Polish Landscapes: Magazine Article

I first set foot in Poland four years ago, spending a couple of weeks in Poznan. It was my longest trip outside England and everything was wonderfully strange and exotic. Later, I was charmed by Krakow: its main square, charming streets and old town architecture. I fell in love with it immediately, the hot summer sun quickly burning away any Cold War stereotypes about the country or its people.

Mind you, those who choose to stay soon discover there’s more to life than tourist trails and there are some less than pretty residential areas in Polish cities. Many’s the time I’ve got lost in a sea of grey apartment blocks whose only identifying features were the massive adverts plastered on the sides. No, give me green, any day. I love a bit of green, especially after a long winter (minus twenty-seven Celsius?! Nobody warned me about that one!). So my dog obligingly pulls me around the nearby park three times a day, I stack my balcony with flowers in the spring, and get out of the city whenever I can.

Take a slow train journey between cities. You’ll soon get the hang of the Polish landscape. It’s flat! Really flat! And kind of plain, too. I mean, even the Poles call it Polska, and everyone knows that pol means ‘field’ in Polish. I rest my case.

Of course, Poland is not actually billiard-table flat. Of course not. That would be silly. The south of the country is a huge area of rolling hills, uplands and, of course, the Tatras, which are a magnet for the foreigner just as much as the Poles. I was only in the country for two weeks before climbing Rysy, one of the range’s highest peaks at 2499m. I didn’t expect that. ‘Beats the English Pennines, that’s for sure!

And, unlike England, there are many landscapes here that seem hardly touched by Man at all, an almost primal wildness still lingering in many of the hills and valleys. Taking a moonlit sleighride along a remote snowy forest track, the sound of wolves echoing along the valley was a wonderful, slightly unnerving brush with the raw Poland that I shall never forget.

Copyright John Marshall 2009