Eskimos live in igloos, Japanese live in paper houses, and the English live in country cottages festooned with roses, but where do the Poles live? Most westerners probably visualize grim Stalinist blocks as the standard abode of the Pole, and it has to be said there is a degree of truth in this, but the whole story is a little more complex and interesting. There are three basic forms of housing in Poland; the Kamienica, the Blok, and the Dom.
The Kamienica
Kamienica (pronounced Ka-mee-en-eetza) is a tricky word to translate. Basically it means a pre-World War I apartment block in a town or city center. These are the pretty four or five story building that line Poland’s lovely medieval city squares and make up much of the housing in its old city centers. Anyone who’s been to any historical European capital, apart from London, would recognize them. In the best parts of the most tourist friendly towns they have been meticulously restored to chocolate box standards and are dripping with baroque decorations on which winter snow can perch prettily. Few people can afford to live in these and most are given over to hotels, fancy restaurants, and trashy nightclubs. In the less fortunate towns and outside of the golden tourist zones of Krakow, Wroslaw, and Gdansk, there are thousands of these buildings in a less happy state of repair. Usually they are romantically dilapidated and have intriguing entrance halls with peeling paint that hint at happier and more decadent times. British tourists raised on a diet of home improvement shows and tales of foreign property investment can be seen standing outside them drooling. Fantasies of snapping up a rundown city center apartment for next to nothing dance behind their eyes.
A kamienica (the pretty kind)
The occupants of a typical kamienica tend to be ‘diverse’, to put it politely. My friend D frequently warns against the purchase of an apartment in a kamienica on the grounds that they are chiefly occupied by babcie, drunks, bumpkins, and car thieves — he’s known for his liberal and understated views. He does have a point though. Many of the people living in these prime slices of real estate have been there all their lives and got them in the first place through apparently random assignment by the communist authorities. The Kazimierz district of Krakow, for example, is stuffed full of medieval and 17th century buildings that can cause the average property developer to eat his own trousers in excitement, but until ten years ago it was one of the poorest and most crime ridden parts of the city. Kazimierz was the original Jewish quarter of the town and was tremendously prosperous for centuries. At the end of the second world war when the Jews had, ahem, ‘gone away’ the authorities assigned the empty apartments to the hordes of impoverished and desperate people who were streaming in from the countryside. Many of them had spent the previous four years in the forest hiding from Einzatsgruppen johnnies and their fun shooting-people-in-the-back-of-the-head game. It’s not uncommon to find that many of the apartments in these buildings are occupied by wheezing old gentlemen with flamboyantly red noses and an extensive collection of empty vodka bottles. They haven’t worked since 1974 and the gas, water, and electricity were cut off some time in the late 80s (I’m not exaggerating here). They spend their time huddled in one corner of one room of a 90 square meter apartment waiting to die. Their families are also waiting for them to die of course so they can flog the place for bundles of loot to the nearest neo-German property developer and get the hell out of the city (see The Dom). There’s some kind of irony in there somewhere.
Another kamienica (the less pretty kind) from this guy
There’s a kind of quiet war going on over the kamienica. The descendants of the wealthy families that originally owned the kamienicas, many of them now living in the States, started popping up after the fall of communism and pointing out politely that they would quite like their property back please. When this failed to produce results they hired extravagantly expensive Chicago lawyers and said it again, a little more loudly. The new Polish political elite, with their hunger to embrace the free market, had a degree of sympathy with them but also had one eye on their electorate whom, they suspected, would be less than happy about being turfed out of their homes so that a rich American could overhaul them and become slightly more rich in the process. The end result was that laws were introduced making it next to impossible to evict people, even if they hadn’t paid their gas bill since 1964. Dozens of expensive and protracted cases went through the Polish courts (the very idea makes me shudder) and lots of families did, eventually, get ‘their’ property back. In the vast majority of cases, however, the drunks are hanging in there. Toned and hungry-looking property types purr past in their Mercs occasionally, waiting for the old guard to die and fall off their perches. The day when the last kamienica is renovated and prettified and the last drunk is carted off from his traditional sleeping position, slumped across the front step, is the day I leave Krakow.
I live in a kamienica, as all foolish foreign bohemian types aspire to. The locals are far too sensible to fall for this and tend to live in the grey but perfectly serviceable blocks that lie a little further out from the center. My building has all the typical features one should expect from the classic kamienica; it’s cold, there are drunks sleeping on the stairs, and the plumbing was last overhauled in the 17th century. The electrical system is a source of endless entertainment and periodic bracing shocks to the system. Jiggling the bedroom doorknob causes the lights in the kitchen to flicker in a festive manner and one has to be extremely careful when opening the fridge. On the plus side I have access to a communal attic that has a ladder leading to a skylight from which one of the best views in Krakow can be observed. Of course you have to move quietly otherwise the resident babcie will be down on you like a ton of bricks demanding to know what you are up to creeping around in the roof space in a highly suspicious and foreign manner. All kamienicas also have cellars, but they scare the bejeezus out of me for all kinds of reasons so I can’t tell you what goes on down there.
I once knew a guy who lived in one of the very few kamienicas that survived the razing of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw in 1943. Every Tuesday hordes of Israeli school kids would be bused in from the airport under heavily armed guard to see how their ancestors lived in the bad old days. They regarded him with thinly disguised hatred and chucked the occasional rotten egg at his windows even though he was English, and therefore righteous and innocent. His girlfriend used to ply the local 12-year-old hoodlums with beer and ice cream in the hope that they would refrain from stealing her car stereo. Those were the days.
Coming soon: The Blok and The Dom
As a ‘Dom’ dweller, I look forward to read your thoughts about it. I presume you’ll differentiate between rural dom, urban dom and suburban villa?
Jewish ghetto razed in 1943.
