of England has been scrubbed away. The old Endland for which our parents fought has been reduced to isolated pockets between the motorways....

The towns have lost their centres, which are boarded up and vandalised: and the cities have all but been obliterated by vast steel structures which at night stand empty amidst wastes of illiminated concrete.

The night sky is illuminated by a sickly orange glow, and England is becoming a no-mans land, an elsewhere managed by executives who visit the outposts only briefly, staying in multinational hotels on the edges of the floodlits wastelands".

That night I took out a volume of Philip Larkin's poetry and, at 5AM , feeling the effects of two bottles of wine wearing off, I understood how Larkin felt when he wrote this,

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Biblography

Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy.
Roger Scruton, Modern Culture.
Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain.
Philip Larking Collected Poems ( the above was taken from the web but a fine paper edition is produced by Faber and Faber)

Kazimierz Locals Show Their Cultural Appreciation for the Plastic Pianos

2010-05-01T11:29:00.000-07:00

Another Chopin piano in Plac Wolnica just in case Poles forgot Chopin played a piano and was half Polish.

Behind on a bench two lovers were petting with the guy having his hands down the jeans of the girl. I laughed a bit as I have the distinct impression that the Chopin Dummy Piano hadn't made any kind of edifying impression on them. In fact, apart from tourists no local gives a fig for this plastic junk.

They are bemused that Cracovia Krakow could fund such trash. Who funds them? Why the Rada Miejska-who else? Cultural bureaucrats who treat culture as an industry tied into "promotions". Hence the desire to be "with it" and to give Krakow an new aspect of trendiness.

But locals either remain indifferent or walk on by. Why should their taxes go on this dreck ? Why could that money not be spent on renovating at least one Fort? Improving Zakrowek into a first rate natural landscaped park not a crappy recreational space for annoying joggers with Nike brand shoes ?

In short, why is a city that contains so many decent and intelligent people run by such utter morons? It's time to challenge the junk, the institutionalised nihilism that results in dummy pianos, fake "ironic artists", crap installations like AUSCHWITZWIELICZKA in Plan Niepodglosc ?

The Making of the Kitsch Chopin Year in Krakow and his Rebranding.

2010-04-30T15:10:00.001-07:00

The worst kitschy piano yet to appear is this pink one on Plac Matejki. The Square resonates with history being next to the Grundwald Monument and constitutes an annoying presence. The Chopin 2010 Group at least advertise the Szlak Chopin on billboards where it has context-in Mazowsze.

In Krakow, bereft of context, they plonk plastic pianos. Wow !

Kasia Szuminska countered that view by arguing,

Sorry, I still don't buy the "Chopin-should-be-celebrated-only-in-Warsaw" theory. Chopin is NOT a local brand of sausage which should be produced only in its traditional region. His person and works are considered part of the national culture (just like Mickiewicz, who never visited Kraków, but is buried and has a statue here, anyway), so consequently, every region and city in Poland has the right to celebrate him.

It makes about as much sense, as if I said that Shakespeare should be celebrated only in Stratford and London, because this is where he lived. And that staging his plays anywhere else is downright abomination, defiling his works and catering to the uncultured tastes of the ignorant masses.

If I ever said so, I'd soon be told that I'm a stupid foreigner who doesn't know the local culture and context and that I should take that poker out of my a*se, because nobody cares about my opinion anyway.

Chopin can, of course, be celebrated for his music in Krakow but just not with regards the "personality cult" and which is both part of European and Polish culture and so my gripe is still really against these kitschy pianos that mean nothing, have no connection to his music nor to Krakow. Unless people are so silly as not to know that Chopin was Polish ( or Franco-Polish ).

As regards Mickiewicz he was the national bard and a statue or bust of Chopin would suffice with recitals ( as it happening ). But the kitsch, like that of Mozart in Salzburg, where at least he derived from is what is wrong

On a Mickiewicz anniversary it would be idiotic to have plastic dummies of him dotted around or plastic books on plastic lecterns. I never said the music should not be celebrated but not the kitsch iconography.

The same that applies to Chpoin but a crucial difference is that Mickiewicz was involved in freedom struggles to liberate Poland in a way that Chopin was not, though he reacted to the suppression of the 1831 Uprising with anger. Hence the Revolutionary Etude ( see below )

Nobody with any sense of real culture, the word meaning that which can be cultivated and having its roots in a particular place at a particular time, would think of placing plastic violins in Edinburgh to celebrate Elgar whose music was influenced as an person by the Malverns and Worcestershire. Not Scotland.

Now Shakespeare is celebrated both in Stratford and London as a historical persona. Not in Inverness, where the play's the thing. The obsession with branding Chopin in Krakow is trivial.
Take the artist as a persona away from the historical context and they become mere cultural icons valued partly by those gossip about his life.

Take this from the Guardian's Hadley Freeman,

People magazine, which I can only describe as being like OK! but with lower standards, recently conducted a survey, the likes of which make you wonder what the folks at YouGov do all day, seeing as they've never come up with anything half as interesting. In an article headlined "Historical hotties", the magazine pondered the hotness of, among others, Shakespeare, Mary Tudor and Mozart. Yeah, sure, Mozart might have composed a concerto or whatever, but was he hot?

