Dual-city Cieszyn. Polish, Czech, shared?
panorama of Czech Cieszyn, in the foreground on the right - Romanesque rotunda
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In Cieszyn this vibration is different, calm, Polish-Czech and intimate. Real and alive, because unlike the Jews of Krakow - Czech neighbors have not disappeared, they are here - fortunately, this relationship is authentic and tangible. And it is certainly a Cieszyn vibration, not a Krakow or Bielsko-Biala vibration; it is a vibration specific only to this city. So it vibrates for itself without a lot of noise, without a big-city nerve. Cieszyn is a city of fifteen minutes, perfect for living. Tailored for someone whose nerves are unnecessary. It pleases the eye with the river, from which the city has not turned away, the murmur of water has a good effect on walkers along the Olza and Młynówka.
Cieszyn-Prince Pan is a bit like an English queen, he really can be liked, even though he can already go around his entire empire by melex. Prince Polo, that most famous Cieszyn delicacy, adored even in Iceland, is a no-nonsense attempt to distill what is important in Cieszyn. Prince Polo, Cieszyn's Prince Pan is associated to me with the slightly upturned nose of Prince Pan from Rumcajs. I like this association, it's princely bohemian, humorous, and suggests the need to find that aforementioned distance from oneself.
In addition to the Prince Polo wafer, the other delicacy - completely unknown to outsiders - herring sandwiches, is also very Cieszyn. Supposedly, you have to buy them at PSS Społem delicatessen in the morning, because after that they are no longer available. I'll check out these sandwiches the next time I'm in Cieszyn, and I certainly will, because once you discover Cieszyn, you'll keep coming back.
Adam Mickiewicz Theater
Photo: Jakub Połomski © UM Cieszyn
I'm also looking forward to spring in Cieszyn. There are plenty of trees everywhere, greenery, which, when it bursts along the banks of the Olza River, I feel something will get really cosmic. I find the city relaxing. Greened can turn out to be a real spa for a battered soul.
Walking through this colorful, in places already very neat space, which still has a lot of renovation, resuscitation and reinterpretation ahead, I notice a streetcar rail. The streetcar, which used to run through the city, linking the center with the train station, today - although it no longer exists - is still an important symbol for Cieszyn. Hence the Tram pub, the commemorative rail in the renovated roadway and the planned investments, making a statement about the streetcar architecturally, literally and figuratively. The streetcar once connected the two halves that were later separated, and today it may play a similar role. For now, as a symbol. These are the plans of the city today. And in the future? Who knows, maybe someday it will be possible to recover this streetcar also in reality? It would drive one from Poland to the Czech Republic, back and forth, and it would make these hills like San Francisco.
And while riding this streetcar I would still be thinking about this contemporary Cieszyn identity, which is the key to understanding today's Cieszyn - and as I know it well - also the key to wisely designing its future. The identity of the many artists here, local patriots, and local regulars willing to discuss it. After all, the soul of Cieszyn Silesia and its tiny capital is a wonderful cocktail of cultures, not only Polish and Czech, princely and imperial, but also, after all, the neighboring Beskydy highlanders, numerous Silesians, formerly numerous Germans and Jews, and nearby Slovaks.
Museum of Cieszyn Silesia
Photo: Wojciech Wandzel © UM Cieszyn
Full in this cocktail of stelaks, these ones fascinate me especially. Because Cieszyn's stelaks, or multi-generational locals, have a chance to prove more than a thousand years of uninterrupted incumbency, which certainly has a big impact on the complexity of Cieszyn's element, soul and self-esteem. There is in this Cieszyn some complex of Bielsko-Biała, bigger, richer, with shopping mall, big industry, mega-success from the industrial revolution. Cieszyn at the time remained its unchanging self, losing its importance and becoming somewhat marginalized. But that history has already been written, it's time to write a new narrative for new times - and this narrative will take advantage of this lack of change, the lack of the Industrial Revolution and its impact on reality, and make Cieszyn's immutability the second advantage besides its bohemianism, the second leg of the success that Cieszyn will enjoy in the coming decade, which I don't doubt.
The identity of the stelaks, who are simply the most numerous here in Cieszyn, cannot be overlooked in this new narrative. This bypassing of the city by the industrial revolution has produced a remarkable result: a nationally unique advantage of stelaks over newcomers.
Next door, in Bielsko-Biała, alongside stelaks from Biała Krakowska and very few from Bielitz, appeared the khadziaje and verbos. The khadziai were an immigrant population from across the river Bug, who populated empty post-German and post-Jewish tenements after 1945, quickly becoming the cause of their dire aesthetic and utilitarian condition. Later, with the development of more factories and the construction of Bielsko-Biała's big slab, they were joined by the recruits - as the autochthons used to say disdainfully about the laborers brought in from all over Poland. Neither chadziai nor verbusi appeared in Cieszyn - because there were neither empty post-German tenements nor abandoned former Jewish space - a more numerous Jewish community had never lived in Cieszyn. There wasn't much to draw verbiage to either - local businesses didn't generate that much demand. Thanks to this, an absolutely unique identity of stelaks survived in Cieszyn - undisturbed excessively by outsiders. Such a city as Krakow, for example, also has its stelaks - they are Krakow bourgeois families who live around the Main Square in tenements that have lasted for seven hundred years. But there are perhaps a few percent of such stelaks in Krakow. The metropolis was populated by successive waves of chadziaks (these poured in, as in Bielsko, into places abandoned by Jews, namely Kazimierz and the ghetto areas in Podgórze), and then hundreds of thousands of verbiage descending on Nowa Huta and the blockhouses - as the city continues to grow furiously. The process continues uninterrupted - verbiage from all over the world is now being drawn to Krakow for the BPO sector, co-creating a cosmopolitan society of great change.
Meanwhile, in Cieszyn... nothing of the sort is happening. And that's just the thing! Imagine the consequences: a dozen or so thousands of people neighboring each other and continuing uninterruptedly certain traditions for perhaps even a thousand years, still in the same place, in more unchanging company than elsewhere, assimilating the few outsiders more efficiently than in other cities.
