Krakow Chronicles: Easter 2009

Hmm .. from the warm look of content on your face I see that you’re reading April’s Krakow Post. Well, that must mean one of two things: either you’ve made it through another winter (and if it was the Polish winter, double brownie points to you) or you’re rereading this article at some future point as a distraction to doing something else – probably cleaning the windows or starting your thesis. Either way, welcome (once again) to the Polish spring, which officially started on Saturday 28th March.

Spring is, for most Poles, the finest season of the year. Autumn’s ok, they say, summer’s too hot and winter is … well … winter. Spring days are simply longer, warmer and brighter. And now the streets and parks are full of people enjoying the return of both sunlight and birdsong.

But it’s not quite summer yet, down here in Central Europe. For no sooner does winter give away to spring than attention is turned to serious matters. For, in the Christian calendar, March means Lent (the traditional 40-day period of abstinence echoing Christ’s ordeals and temptations in the wilderness) and April means Easter and the Resurrection of Christ.

Let’s be honest, most Western Christians’ observance of Church festivals is limited – at best – to Christmas and Easter, and even then more often in a purely secular manner: expensively-bought presents at Christmas, expensively-bought chocolate eggs for Easter. Our experience and knowledge of the church, its yearly rites and festivities is, for many, fading fast. Twice a year we may perhaps pop our heads into the local church, shakes hands nervously with the local vicar (just how do you address him / her?) before curtseying backwards into the Women’s Institute flower display, but that’s about it. Or, at least, that’s how it used to be. For as anyone who either lives in Poland or lives near a community of ex-pat Poles knows very well, there are some churches where the cup runneth over - Polish churchgoers standing and even kneeling in the streets outside.

Huge church attendances were one of the first things to hit me when I came to Poland. And Sunday services repeated several times, with people queuing outside a la Harrods on Boxing Day morning?! You just don’t see it in Britain. And, as an occasional church-goer myself, I love to see it: just the sight of so many cheers the soul. However, removing my rose-tinted spectacles for a moment, I wonder how it was ten or twenty years ago. For many, going to church is merely ‘the done thing’. Where the church was once the source of comfort and an alternative to spiritually empty and morally bankrupt Communism, many Poles no longer seek nor, in fact, need such a solidarity and worship instead at the new churches of Ikea and the Galeria shopping centres. In this, of course, Polish society is merely ‘catching up’ with those in the West.

But Easter, at least, is a time of genuine celebration. And Poles fill every part of Holy Week with meaning and tradition. On Easter Saturday, for example, people take baskets of food into church to be blessed by the priest, and children paint eggs, giving them to members of their family. Another of the many family-related traditions is the all-day breakfast on Easter Sunday, when kitchen tables are laden with all manner of tasty foods, to be enjoyed from dawn to dusk. Traditionally, a moderate intake of alcohol from morning onwards helps ensure a particularly cheery Sunday.

Although the Slavs are great churchgoers, Christianity came late to this part of the world, with paganism only beginning to be replaced in the tenth and eleventh centuries. And pagan customs are much more evident in Poland than in the West. For example, the pagan Pole used to sprinkle water on the fields to awaken the Earth Mother after her long winter sleep. This custom has – with some slight modification, it’s true - survived to this day in the custom of throwing (sometimes sizeable quantities of) cold water over innocent passers-by. It’s called Wet Monday, or Śmigus-dyngus (after two mythical pagan gods), and you’d better be on your guard on Easter Monday when any random citizen – usually a child – decides to cover you in water, balconies of flats being a popular launching-pad. Although tradition dictates that you’re not allowed to be angered by this, you are allowed to retaliate. Sales of water pistols, AK47s and orange plastic rocket-launchers are predicted to rise over the Easter period.

First published in the Krakow Post newspaper 2009