Herman Hesse predicted all this in his The Glass Bead Game when he wrote about journals containing articles on the composer Rossini's favourite dishes, where received notions of "culture" are signs of status and attachment to a level of mediocre knowledge rather than the vital creative process, as Harry Haller in Steppenwolf also observed.

Hesse was correct to see that following the epoch of war and conflict and the way the West was becoming cocooned in a society of consumerism that would hollow out civilisation and degrade culture by separating it from the elemental struggles at the heart of man's life. Instead an affected irony would become the hallmark of windbag columnists that can also be seen not only in the cult of the self presentational celebrity journalist whiffling on about trivia

The trivialisation of the serious or to make serious of the trivial was typical of the Age of Feuilleton. The "Feuilleton" is the trivia dished up in the media by so-called experts, pretending to be analysis. In the Age of the Feuilleton, Hesse says, the media served up trivialities,

'by the millions ... They reported on, or rather "chatted" about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. ... A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident and in quality, assortment, and phraseology all this material bore the mark of mass goods rapidly and irresponsibly turned out.' (p. 21)

I never said Chopin's music should not be "celebrated" in Krakow but if one is in search of "the historical Chopin" in conjunction with his music, then that belongs to Warsaw and Mazuria.

As a fighter for freedom and a national poet Mickiewicz can only be celebrated in Poland especially Krakow as where he was borne now lies in Lithuania. The poetry is about Poland's partitioning and status as a Christ of Nations whilst Chopin made few explicit political statements about Poland, remaining in exile in Paris.

There might as well be a Chopin Year there too as he spent more time there composing and it was more of a formative influence on the art than Krakow. So this is not strictly about art or performances but about selling Chopin as a brand. Thcat can be seen clearly by the vulgar attempts to cash in on his name rather than emphasise the music.

Hence Cracowlife, a UK publication by the way, as well as prostituting Krakow's women and selling it as a Stag Night destination, make the following cretinous comment about the Chopin Apartments which look like the bland interior of any boring Motel but happens to be centrally located.

Poland's greatest composer would no doubt have approved of this location. Right next door to the Raczynski palace and a stone's throw from the flamboyant Slowacki theatre. The newly refurbished Chopin apartment would be a perfect base for a stay in Cracow. At 80 square metres the flat could comfortably accomodate a young family or a couple who want to have plenty of space! There is a kitchen, a bathroom (with bath) and easy access to all of treasures of the Old Town. A useful store on the corner has everything you could possibly need - be it toothpaste, wine or any type of food you can think of.

Well, yeah but they don't KNOW that do they ? They are making it up to flog a product because Chopin Apartments have paid these idiots to do that, just as Strip Clubs ask them to promote the degradation of women in gaudy and visible locations. "Cracowlife" is really Cracowdeath, the killing of the historical city through a deluge of kitsch and crappy PR drivel.

Now Chopin can be celebrated as a historical figure better in Warsaw. The fact that the best Krakow can come up with is kitschy plastic pianos is clearly evidence of that. To suggest otherwise is to take the Cracow-life view of Chopin which is produced here with dreary philistinism of the sort Hesse complained about. The tone reveals it all.

"With his fair share of dodgy movie tributes ( even Hugh Grant has had a bash at playing the part ) and scandals over his steamy love affairs Chopin has all the ingredients for the hackneyed role of troubled artist"

( wot like wot Tracey Emin is, like )

"Unlike national bard Adam Mickiewicz, who never set foot in Cracow, Chopin did at least make an appearance in the old royal capital. Indeed he seems even to had time to check out the historic salt mines in Wieliczka, as well as go for a jaunt in the Ojcow Valley"

Thus making the point that it mattered that Chopin set foot in Krakow as a tourist but not as an artist ( why would that matter-he saw the salt mines did he not? ). This is a biographical detail, no doubt taken by some Cracowlife hack from scouring Zamoyski's Chopin Prince of Romantics in the index just to try to make the tourist connection.

Hence Cracowlife, a UK publication as well as prostituting Krakow's women and selling it as a Stag Night destination, make the following cretinous comment about the Chopin Apartments which look like the bland interior of any boring Motel but centrally located. These dolts promote a bloody apartment with NO connection or even period resemblance to the time in which Chopin lived.

Just don't forget the convenience store that Chopin would no doubt have bought his toothpaste from.

The Beauty of Zakrzowek and the Wrong View of Green Space as merely "Leisure Space"

2010-04-30T11:12:00.000-07:00

This is the view from Zakrzowek over Krakow, what Gerium Developments refer to as a "banal location"and the organisation Cracovia Krakow, which also sponsors of the repellent Miroslaw Belka's totalitarian style tunnel in Plac Niepodglosci in Podgorze, have allowed to be branded as a place of mere use value in association with NIKE.

Forget the idea of nature as a place of contemplation and wildlife, instead it's only there because NIKE want to promote sports products as the sign mapping the entrance is sponsored by them in association with Cracovia Krakow, a grouplet funded by the Rada Miesjka.

