The Gnomes of Wroclaw

Last week A and I decided to take a trip together. Originally we had wanted to go to Lvov (in Ukraine) but the fact that A now has a full time job coupled with the fact that I now have a full time hole in my wallet meant that we had to be slightly less ambitious in our plans. It was a toss up between the mountains and the city of Wroclaw. I moaned like a big girl about the lack of urban amenities in the mountains and the high likelihood of having to march up and down perilous slopes and got my own way.

Wroclaw (pronounced something like Vrods-wav) is one of Poland’s Big Four historical cities, the others being Warsaw, Gdansk, and Krakow.
In fact Katowice is bigger than all four, but it’s a dump so nobody goes there unless they have to, and Lvov now finds itself stranded on the wrong side of the Ukrainian border. Like Warsaw, Gdansk, and Krakow, Wroclaw has a fabulously ornate medieval heart and a divertingly ad hoc conglomeration of Stalinist blocks, 19th century avenues and shiny blue slabs of modern commerce surrounding it. Wroclaw is frequently described as the ‘Venice of Poland,’ largely by people who have never been to Venice. Apparently there is some obscure clause of the European Code on Providing Misleading Copy in Tourist Brochures that requires every country to call one of its cities ‘The Venice of…’ The responsible civil service department of each country generally chooses whichever city has the most bridges or is most likely to suffer catastrophic floods and has done with it. Wroclaw has a lot of bridges since it lies astride a complex series of channels, tributaries and confluences of the River Oder. Not surprisingly having so many waterways lying about brings with it the teeniest tendency to the occasional spot of flooding. The last big one in Wroclaw was in 1997. People were finding skeletal trout in the oddest places for years after that one. The city got truckloads of UN and EU money to clean up and very sensibly had a massive party and built lots of shiny new multiplexes with it. The actual priceless buildings and monuments of the old city had been underwater so many times in their history that they barely noticed. There are several amusing photos of semi-constructed residential blocks neck deep in water. These were, of course, sensibly torn down and relocated to higher ground, or so I’ve been led to believe.

Wroclaw is about 150 miles from Krakow and it takes the train four and a half hours to get there, about twice as long as it takes to get to Warsaw which is twice as far away. The main reason for this, as far as I was able to see, was that the track has to go around thousands of massive piles of coal. The whole area to the west of Krakow is essentially a vast coal heap. It’s called Silesia on maps and Hitler got very exited about it because some of the people there have slightly German-sounding names. Wroclaw is the regional capital of Silesia but fortunately managed to escape becoming the industrial centre. That honour fell to Katowice, a city that now looks like South Wales with the glamour removed. There is coal everywhere. Little old ladies have to struggle up and down mountains of the stuff to get to the shops. Before you put your slippers on in the morning you have to tip a couple of hundredweight of prime anthracite out that has gathered in the toes overnight. The train sidles and squeezes its way through these ominous black heaps stopping at a series of spectacularly ugly and misshapen towns along the way. Grimy locals peer up at the carriages marveling at the whiteness of the passengers’ teeth and the brightness of their Nike baseball caps. The occasional student returning home from university in Krakow is heard to emit a heartfelt sign before stepping down onto the platform, which is of course ankle deep in coal dust. After a few hours of this I was becoming slightly apprehensive about exactly what Wroclaw would look like, but I needn’t have worried. Apparently the centuries of ceaseless flooding have washed all the coal away.

The welcoming sight of Katowice train station

Polish trains are, as I think I’ve mentioned before, absolutely fabulous. There are three tremendously exciting things about Polish trains. First, if you look at one end or other of the train as it clamors into the station there’s always one or two incredibly grimy carriages that actually began their journey four days ago in an obscure city on the borders of Kazakhstan – occasionally there’s a wide-eyed Kazakh shepherd boy with a knotted handkerchief on a stick clinging to the roof. Second, they have compartments and corridors. The entertainment potential of a train with corridors and compartments is tremendous, which is no bad thing on a four-hour train journey (it takes 12 hours to get to the coast by the way). Foremost among these pleasures is the opportunity to stand in the corridor leaning on a windowsill and watching the world crawl by. I can do this for hours and find it immeasurably preferable to cramming into a compartment with eight flatulent grandmothers laden down with bags of cabbage. There is something primordially masculine about leaning out of the window of a crowded, slow moving train as it crawls across country, especially if it has the good sense to do this in the small hours of the morning. Unsurprisingly it is an almost exclusively male hobby and a tentative, but very definite, esprit de corps develops among its adherents. The angle of the slouch, the expertise with which one flips the window open or closed, and the occasional wry smile at a particularly desolate scene of rail side depravation are the gestures by which we know and judge each other. A braved the flatulent grandmothers and read a book. There are some things that women just don’t understand. The third thing that sets Polish trains apart from the rather limp-wristed affairs of my homeland is that you have to climb to get on them. There’s none of this messing around with ‘easy access’ or ‘platform-level parity.’ You grab a handrail and haul yourself up three or four pierced steel steps to get on the thing. You actually feel as if you are climbing into a massive and potentially deadly vehicle rather than stepping from a slightly naf environment into a slightly more naf environment that might move. Of course, if you happen to have any kind of problem with getting about or want to do something crazy like taking a pushchair on board you’re in big trouble. Having said that there was a Roma girl with a baby in a 1920s vintage pram who essentially hefted the whole affair above her head and leapt on with minimum fuss.

