Sunday 19 June After a fairy poor sleep due to street noise overnight from the town square, we had a very early but slow start to the day. We planned to take the 10am Free Walking Tour of Wroclaw. Local guy Mat was our Free Walking Tour guide whose English was good, and he was really enthusiastic about his home town. He filled us in about the history of the city, which has had 17 different names, been part of four different countries and about 70% destroyed in WWII. Its interesting to hear that many of the historic and ornate buildings that we are looking at have been completely rebuilt since the war.
In some places, there are photographs taken in 1945 fixed to walls near where they were taken so you can compare the differences.A lot of the reconstruction was funded by the allies, but during the communist period, very little additional work was done. The government concentrated mainly on building cheap small apartments for housing which look pretty depressing. There was one attempt at constructing a new precinct using some of the visual elements of the existing buildings, but didn’t continue as it was seen as a waste of resources.
The town and particularly the town square have apparently changed dramatically since the fall of the communist government. For example in the area in front of our accommodation used to house a petrol station and traffic was allowed through the square. He also told us about the city rivalries, particularly between Wroclaw and Krakow, like Sydney/Melbourne but on a different level. Wroclaw is also a university town, with over 100,000 students, many form outside Poland living and studying here, although few from Asia. The Chinese wave of tourism hasn’t really hit here yet compared to western Europe.
Here is a selection of photos take on the tour.
On our city tour we also went to Hala Targowa, a large indoor market at with lots of local produce, including some very nice cheeses that we had to sample. Here are some photos for a bit of local colour.
In the afternoon we joined the Wroclaw Dwarf Free Walking Tour led by Kuba a local resident. Wroclaw is famous for its dwarf (or gnome) statuettes which now apparently number over 300. This only dates back to the 1980s during the Solidarity movement made famous by Lech Wałęsa and the workers of the Gdańsk shipyard. In Wroclaw the movement was called the Orange Alternative and led by Waldemar Fydrych. Rather than strikes or physical resistance, the movement used humour, parody and passive demonstration to resist the communist government – not unlike BUGA-UP. It started when the government painted over anti- government graffiti with white paint. The Orange Alternative started painting orange dwarfs over this paint. The word for dwarf in Polish sounds similar to the Russian word for red, symbol of the communists. The activists took to wearing red pointy hats to mock the government, and famously, during a mass demonstration at Christmas time, 3 guys in Santa Claus costumes were arrested with the demonstrators. The rest is history. In 2005 Wroclaw was looking for an identifiable icon, and decided on the dwarf as a reference to that time, and so the tradition began. The first one was a caricature of Waldemar Fydrych, standing on the tip of a raised middle finger. It was placed at the location of a ‘Milk Bar’ where many public meetings were held. A consistent aspect of the dwarfs is that they are humorous, irreverent or both. What started in a small way has snowballed, and now the council has legislation to control their spread. Private companies are now wanting to place dwarfs outside their businesses – the most extreme being a dwarf at an ATM outside a bank. We discussed this commercialisation with Kuba over a coffee following the tour. He said there are mixed feelings about it. Some people see it as a huge benefit for the local economy, but some of the old hard-liners see it as a sell-out to the capitalists. Waldemar Fydrych is unhappy that the use of dwarfs has become divorced from the original purpose. Kuba can see both sides, the joy of children trying to find them spread across the city, and the loss of the historical context for the Polish people. We also asked him about the changes that have happened in the post communist period and he said it’s been a mixed blessing. In the early period, a few capitalists made lots of money, and since then, overall living standards for the majority of people have greatly improved. However in some regions, particularly mining and manufacturing, and in country areas there is still a difficult financial struggle for those people – especially as more young people move to the cities. It was much better to have a more in-depth understanding of the context as we photographed the dwarfs. Here is a sample.
After the dwarf tour, Kuba mentioned over coffee that a cinema had Polish versions of foreign (English language) movies and a private gallery that had a poster exhibition. They sounded interesting, and were still within the old city, so out with the map and off we went.
Unfortunately the poster gallery was already closed, and not open tomorrow (our last day). The cinema was open however and so we went in for a look. They basically had a bookshop that also sold posters and postcards.The posters were fantastic. In the communist period, any foreign movies that were shown had posters for them made locally in Polish, and the artists apparently had a pretty free reign as to what to depict – in most cases they looked nothing like the originals as they would not have seen the official promotional posters.
Since that time, graphic artists have re-interpreted some movie posters (predominantly from the USA) in their own style, which is most of the ones we saw. We got this information after Frances struck up a conversation about books and movies with the bookseller who spoke very good English and was a mine of information.
Dinnertime was approaching and time for another trip out into a world of incomprehensible menus. Of course we could have gone to Pizza Hut a few doors away. Instead we headed to the university quarter in the hope of finding something reasonably priced, interesting and edible. After a while we found another ‘Milk Bar’, Bar Misz Masz (pronounced Mish Mash). Again it was through a series of pointing and gesticulation that we ordered our meals.
I was about to go to a nearby store to buy some beer, when I noticed what looked like beer in their fridge. We hadn’t seen bottles like that before. I asked if it was beer, it was, and how much. They said beer with dinner was free! Bottles soft drinks like Coke had to be paid for. We settled for one of each, and headed outside on the benches to eat. Fortunately it was a little late, so no smokers nearby. Frances had a plate of chicken with mushroom, potato (of course) and white cabbage salad. She really enjoyed it, although the serving was too much to eat.Likewise with my meal, a combination of pierogi, meat filled dumplings, and something like a chicken and vegetable curry. The dumplings were the best, the pierogi a bit uninteresting, and the chicken curry….well I ate the vegetables. The beer was fine; one was from Wroclaw (the best) and the other from Krakow.
On the way back we found an excellent gelataria and shared a delicious passion fruit ice-cream. Quite tired by now, after two long walking tours during the day, and gallery visit, we’d covered 17,000 steps (including the back 145 up to our bed-sit), close to our record in Seoul.