Attitudes towards Nature in our civilisation need to change and we need to be able to leave the natural world alone. This unique green space is threatened because the rapacious Portuguese Corporation called Gerium who want to build this in its place. Apparently this is not "banal".

Eva Spohn wrote a great piece in the Krakow Post which stated that the Rada Mieijska had handed over on a platter all future decision making with regards Zakrzowek, which it must be said is in parts neglected and used by disrepectful people for fly tipping, the following which deserves to be quoted in its entirety, so brilliantly and stridently written was it,

Today, 31 March 2010, Krakow’s City Council voted by 17 votes to 14, with 6 abstentions and 6 absences, to reject a proposal to protect Zakrzówek, one of Kraków’s largest and most popular green spaces. In the process, they exposed the democratic process in this city as a sham and opened up the way for irreversible damage to Krakow’s environment.
Today’s vote now clears the way for a Portuguese developer, Gerium Polska Developments sp. z. o.o., to complete a highly controversial deal. They will exchange the un-usable land they bought in 2006 (consisting mainly of lake and cliffs) is exchange for a prime plot owned by the city. On this plot, housing for 5,000 new citizens, an average sized Polish town, will be crammed in but without the schools, shops, doctors’ offices or any of the other amenities that make a town a good place to live. In the process the natural habitat of endangered animals will be destroyed and the daily traffic chaos that is already evident in the neighbouring Ruczaj district will be made worse with the influx of a few thousand more cars.

In return, Gerium has promised to invest 70 million złoty to tidy up the park and build some leisure amenities. However, the developer’s own architect has stated that at least 40ml złoty of this is designated towards building the roads that the new town will require and a significant portion of the remaining 30mln will be spent on the totally unnecessary stabilisation of the cliffs surrounding the lake, so it’s not clear how much will be left over to invest in the park.

As part of the deal, the city will now vote through a Development Plan for exactly the area on which the new town will stand which will allow Gerium to obtain the relevant building permits; without this document, building on Zakrzówek has been impossible up to now. What makes this even more galling is that most of the rest of Krakow has been waiting for over 20 years for similar plans to be passed.

The campaign for the protection of Zakrzówek gained widespread support from tens of thousands of ordinary Cracovian voters and over 40 NGOs and associations. However it was the last minute political horsetrading, where the Councillors favouring protection of Zakrzówek were contacted by their colleagues who threatened to vote against their future projects, as well as Gerium’s widely-reported threat to fence off their land and forbid public access if they lost, that swung the votes in the developer’s favour. It is unknown at this time why as many as 12 Councillors, almost 30 percent of the Council, chose to abstain from or not be present at today’s vote.

Over the last few months it has emerged that the city was unaware that EU funds exists to help local governments buy up green spaces in cities and turn them in to parks for the benefit of all citizens. By the time the Zakrzówek campaigners brought this to the bureaucrats’ attention, it seems that the pro-developer lobby was too invested in portraying the involvement of Gerium as the only way that Zakrzówek will be cleaned up and turned into a park, given the city budget’s apparent lack of funds, in order for them to change their views without the loss of face.

So as a result, today Krakow’s City Council declared to the world that Krakow’s open spaces are up for sale to the highest bidder, all in the name of being pro-business. They rejected any notion that the current and future inhabitants of Krakow have a right to influence their environment and that they have been elected to represent their voters. The only good that can come of today’s events is that ordinary people declare that enough is enough and roll their sleeves up and get involved. Unfortunately, the people who represent us cannot be trusted to manage Krakow’s future for our common good.

The fault lies not merely with an incompetant Rada Miejska. A favourite thinker of mine on this is the ex-Episcopalian priest then Zen and Taoist sage Alan Watts shown in action in a great film video he made in 1971.

Watts was particulary good on examining what was wrong with our conception of Man and Nature, predicting many of the problems that would come from a a belief in the view of "I" being separate visitor to natural places that exist exclusively only for humans.

On this theme, it is interesting that as the dominance of the Catholic Church declines amongst certain sections of the young, Eastern ideas connected to Buddhism are making their appearance. Some this might well be modish and merely trendy, though Lech Walesa has supported the Free Tibet Campaign whose posters are now appearing in various parts of Podgorze and Kazimierz.

There is no need why Christian ideas free from rigid dogmas which regard Nature with a degree of separation , as if we stand above it instead of being inseparably related to it because IT is us, cannot be combined with the respect for Nature found in Taoism and Zen Buddhism. That is proved by the writings of St Francis of Assissi who wrote,

"My sister birds, you owe much to God, and you must always and in everyplace give praise to Him; for He has given you freedom to wing through the sky and He has clothed you... you neither sow nor reap, and God feeds you and gives you rivers and fountains for your thirst, and mountains and valleys for shelter, and tall trees for your nests. And although you neither know how to spin or weave, God dresses you and your children, for the Creator loves you greatly and He blesses you abundantly. Therefore... always seek to praise God".

With regards the idea that Nature must be "useful" to us humans in a "recreational sense" ( hence the patronage of NIKE in conjunction with the Rada Mieijska who also concur that Zakrzowek is "unused" and thus "useless" land ) Watts had much to say about turning nature into a theme park, something he observed and rejected in 1950's America.