This is the ancient town hall of Wroclaw, temporarily not underwater

We arrived in Wroclaw at about 8 in the evening, the train not having had the good sense to do its cross-country crawling in the small hours, and headed for our hostel. I had the good sense to bring a map. A claims to have been to Wroclaw dozens of times, but her sense of direction is so woeful that I feared a seven-hour walk that would end with us bedding down in a cabbage field on the outskirts of Frankfurt. A claims to have been to hundreds of places in her erstwhile profession of traveling comedy zebra and all round entertainer, and I don’t doubt these claims for a second, but it hasn’t done much for her sense of direction. She tells a great tale about having to ‘turn around in Germany’ as a consequence of poor map reading. On a car journey to the Wroclaw vicinity she and her troupe missed a vital turning and found it necessary to continue along the highway for a few kilometers before they could find a place to reverse direction. Unfortunately Wroclaw is perilously close to the German border so this actually entailed crossing an international boundary in search of a u-turn opportunity. The border guards were apparently most understanding and no doubt recount the tale at every opportunity.

There is a new trend among hostels that is usually advertized with phrases such as ‘4-star accommodation at hostel prices.’ What this actually means is that you get brightly colored Ikea duvet covers and a sprinkling of plastic rose petals on the breakfast table. It doesn’t mean that you get more than one shower per 97 guests, which would arguably be more useful. During a bold reconnaissance mission conducted in my underpants I located a second, unfrequented, shower room on a semi-condemned floor, although I wasn’t able to avoid shocking and appalling several groups of scantily clad young ladies along the way. The place was ok, we had a room to ourselves and as much horrendously bad tea as we could drink.

Wroclaw old town is stunning, but in a way that I have become very familiar with. It was completely trashed during the last three months of WWII. Despite having clearly lost the war by that stage the German commander of the district decided to declare Wroclaw a ‘final bastion’ against the Soviet advance. He spent weeks gently persuading the locals with bullwhips to build earthworks and ramparts on which the tide of the Red Army would break and then buggered off when the visceral stink and noise of that extraordinary body of men actually began to crest the horizon. The Soviets lined up their howitzers and flattened the place with the kind of off-hand ruthlessness that comes from extreme political indoctrination mixed with a big dose of hunger, desperation, and excitement. Some sensitive Poles are a little squeamish about the way the historical cores of their old cities were reconstructed after the rain of TNT had subsided, and there is no doubt that there is a Disneyesque quality to the perfectly rendered fairy tale buildings that resulted, but it’s hard to fault the instinct that drove it. If Canterbury or Bath had been nothing more than a smoking pile of rubble in June 1945 I think we would have done the same. It’s a lovely town with just the right level of dodgy and decrepit stuff around it to add piquancy.

Wroclaw was built on a series of island, not a bad idea when Germans are your neighbours

