The World and Its People, Part 42

THE ISLAND THEATRE OF THE LAZIENKI PARK IN WARSAW

CHAPTER XXIII — POLAND
WARSAW AND THE NORTH

As we leave Cracow, we shall see just outside of the city what seems an ordinary hillock some seventy feet in height. This is Kosciusko Hill. The people built it themselves, when they were allowed to raise no other monument to the fallen champion of their freedom. Each Pole of Cracow carried here his own basket of earth.

On the road to Warsaw we shall pass another famous sight, the religious shrine of Czestochowa. This is the holy city of the Poles; and when invaders have attempted its capture, the Poles have always rallied to its defense with special earnestness. It contains a very ancient image of the Madonna. Less than three centuries ago this image was formally crowned by the government as "The Queen of Poland," and through all the days when the land had no other sovereign of its own, the people thought of this Holy Mother as their queen and prayed to her. The Poles are an earnestly Catholic and deeply religious folk, and a pilgrimage to the shrine of Czestochowa is still the main event in the life of many Polish peasants. Their devotion before the shrine is most impressive. Sometimes hundreds, even thousands, of pilgrims will be seen lying flat on their faces muttering their prayers. The stones of the church are worn away by the contact of human bodies. At almost any time in a Polish church service, you can see some worshiper stretched 1330 flat upon his face, often with arms extended to form a cross; or you will see an aged man beat his head upon the floor in a very agony of soul. Women sometimes become dumb for hours in a sort of hysteria from the intensity of their religious sorrow. Czestochowa is only the main Polish shrine among a thousand.

We have crossed now from the Poland which Austria formerly held and ruled good-naturedly, to the district farther north, which was under Russia's strict and savage rule. We are also reaching a lower land, as the Vistula and its tributaries seek the sea level. The ground becomes more fertile. Occasional forests appear, and trees line every stream and roadway and shut in the horizon. This part of Poland has long been one of the main grain fields of Europe. It grows also huge fields of beets for sugar; and the peasants still raise, though less extensively than before, a great crop of potatoes. They use the potato now for food, though once it was cultivated almost solely for the making of "vodka" the brandy of the Russians.

The peasant homes here are unlike any that we have seen elsewhere. They are built of wood and colored a grayish blue. The roofs are made of thatch, and the windows are so tiny as to let in scarcely any light. Each house stands by itself in the fields amid a great loneliness. There are no roads, few villages, and fewer churches. Occasionally we pass the farm of a wealthy proprietor, where there are barns and orchards, and farming is carried on in modern style; but most of the farms are still cultivated by hand in long, narrow strips and the peasants we see at work upon them are almost as heavy-faced and helpless as the serfs of old. There are cows here for the children to herd, instead of the pigs and geese of the south. The old Polish costumes have disappeared; but a peculiar, modern garb is widely used, perhaps because of the cheapness of its cloth. Both jacket and trousers, or the skirts of the women, are of the same bright red or yellow cloth with broad stripes of green. Even the children wear this peculiar garb. The religious devotion of the people finds its expression in the raising of tall wooden crosses in the fields. These are not costly emblems, carrying a carved figure of the Christ; they are just two great crossed sticks of wood fastened together and uplifted by the farmer's hand. A few windmills also survive, though most of these were destroyed when the Russian and German armies fought back and forth across the fields. New huts have been erected since, but not the costly windmills.

Lodz, the second largest city of Poland, containing over half a Continued 1332 1331

GOING TO CHURCH IN POLAND
Poland's new freedom has roused in her peasants a joy that is expressed in gay outbursts, unknown to their former somber lives.

1332 million people, is reached a little to the south and west of Warsaw. Lodz is wholly a modern town, a manufacturing city, laid out upon a flat and treeless plain, for mills and the homes of the mill-hands. It has a single main street several miles in length; but there is nothing in the whole dreary town, to hold any one there for a single moment except on business.

When Warsaw is at last reached, we find ourselves in a different world indeed. Warsaw was the capital of a powerful people for two centuries, and has now become their capital again. In the Middle Ages it was the rival of Paris, as the home of wit and culture and gayety; and this fame also it seems striving to renew. It contains nearly a million people, of whom almost a third are Jews. The latter still carry on most of the business of the city; but its manufactures are to a considerable extent in German hands. Its social life lies largely with the upper class and more intelligent Poles, descendants of the old nobility. The cultured Poles have charming personalities indeed, truly warm hearted, frank and sympathetic. As a rule, they are tall and slender, blond, and with features of much delicacy, which in the women at least are very beautiful. Though Poland is now a democracy, most of the power still remains with these city folk, whether Poles or Jews, and must continue so until the country folk have reached a much higher level of intelligence.

Warsaw lies upon the western bank of the Vistula, raised upon a terrace perhaps a hundred feet above the river. The river curves; and so both terrace and city take a crescent shape, almost encircling the suburb of Praga, which lies on the lower eastern bank of the river. The fortifications of the city rise on the high west bank; for Warsaw was built originally as a defense against the invasion of Russians and Asiatics from the East. Praga has thus become the site of the chief defeats of Poland. Its citizens defended it desperately against the Russians when their country was being seized. The Russian general Suvarof finally announced its surrender to his empress, Catherine, in a despatch of three words "Hurrah, Praga, Suvarof." The empress in response rewarded his success with equal brevity, "Bravo, Field-Marshal, Catherine." When the Poles revolted, and were again crushed at Praga, the citizens of Warsaw were compelled to build the great Alexander Citadel which stands like a mighty jailor on a height to the north of the city, keeping watch upon its every movement.