These ideas about rejecting the anthropocentric conception of Man and his creation of God as a dominant overlord or Great Architect are part of a dogmatic approach that nature, as both manifested within us and without, is a force for evil unless tamed. Such ideas still exist in secular notions of so-called "Progress" which often create ecological problems that only more technology is meant to solve.

Whilst invariably we are where we are now and technology must be used to stave off the worst ills of technological society civilisation is confronted with, Watts contemplative view of life and rejection of the rat race and the ceaseless treadmill of acquisition, working harder and harder to make more and more money to spend on junk and "leisure" which is totally devoted to the regime of meaningless work ( selling junk and consumerism ) still has force since he died in 1973.

Bibliography and References

Ewa Spohn The Battle for Zakrzowek
Ewa Spohn, Krakow City Council Abandons Zakrzowek
Alan Watts, Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation
Alan Watts, Tao The Watercourse Way

Hulking Great SUV Drivers are Asocial and Must be Subjected to Road Pricing.

2010-04-30T00:49:00.000-07:00

Monstrous SUVs need to be taxed or, to put it better, their owners subjected to road pricing A three hour stay on a pavement ( usually considered reserved for pedestrians ) seems either to cost not enough or parking meters charge a paltry 9zl 30 groszy for a three hour parking session.

This applies whether the car is a Maluch or a Hummer. This is absurd. The price must be trebled for these things given the sheer space they take up.

This hulking steal chariot always blocks my way down Ulica Smolensk. This tendency to park on pavements is choking Krakow and making the everyday life of pedestrians hellish, not only from the amount of photochemocal smog, but also the cluttering of the pavements.

Last week I accidentally knocked off one of the wing mirrors of one of these military style vehicles as pedestrians tried to squeeze past one on Aleja Slowackiego. There are simply too many cars in the centre of Krakow.

The Rada Miejska Wastes Money on Tacky Gimmicks Instead of Protecting Old Buildings

2010-04-30T00:25:00.000-07:00

The Chopin Plastic Pianos are spreading. There is now black version near the Bastion V excavations on Rondo Mogilskie. As for the white one on Plac Wolnica in Kazimierz, some local drunks were the only ones who thought it served a purpose in acting a place to put their Jabcok and cans of beer on.

Behind on a bench too lovers were petting with the guy having his hands down the knickers of the girl. I laughed a bit as I have the distinct impression that the Chopin Dummy Piano hadn't made any kind of edifying impression on them. In fact, apart from tourists no local gives a fig for this plastic junk. I get the distinct impression there was no though of Chopin here.

Locals are bemused that Cracovia Krakow could fund such trash. Who funds them? Why the Rada Mieijska-who else? Cultural bureaucrats are usually philistine idiots who treat culture as an industry tied into "promotions". Hence the desire to be "with it" and to give Krakow an new aspect of trendiness. The kind mercilessly lampooned in Michel Houellebecq's novel Platform.

But locals either remain indifferent or walk on by. Why should their taxes go on this dreck ? Why could that money not be spent on renovating at least one Fort? In short, why is a city that contains so many decent and intelligent people run by such utter morons who could only run a piss up in a brewery. Are they all permanently sozzled when they make these decisions ?

It's time to challenge the junk, the institutionalised nihilism that results in dummy pianos, fake "ironic artists", such utterly meaninglessly shit installations like AUSCHWITZWIELICZKA in Plan Niepodglosc. This Christmas I'm sending a crate of Jabcok to the Rada Mieijska as a token of my apprciation on behalf of all those who admire these dummy pianos as great tables for public alcohol consumption !

Norman Davies on the inheritance of the Rzeczpospolita

2010-04-28T17:20:00.000-07:00

Norman Davies on the Smolensk Air Crash.

2010-04-28T16:59:00.000-07:00

CZARNYKOTBLOG has translated an interview with Norman Davies on TVN which is of interest.

Q: Did you lose any friends in the crash?

ND: Yes, my wife and I flew to Smolensk with the government delegation on Wednesday. We travelled with several people who were on the plane which crashed on Saturday. The person I knew best was the wonderful president Kaczorowski (ex-president in exile) He was certainly one of the greatest losses of the tragedy.

Q: I ask you this as someone who knows Poland and Poles but who can also look out this tragedy from an objective distance: Do Poles always have to fight and argue amongst themselves, even in occasions such as this? I'm talking about the controversy over Wawel.

ND: I see that there is a very unpleasant fuss surrounding Wawel. I'm convinced that it is not something specific in the Polish character. However, in Poland there are people who constantly provoke controversies and arguments. Unfortunately, this has been a characteristic during recent years.

Q: Is it a Polish characteristic or can it be observed everywhere?

ND: In general I don;t believe that there is such thing as a national character. It is a great myth. Every nation is made up of millions of people who each have thier own temperament and personality and who all react differently, even to the same experiences.....

Q: You are a honorary citizen of Krakow, you have an honorary doctorate from Jagiellonian University, and you are an expert on Polish history. Is Wawel an appropriate place for the president to be buried?