We spent Saturday engaged in the age-old game of ‘wandering around the new place.’ The city was originally based on one of the numerous islands that are sprinkled along the main channel of the Oder and this is where one can find the prettiest and most highly polished examples of medieval church and street building today. There are lots of divertingly odd bridges to cross, several of which seem to have been overlooked by map makers, and dozens of spectacular churches to pop in and out of. It was during this popping in and out that I noticed A was taking particular care to read the times of services on the prominently positioned boards. Of course, I had never looked at churches in this way. For me they had always been objects of aesthetic interest, but for A this is a part of her life and, the next day being Sunday, she was looking for a convenient Mass to attend. That night we found a fabulous pub in the almost completely erased Jewish quarter and had one of those conversations that include explanations of supernovas as well as the serious discussion of miraculous happenings. At some point I agreed to go to Mass with her the next day on the grounds that she wanted to go and wanted me to go with her. It’s a simple formula that’s surprisingly hard to argue with. Sunday dawned with the rapid realization that I may have committed myself to more than I had intended. We made our way down to the nearest church as a growing sense of apprehension took control of my faculties. By the time we had arrived at the selected church (St Elisabeth’s Basilica) my nerve had failed completely and I had to wave goodbye at the door of the church with feeble excuses. After five minutes sitting on a bench in the square, however, I realized that I was being a massive girl’s blouse and went back in. It’s amazing how powerful the fear of the church is among us non-believers. I fully expected rabid Catholics to turn on me with sharpened scythes when they realized I didn’t know the proper words or wasn’t kneeling down at the appropriate moments. Strangely enough they turn out to be the same people that one sees walking about the streets at any other time and have absolutely no interest in dismembering people for non-belief. It was an interesting 45 minutes, although I suspect a lot of the interest sprung from the fact that I had never seen it before. The actual serious part where one has to go forward and drink the sacred wine and eat the host is entirely voluntary and nobody minds if you don’t. There’s a great part where one is supposed to turn to the people around you and wish them ‘peace’ with a handshake or a wink or a chummy slap on the back that rather caught me by surprise. I can get behind that entirely, although I’m a bit skeptical about the Catholic roots of this element of the Mass, it strikes me as a sop to Protestantism, although I may be horrendously wrong about this.

I didn’t attend mass in this church, but I might have

And, finally, to the gnomes. Gnomes are more naturally connected with Zurich, but Wroclaw has surrealist gnomes. One first encounters Wroclaw’s gnomes walking down the main street that leads to the Old Town square. There are two of the little fellas attempting to move a two-foot wide granite ball by the side of the road.

Apparently harmless Wroclaw gnomes pushing in opposite directions

These little bronze sculptures of fairy-tale gnomes are far from the twee tourist-industry icons that they first appear to be. Although they look like the perfect accompaniment to the sugary spires of the cathedral and the gothic overindulgence of the town hall they are in fact a tribute to a remarkable political movement that flourished in Wroclaw during the 1980s as the Communist era stuttered to a close. The Orange Alternative movement was founded by a history of art student at the University of Wroclaw who wanted to voice his opposition to the stifling political climate of the era while avoiding getting his neck stretched. The problem with voicing opposition to fundamentalist dictatorships is that you tend to get hustled around the back of the local army barracks and pumped full of lead. Waldemar Fydrych, for that was his name, hit upon the brilliant ruse of making the authorities look like complete idiots without actually doing anything that would warrant a bullet in the brain. On one occasion he organized a march through the streets of the city demanding the release of Father Christmas. The authorities had banned Father Christmas as a corrupt capitalist institution and replaced him with the rigidly socialist figure of Father Frost. He did this dressed as a gnome. The police felt unable to arrest a man for taking part in an illegal procession of gnomes. Fydrych and his gnome-like cohorts also braved the wrath of heavily armed ZOMO units by freely distributing sanitary towels to women, items that were almost impossible to get hold of by legal means. For this he was arrested and sentenced to several months in jail, but again the authorities had to let him go when it became clear that the general population thought they were being very silly. There’s not much that a battalion of Soviet recruits in hull-down T72s can do against a bunch of nerds wearing silly hats. Brave young men with scarves wrapped around their heads throwing Molotov cocktails are much more satisfying targets, as the Hungarians discovered to their cost in 1956. A classic Orange Alternative trick was to paint images of gnomes on top of the patches of official paint that covered up anti-government graffiti. It’s hard to justify executing people for painting gnomes on walls, but the sheer number of gnomes on walls drew everyone’s attention to how many anti-government slogans were being covered up. Now that the danger is over Fydrych is largely ignored and forgotten. His attempt to run for mayor of Warsaw under the ‘Fools and Gnomes’ banner in 2002 met with little success. He is chiefly remembered by his nickname ‘Major,’ which he acquired by attending his compulsory Polish People’s Army induction interview wearing the uniform of a major. Exactly how he avoided the short march round the back of the barracks on that occasion I don’t know.

Of the 15 gnomes hidden around Wroclaw these were the hardest to spot. I saw 12 out of 15

Interesting historical fact however for those of you who remember the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004/05: Fydrych and his aging cohort of hard core gnomes were heavily involved in the protests and the Orange Alternative movement gave its name to the Orange Revolution. When Viktor Yushchenko finally accepted presidential office, his face scarred by an attempted poisoning, they placed a 15 meter long orange scarf around his neck. Ok, lets be honest it was a carefully orchestrated CIA / MI6 operation that ousted former communists in favour of Western-friendly government by using grassroots student organizations to ferment mass protest, but the giant orange scarf at least adds something human to the whole affair.