From the rampart of the Citadel we can get our best view of the 1333 new Warsaw with its intense and eager activity. Directly beneath us lies the "new town" with handsome modern dwellings. South of this on the river bank is the old Jewish quarter, including the Stare Miasto, the original market place and central square of Warsaw. Its old buildings still carry above their arched doors, the coats-of-arms of their former owners, or a trade mark, or a sacred motto in bad Latin. They are carved with figures of saints or ornaments. Some of the houses are six centuries old and have sloping walls as thick as those of a fortress. On one side of the square is the old Fukier wine-house. It serves you the national Polish beverage, mead, a mixture of beer and honey; but if the proprietor knows you favorably, you can gain entry beyond the old public room with its bench-seat lining the walls and its model of an old-time frigate hanging in the center. In some inner chamber you may then call for the rare old Hungarian wines which are said to be preserved here, sometimes three centuries old. The Fukier house and its wines are famed all over Europe.

THE "THIEVES' MARKET" FOR OLD GOODS IN WARSAW

Beyond the Stare Miasto, rises the royal palace, and beyond that begins Cracow Street, the most famed of Warsaw's avenues, lined with gorgeous churches and palaces and dwellings, the favorite promenade 1334 of the aristocracy. Down the middle of part of Cracow Street, there extends a garden with gay flowers leading up to an unusually fine statue of Mickiewicz, the national poet. Another statue which long "adorned” the street has been torn down. It was erected by the Russians in honor of the general who had crushed a former Polish revolt and punished it with savage cruelty.

The University of Warsaw fronts also upon Cracow Street. It has been rehabilitated since Poland became a republic; but during the Russian days it was a wholly Russian institution conducting classes in the Russian language; and a patriotic Pole would almost have suffered death rather than have entered its hated walls. So that not this University but the one at Cracow remains still the chief seat of Polish veneration.

We can stroll for more than a mile southward along this gorgeous Cracow Street with its stately structures, before we come to Jerusalem Avenue, a broad promenade with handsome houses of much beauty. It leads down to the Vistula and crosses the river by the newest and finest of Polish bridges. This bridge, however, was built only as a bold speculation. It leads to an almost empty suburb, which the builders hoped would fill up more rapidly than it has since the bridge made it so easily accessible.

Beyond Jerusalem Avenue our southward road leads us to the chief parks of Warsaw, first the Ujadowska, carefully laid out with playgrounds for the children and amusements for the poor, and then the Lazienki, which means literally "the Baths." There are, however, no baths here now. The park descends the slope toward the river; but the Vistula long since changed its lazy course beyond another ridge, so that now the valley of the park holds only a shallow lake with an artificial outlet.

On one side of this lake, on a terrace reached by broad steps and adorned by statuary, stands the Lazienki chateau, one of the most perfect, dainty, but unkingly royal residences ever devised. In the old days when Poland was still nominally free under a king elected by her nobles, this park was the home of her kings; and the last of these, Stanislaus Poniatowsky, the king who sat upon the throne when Russia conquered the land, built here this suburban villa. It is as French as though Louis XIV had erected it, elegant and artificial, with columns and cornices and marble walls of dazzling whiteness. As we enter by the lofty portico we find in an ante-room four stately statues of great Continued 1336 1335

THE TOWN-HOUSE OF THORN
Thorn is one of the Polish cities on the borderland where the Poles have inherited the rich buildings of their German masters.

1336 Polish kings, and then, in an inner room beyond, a series of portraits of all the fair Polish ladies who graced the king's court and flirted with him in his barges on the lake. The decorations of the ballroom are dated 1793, the very year of Poland's capture. So while his people were fighting at Praga, their king was ornamenting his palace.

There is an open-air theatre in the park, fitted in amid giant old trees with a background of antique columns showing amid the foliage. The stage of this theatre is set upon an island, the audience being seated on the mainland, so that the actors are brought on and off the stage in rowboats in sight of the entire assemblage. The theatre is extremely popular in Warsaw today. There is a great public theatre in the heart of the city and also a sumptuous Opera House. The Poles love the drama almost as much as they love music, and their freedom has been eagerly used for the cultivation and encouragement of these national arts.

Northwest of Warsaw we may journey into what was formerly German Poland. The Russians and Austrians each took possession of a larger part of Poland than Germany seized. Yet the German section was not less valuable; for it included the richest mines, and the rich old cities of Thorn and Posen, or Posnen as the Poles call it.

Posnen was the Polish capital in those early days which preceded even Cracow's rise. In Posen's cathedral were buried the first of the nation's kings, and a sumptuous monument has been erected over the shrine of the two earliest ones. Most of Posen has been repeatedly destroyed by fire and battle; and the old Jewish and Polish quarters look very dilapidated. Indeed the German rulers of the city used to be fond of pointing to the prosperous well-built modern German quarter as a contrast to the older sections, saying, "This is what Posen was, and what we have made of it." None of the official German buildings, however, not even the royal palace built by Emperor William II to tie his Polish subjects to him in gratitude, can compare in grace with the old Polish town-house which still stands in the Old Market Place. This is a semi-Italian, quaintly turreted and columned structure, with a huge old cen- tral clock tower. In front of the town-house still rises the ancient "pillory" in which offenders were held up to public scorn. Under the new republic this stately old town-house and the stately cathedral have once more become the center of the life of this typical city of Catholic, self-governing Poland.