ND: I am also an honorary citizen of Warsaw. In my opinion the ex-mayor of Warsaw, the national president who ruled from Warsaw, a son of the uprising, should be buried in Warsaw.

Q: How much time will have to pass before history can objectively pass judgement on the achievements of president Kaczynski?

ND: It's hard to say, but we can see right now how a myth is forming before our very eyes. It is impossible to be objective about someone who dies tragically. People feel a natural sympathy towards the deceased. Now is not the time to assess the president or any of the other victims.

Q: Do you think that the improved relations between Poland and Russia following the tragedy will last?

ND: Even before the disaster I had noticed a lot of progress in relations. When premiers Tusk and Putin met in Katyn I was there and I saw it up close. I believe that it is an authentic rapprochement. One effect of the tragedy has been a wave of sympathy towards Poland and Poles amongst ordinary Russians. This is a new factor in relations and I doubt it will fade away overnight.

Q: Should we be happy about this?

ND: Of course. Poland, like every country, should have good relations with all its neighbours. I don't see any other priorities in international relations.

The Hi-Flyer Balloon's Fairytale Ending.

2010-04-28T14:04:00.000-07:00

This Sunday at 12pm there will be another protest led by Christopher B Gray against this grotesque balloon which destroys the Krakow skyline and is designed by voyeuristic tourists devoid of any conception about how the city throughout the ages has been viewed. Predictably Cracowlife.com advertised the balloon which stood across the road from the Wawel thus,

This stunning white sphere is the newest addition to Krakow's skyline, floating above the spires of the city's Old Town. A trip up in this magical orb will provide you with the best panoramic views of the Old Town, Kazimierz, and even districts of Krakow much further away. There's no chance of floating away though, as this hot air balloon is firmly tethered while it floats majestically 150 metres above ground. The HiFyler balloon rises every 15 minutes on most days, but it's best to call in advance as flights depend on weather. Without a doubt, one of Krakow's most original attractions for adults and kids alike.

Perhaps this is why once upon a time a mysterious stenciled graffiti appeared in ghastly garish green just before Most Grundwaldski along the path along the Wisla towards the Paulite Church at Skalka where this eyesore was dumped before as well as blotting the view of the Wisla to the people living in the tenements in front of which the gimmick appeared until March 2010.

In Krakow there are numerous vistas from which the city and its topography can be viewed. The ancient Wawel Hill, The Krakus and Wanda Mounds, Lasota and Krzemionki Hills, Kosciuszko Kopiec and the Pilsudski Mound in Las Wolski. A traveller with a genuine interest in the way Krakow has been viewed and depicted by artists for centuries needs not this blight.

In Krakow Legend there was once the story of a magician named Master Twardowski in the sixteenth century who made a pact with the Devil during the night under a full moon to give him the powers to make appear in the depth of the night sky an apparition of Sigismund Augustus' late Queen Barbara who emerged through a silvery, luminous and bluish aura glancing down at the earth below.

The King was most impressed when looking from the Wawel he saw once more his beautiful wife's ghost during a seance held during a full moon, a myth that captures the imagination of generations of Krakowian inhabitants who do not need this ersatz spherical moon like balloon bobulating about morning, noon and night.

Yet Mephisto was annoyed and jealous at the power and prestige that Master Twardowski had he so decided to take revenge on him for conjuring up magical powers for such Worldly Ends. After being drunk one night on mead, Twardowski was surrounded by the hosts of the Devil who took him out and flew out with him through a chimney into the night sky.

Whilst floating above the Rynek, Twardowski asked forgiveness from God for his sins in conjuring up his magic ans using sorcery to gain favour with Krakow's notables and this God in Heaven decided he ought to be placed on the moon suspended between the earth and the sky awaiting the Last Judgement.Unlike the Hi-Flyer Balloon Merchants, spinning their fairytale drivel for pure profit, at least Twardowski had talent and powers and wished to serve the people of Krakow through the practice of alchemy and in being a physician who devoted himself to healing sick people in the villages near Krakow.

Given how the pseudo-moon has no redeeming qualities, unlike Master Twardowski;s apparitions, the placing of the rapacious merchants and peddlars of a shoddy blight that destroys the night sky, the Hi-Flyer management deserve full condemnation to Hell for their Evil Sins and along with the rapacious property developer Henryk Gaertner who should be placed in the balloon.

One aloft Gaertner, the entire Rada Miejska and all those in league with the money grubbing and black arts of manipulation and turning Krakow into a rootless Theme Park cut adrift from it's past, it became clear that the only true fairytale ending for those doing so would be to be placed not on the actual moon, from which Twardowski wistfully looks down, but cast aloft in their kind of creation which changes the face of Krakow.

With the ropes slashed by the strokes of a few swords and the cables fully released, Gaertner, Duda, Gerium Development spivs, and the Rada Mieiska's General Architect should be borne up into the stratosphere where, just like from the planned new Treimorfa Skyscraper, they shall be granted their wish to see a panoptical vision of Krakow and even the Tatras.

