Rain fell steadily and at times, heavily, which packed the cathedral with candy Poles. Not easy to move about. Like St. Adalbert’s, the cathedral dates to the early 1000s, and by its completion some 700 hundred years later, exhibited the gamut of architectural styles, inside and out. I rather like agglutinative aesthetics, but I don’t particularly enjoy the challenge of explaining them.
A few tombs of interest on the main floor, Kazimierz the Great, Stefan Batory, and the silver reliquary supposed to house the remains of St. Stanislaw—not likely—of whose butchery you will read shortly. What Italians could do with marble in the Renaissance astonishes! Orangey though, with the complexion of pepperoni. Equally perplexing is how and why, exactly, marble? We, I (again), did not descend into the crypt for more tombs—surcharge.
Repeated my tour, as well, of the royal apartments. Nothing new to report, and my comments regarding the Royal Castle in Warsaw could be inserted here. One ceiling was impressively beamed with larch, a second ornately paneled with deeply recessed boxes, a third, the most famous, populated with carved heads that stare down upon us with the same vulgarity as we gaze up at them. A bust of Caracalla wears the look of a school bully. Otherwise, simply fabulous, again. We descended into the caves below the castle, the dragon Krak’s lair, where I unsuccessfully attempted photography. Too dark, I think. The folktale goes that Krak, like most dragons, made himself a pest by eating the locals. Enter king, beautiful daughter, inventive farm boy who induces Krak to devour a Trojan sheep stuffed with sulphur. Boom. Next thing you know, a thriving Krakow.
More interesting, though not drier, was our walking tour of Kazimierz, the former Jewish district of Krakow. My old haunt, having lived for two weeks there in 2004 on Miodowa, a main street. Visited the Old Synagogue and the New Jewish Cemetery, an almost random assortment of stones and memorials, a charnel junk drawer. I feel more fully the tragedy of the Holocaust here than at Auschwitz, for not only were the Nazis intent on murdering a people, the Jews, their purpose was to erase an entire culture as well, the wonder of which culture that is so evident in restored Kazimierz.
Christianity, Roman Catholicism, likewise abounds in Kazimierz, with its coincident charms, coincident with the names and color schemes of my growing up. There is the Church of St. Catherine, in which St. Rita has prominent billing, the names of my grandmother and mother, respectively. No one seems to be able to take a clear picture of the statue of St. Rita, the Patroness of Difficult and Impossible Cases. My efforts blurred, and the post-card I received from a very kind Protectress of the Card Table Display of the Holy Bric-a-Brac is similarly unfocused. The church Boze Cialo (Bozhay Ciao-wo), or Corpus Christi, I love for its blacks and its gold, and its black and gold—the Steeler Church. It’s of the 1340s and the 1970s. Not far away, though not in Kazimierz proper, is the Norbertanek cloister, my father’s patron saint. And finally, the Paulite Church “On the Rock,” which impressed itself in my memory on this trip for two reasons. First, we happened upon a pool into which a finger of the dismembered St. Stanislaw is reputed to have been thrown. Stashek was killed and quartered in 1079 in a power struggle with Boleslaw the Bold, a struggle in which holy men generally lose but become saints in the process: vide Thomas Becket and Thomas More—two of my favorite old movies. Remember Peter O’Toole’s (Henry II) wonderful line, “He’s read books, you know. It’s amazing.” And second, in the crypt of the Church “On the Rock” lie interred a number of Poland’s cultural heroes, including now Czeslaw Milosz, who died during my second visit to Poland and who lived, I found out recently, not far from David. Owing in part to Milosz, and Szymborska and Zagajewski, I’m reciting more poetry now than ever, and certainly more poetry than prayer.
To find my home in one sentence, concise,
as if hammered in metal.
Not to enchant anybody,
not to make a name for oneself in posterity.
An unnamed need for rhythm, for order, for form.
Which three words are opposed
To chaos and nothingness.
Or words to that effect. This tangle of associations makes Kazimierz my favorite quarter of Krakow.(156-162)
No comments:
Post a Comment