Dear Author,
I am afraid, it is me (the babcia-in-the-making) again and I am (again!) going to correct your statements just a little bit.
1. “Kamienica is a tricky word to translate” – it is usually translated into “a tenement house / building.”
2. “It means a pre-World-War I…” – I am afraid it does not. During the between-the-wars period numerous tenement buildings were built ouside the very centre of Krakow, for example along the 1930s Aleje. If you go for a walk along aleja Slowackiego or aleja Mickiewicza (please, note, that in the CORRECT Polish the word ‘aleja’ plus a name should never be written with a capital letter ), you will see dozens of them. Go inside, it there is access, and you will be surprised by the look of the staircase, the lift etc. The Aleje tenement buildings have always been inhabited by the middle class and, despite all the political and economic changes, the people who still live in them belong to a more respectable group that the legendary drunkards from Kazimierz. The flats are big, spacious and – certainly – they are getting very expensive by the day.
3. “My friend warns me against a purchase of an apartment” – actually, I have been looking after a flat which belongs to an Englishman for quite a time. The flat is very posh and very big (by Polish standards), it is more that 100 m2 big, the location is great, the neighbours are co-operative and friendly. In my humble estimate the purchase of the flat was the deal of the Englishman’s life – the current price is three times the original one. However, it seems that the height of the housing craze is over so, please, think twice before you buy anything now.
4. “Kazimierz was tremendously prosperous for centuries” – yes, it was and no, it was not. There were pockets of great wealth and, more numerous, pockets of extreme poverty in Kazimierz ( I recommend watching some documentaries from the 1920s and 1930s). In fact, by the end of the 19th century, most of the middle class Jews had left Kazimierz and moved into Dietla or Stradom streets. As you can read in their memoirs, they – very often – did their best to cut the links with the Kazimierz district; as it is only to be expected, their children did not play with the children from Kazimierz and most of them never set foot there. I know some elderly Jewish people, born in pre-War II Krakow,who come here from abroad and, for the first time ever visit Kazimierz: “because mummy never let me go there, and, anyway, we weren’t interested”.
5. Not all the kamienicas, as you seem to be suggesting, belonged to the Jewish minority, neither were all of them taken from the hands of the legal pre-WW II owners in 1945 or later.
There are a number of reasons why so many of them look “romatically delapidated”. It must be stressed that, for at least five decades, the rent the tenants paid was dictated by the state; it was very low indeed. The situation was definitely good for the tenants (who got used to living in over-sized flats for a ridiculous sum of money) but it affected the condition of the buildings in a terrible way. A friend of mine, whose family has owned a kamienica in Rakowicka since the 1920s, could tell you all kinds of stories about, for example, how his parents and grandparents had to work long hours as some middle-rank state employees in order to pay for the emergency repairs, just because the money they got from the rent was peanuts in comparison to their expenses.
No wonder they could not prettify their kamienica when they hardly coped with the cost of the basic maintenance of the building.
6. The Jews were being evicted from their houses by the Germans as early as in May 1940; in my opinion, the fate of Kazimierz as a mostly Jewish district was sealed not at the end of the WW II but in March 1941, when the Ghetto was created on the other side of the Wisla and all the Jews transferred there. Where did the Polish people who had to leave their houses in that part of Podgorze go, by the way?
I am looking forward to the “Block”.
Uszanowanie
Jolanta
Michael: I doubt I will go so far as to differentiate the different types of dom, my goal is entertainment rather than exhaustive completeness… and besides, Jolanta would probably come down with carpal tunnel if I did.
Thanks for the ghetto date correction, silly me.
Dear Author,
I has just dawned on me ( a little too late, perhaps) that I am a clinical case of a spoilsport and that I need some treatment urgently.
I promise on the grave of my grandfather (an infantry soldier who spent his early 20s fighting for the Austro-Hungarian Empire) that I will not comment on the block. I cannot promise anything as far as the dom is concerned, though. I happen to live in one of those ugly 1970s detached houses (yuk).
Pozdrowienia
Jolanta
Jolanta:
That’s a relief, I was thinking I would probably have to take a couple of days off to respond to your comments!
But seriously, you are not a spoilsport. Far from it. I’ve very much enjoyed the kosa controversy and have found out a lot of interesting things because of it. Perhaps you went a little overboard on the kamienica comments – that was kind of my point; of course there are 20s and 30s buildings that would be described as kamienicas, but they are oddities, in other words it IS hard to describe exactly what a kamienica is.
I’m a big fan of 1970s Doms by the way, they represent one of the few positive achievements of the communist era in my view.
…and yes “Where did the Polish people who had to leave their houses in that part of Podgorze go?” That’s a good question.
Dear Author,
Mea culpa once again!
But why you are convinced that the 1970s houses are some kind of achievement is a mystery to me. I think that they are too ugly for words and, incidentally, oceans of ink have recently been used up to describe the way in which the 1970s dom destroyed the local character of the rural as well as the urban Poland. Anyway, it is too late to do anything about it.
My father, who slaved away for two years in a US abattoir to built our communist monster of a house, believes that the design caught on because it was the cheapest and ready-made. As simple as that.
Pozdrawiam
Jolanta
PS. To put it mildly, the very design is rather risky ( or outright dangerous) if you take into account the amount of snow which collects on this kind of flat roof every winter. What was the architect thinking about when he was designing it for our weather conditions?
i used to live in superjednostka in katowice….762 apartments in one super unit! incredible place. like a mental institute but with more mentals.
a teacher i knew who lived on the top floor said her floor was populated by prozzies and america missionaries – what a mix!
[...] on the fiddle from Torun rooftops? Once only Kazimierz, a district of Kraków, was theirs, a Jewish island. Now the whole city is theirs. As the whole [...]