And Krakow's little children can see them descend into the stratosphere where they will slowly meet their Maker and have revealed unto them whether their pretence at playing at being God in Krakow was not hubristic, arrogant and greedy whilst the night sky will return to a great empty space that on a moony night will cast its beautiful natural sheen on the Old City once more.....

And then shall they be removed from Krakow and all the children lived happily ever after without it.

Official Corporate Sponsored Vandalism in Krakow

2010-04-28T06:50:00.000-07:00

Cracowlife.com is a prominent publication paid for by local businesses to promote their bars, restuarants and products. Yet just before Most Grundwaldksi last week I was trying to avert looking at the absurd Park Inn Hotel, a heap of enammelled tinny polished kitsch that look like a Lunar Space Station or a descended UFO.
On looking at the floor I then noticed this stenciled grffiti. Now with the prevalent Bonarka Reebok Trainer stencils, this is unlikely to be an indication to be a meeting place for a gangs with regards "tagging" i.e indicating where illegal drugs cab be purchased. So who or what is behind this?

If this organisation is responsible for having sprayed graffiti on a public footpath they must be held accountable or at least come on record and deny that they would promote such a form of marketing. This trend needs to be stopped now, just like slamming of Off Camera Trash adverts on the pavements. Billboard yes. Putting them on the pavement is colonising public space.

This Friday I will walk to their office with the evidence and demand a categorical denial that they had anything to do with this act of vandalism in the vicinity of the Wawel. But the Rada Mieiska, being the utterly incompetant body it is, has failed to protect an entire wall in the centre of the Kazimierz market square being blighted by a Maxwell House advert.

Clearly this must be illegal. Kazimierz Market is in the UNESCO World Heritage Zone and defacing buildings by turning entire sides of them into pseudo-arty and tacky adverts is quite simplt not legal, breaks the UNESCO Charter and destroys any credibility of the Rada Miejska has in trying to stick by the spirit and the letter of the UNESCO Statement of Significance.

This grotesque piece of Rada Miejska sanctioned graffiti shows that the average vandal is being outclassed by the city authorities in association with the police who are meant to stop it. There is one near the AGH dorms as well. Krakow is rapidly becoming a rubbish heap instead of a much vaunted City of Culture.

As forCracowlife.com these repellent dolts are nothing more than whoremongers. Their website contains what amounts to nothing but pure prostitution of the city. So doltishly splatting graffiti before the place where the balloon once was might not be beyond them. They brag,

What do you get when you take the world's highest density of pubs, bars and clubs, add to that locals who drink vodka like water, beer at mad cheap prices and some of the most gorgeous women on the planet? You get Krakow - the perfect destination for your stag night!

You'll be hard pressed to find a better place for your stag weekend party than Krakow. Within the Old Town alone, you'll find hundreds of nightclubs and pubs eager to help make your stag night unforgettable (whether you remember it is another story!). And unlike other cities, bars around here don't close at midnight - that's when they just get going!

Krakow nightlife is legendary and the Poles know how to party. Add to that some of the world's most stunning women (they're everywhere!) and you've got yourself a young man's paradise! "

The quicker these pigs and those promoting this pig like activity leave Krakow alone the better. The locals do not welcome them, detest them and find the presence of leering halfwits with no appreciation for this Renaissance City repulsive. Not only that, they give the British residents who made a home for themselves a bad image to.

Thoughts on Habsburg Krakow and Podgorze

2010-04-27T15:57:00.000-07:00

If we look at the average street in Piasek or Nowy Swiat they do represent the classical vernacular style which was common to most cities in the Habsburg Empire in the mid to late nineteenth century.The streets off Sw Gertrudy are of the same style and this is really the architecture being referred to are of worthy as preservation as the architecturally patriotic buildings of the late nineteenth century as the core of Renaissance and Baroque Krakow

There were also neo-Renaisance buildings modelled on Imperial Vienna. Krakow was known as Petit Wien for a reason and it is these ordinary and elegant buildings from Limanowskiego in Podgorze to Dluga Street, Lobzowska and the back streets near the centre and along Westerplatte that are of interest in being preserved for their contribution to the harmony of the streets no less than the more outstanding masterpieces we all know e.g the Wawel, the Rynek Glowny.

Such a view does distinguishes between the classical and the vernacular in the manner Leon Krier does, for whereas the classical refers to the Res Publica, buildings meant to be imposing edifices expressing civic pride and dignity, though we make for ourselves a home via the Res Privata.

The harmony of both is precisely what makes Krakow a city of beauty. True, a great deal of this heritage stretches back long before Krakow became part of the Habsburg part of Poland i.e Galicia ( though the Baroque and Rococo was present in both Krakow and Vienna ) through the partitions of the historic Polish state, Krakow being absorbed in the final and Third Partition ( 1795).

Yet Krakow became both a modern city without destroying its historical character in the late ninetweenth century especially after the Ausgleich of 1867 and the liberalisation of the Habsburg Empire whereby Galicia developed autonomous civil institutions with devoted Poles and Austro-Poles like Dietl who did much to improve the city. and modernise it.

This, in general, is precisely what is mean by "Habsburg Krakow", though it would be better styled Galician Krakow and much of which has been left to decay and been neglected in large parts outside the tourist areas by the Rada Mieska dominated by PiS who are a bunch of incompetant pygmies compared to their late nineteenth century predecessors.

The principles of Leon Krier about the differential but mutual inseperability of the Res Publica and the Res Privata distinguishes between classical and vernacular architecture. The first addresses monuments, public buildings and the Res Publica. The other one is only concerned by private buildings and structures and by the Res Privata.

Though this clear distinction is essential, it is obvious that classical and vernacular cultures regenerate themselves in an ongoing process. The hut and the temple, the house and the palace, the village and the town, the town and the city etc., since common origins in mythical times have always inspired and enriched mutually! "

As Steve Mouzon puts it,

" Vernacular buildings are built by ordinary people who possess principles, or patterns, that have traditionally been handed over from generation to generation. A living pattern language is essential to true vernacular construction by those not trained in architecture.

A community cannot be fully alive, however, without both. Vernacular architecture meets an individual's basic human habitational needs, especially on a short-term basis. The higher needs, however, cannot be met by the vernacular.

Simply put, the human heart yearns for things which express not only the memory but also the aspirations of their community and their civilization. Put another way, their most noble buildings should tell the story of not only who they are and where they have been, but also where they hope to go'

Those vernacular buildings are as much my concern as the classical buildings. Whether on Rynek Podgorze, Limanowskiego, or even in small forgotten pockets of Krakow in zones in close proximity to the Forts Luneta Warsawskiego and Fort Kleparz by the building of roads such as those off Wita Stwosza.

Irrespective of whether it is the buildings surrounding the Rynek in Debiki or the area off ulica Lubormirskiego threatened by the rapacious and doltish Henryk Gaertner of GDK such as the remaining vernacular nineteenth century Habsburg period edifices on ulica Lubicz.

These buildings reveal competent stone masonry, attention to detail, with elegant lintles, cornices and rendering with elegant shades of pastel colouring ( though some renovations have got the colours too garish and bright as have some near the Ghetto Heroes Square along the river front.

As Krier puts it " Vernacular architecture is the manual-artisan culture of building, based on tectonic logic. Building is a craft culture which consists in the repetition of a limited number of types and in their adaptation to local climate, materials and custom. "

Dr Monika Bogdanowska politely disagreed with the notion of the Viennese influence being as influential as I had made out.,

Well, that is altogether quite confusing. Sure - politically this part of former Poland was partitioned and under Austro-Hungarian rules but historicism was Europe-wide style and that is great simplification to call Kraków - Small Vienna.

Krakovian architects - as they were designer of all these buildings studied in Vienna and Munich but their main goal was - as in all Europe - the search for "national style" which for quite long was belived to be Gothic, both for French, English and German and Poles in fact too.

Vienna is in fact much-much different than Kraków, which in that time was province of Empire with all administration transfered to Lvov. And this was the very heart of this region..it's worth to mention that many Polish - mostly Krakovian architects worked in Vienna but a lot in other European cities and even in Peru (Stryjeński).

True, but in Jan T Malecki's History of Krakow he does write, whilst giving due credit to the search to rejuvenate the a national Polish style ( as exemplified by Wyspianski and numerous other architects ), that many buildings, for example the Slowacki Theatre were modelled on the Paris Opera House, and that efforts were made to to lend,

Krakow a new air-perhaps not that of a metropolis, but it was definitively modelling itself on important European cities. The style of the building around the outer fringes of the Planty, for instance, was designed to resemble the Vienna Ring-on a smaller scale".

It shouldn't be doubted that the construction of many main civic buildings were the work of Polish architects forging new style by drawing on ancient Polish traditions but the city invariably took on some aspects of the classical vernacular common to Galicia, no less than Lwow of course, and the average tenement building seems to be rather in the tradition of Central European Habsburg era stock.

Vienna as a metropolis could never be the same as Krakow but it did taken on some of the aspects of an outpost of Imperial Vienna. Jan T Ostrowski writes in his book on Cracow that,

"Relatively many neo-Renaissance buildings were raised, often modelled on the architecture of Imperial Vienna: the headquarters of the Academic Society of Cracow ( the later Academy of Sciences designed by Feliks Pokutynski,, the Academy of Fine Arts ( 1880 by Maciej Moraczewski): the "Florianka" Insurance Society Building: the Helcel Hotel ( 1885 and 1890 by Tomasz Prylinski ) and the Lubormirski Hotel ( 1890, by Tadeuesz Stryjenski and Wladyslaw Ekielski, now housing the school of economics)"

One of the main points I'm making here is that much of the existing classical vernacular, that is the Habsburg epoch buildings of nineteenth century stock are still part of Krakow's heritage and deserve care and attention. That Podgorze has not might be an indication that it is not really quite part of Krakow and Ostrowski tends to write it of as having little of major architectural value.

The one part he does mention is the Rynek Podgorze but indelibly Podgorze, as a creation of the Austrians, seems to have been neglected.Ostrowski sniffily writes of Podgorze as a "run down slip of a town inhabited by an impecunious population", mostly industrial and which is "not entirely devoid of historic buildings".

There might be an element of nationalism at work here: that Podgorze was never really much more than a bastard offshoot of Krakow proper as it belonged over the Wisla after the First Partition of 1772. It was rumoured to be called Josephstadt. But it's delapidated streets could be restored and this is surely old history now. It's a part of Krakow's heritage no less than the Austrian Fort system.

Obviously Krakow is first and foremost a cultural cradle of the Polish nation. That's obvious. But the Habsburgs indelibly made an imprint on the city and gave partially in architectural terms and certainly in culture a distinctly different flavour to the Galician part of partitioned Poland

If the idea of "Petit Wien" has any merit-it was used by Keneally in describing Krakow in Schindler's Ark- then it is in the zone around Matejko Square which exudes a feeling of the Habsburg presence as obviously does the Dworzec Glowny which was blighted by the repellent Galeria Krakowska. The National Bank of Poland, The Academy of Fine Arts, the Polish State Railways headquarters are all Habsburg architectural triumphs and brought wealth and prosperity to the city.

Incidentally Podgorze was from its inception under the Habsburg Emperor a far more tolerant places for Jewish people and according to Malecki one of the few places were Jew and Gentiles got on as it was the one place "proletarianised" to an extent by having the majority of Krakow's industries. Most of its buildings are of nineteenth century Habsburg vintage and the place seems to have remained neglected.

That's why on Monday 26 April , students met with the Podgorze Council to suggest ways of renovating the Rynek there. The Austrian Hill Fortress remains derelict and neglected, fenced off from junkies and Jabcok drinkers.

It seems to me that it is not taken as seriously as part of the "real Krakow" and has been left to crumble. The buildings all along Limanowskiego are nineteenth century Habsburg and the place could be a homely zone and rescued from relative neglect. The placing of the grotesque Citibank building on Grzegorzeckie 21, the crumbling tenements testify to the neglect of this area.

Moreover, many of the some 28% of Jews by the 1900s who lived there or were pushed into it later were those who, it has to be remembered, were far more nostalgic about the old Habsburg Imperuim and many placed in the Ghetto in Podgorze had been educated in Vienna as they had been discriminated against in the Jagiellonian University

Hugh Seton Watson remarked that the Jewish ghetto district "is little different from the Christian quarter than is an Arab town from the West End of London". In Schindler's Ark, the Jewish architect summarily shot by Amon Goeth in Plaszow for being "too clever" and annoying for calling for the foundations of the barracks to be rebuild was educated in Vienna.

When the Podgorze Ghetto was liquidated and hospital patient about to be machine gunned in their beds by the Nazis, Keneally writes when the doctor is about to give him the poison to kill him before they get the chance

"D sensed with amazement the old man ( Roman's ) history through the touch of his skin. For a scond, like a surge of flame, the young Roman was there, growing up in Franz Josef's southern Poland, a ladykiller in the sweet little nougat of a city, the petit Wien, the jewel of the Vistula, Cracow. Wearing Franz Josefs uniform and going to the mountains for spring manouevres. Chocolate soldiering in Rynek Glowny with the girls of Kazimierz, in a city of lace and patisseries. Climbing the Kosciuszko Mound and stealing a kiss among the shrubs. How could the world have come so far in one manhood? asked the young man in old Roman. From Franz Josef to the NCO who had the sanction to put Rosalie Blau and the scarlet fever girls to death"

The Galician born Jew Joseph Roth also had a certain nostalgia for the Habsburg Empire and it seems to me due respect is appropriate not only to preserving what must be in the UNESCO zone in Kazimierz, but also the once separate Habsburg town of Podgorze which retained independence from Greater Krakow unril as late as 1915.

The point here is not to get into the complex history of Polish-Jewish relations in Krakow but simply to say that both the history and culture associated with Podgorze, it's unique place in Krakow and the history of the Galician partition ought to be accorded more respect than has so far been shown.

And not have irrelevant kitsch dumped on it for gimmicky purposes supported by the PiS dominated Rada Miejska. Nothing has been done with Sw Fort Benedikt. Buildings from the Habsburg period continue to crumble and it's almost as though the choice seems to be a banal form of gentrification and deodorisation or letting whole sections crumble.

It's part of Krakow's heritage too. And created by the Habsburgs back in 1784. As the EU is supposed to be a "post-imperial" union of states, it is about time these buildings were given the treatment and respect they deserve as part of the physiogamy and fabric of Krakow, whether the buildings of Podgorze or Fortress Krakow.

Festung Krakau

2010-04-27T06:16:00.000-07:00

Krzysztof Wilk has put together a very decent website packed with information of Krakow's Austian Fortress system built during the mid nineteenth century until the the Great Ware called "Stronghold".

As he comments many of them are "pearls of military engineering" and as Jan T Ostrowski puts it in his 1992 work on Krakow "a system of forts , still partly preserved, is a rare example of military architecture from the middle of the last century.

I recommend those interested to look beyond the overcrowded Rynek Glowny to take a futher look and go further afield of the 'Szlak Twierdzy Krakow' which will take the traveller into semi rural aras near Krakow and in and around the beautiful Las Wolski