On this date last year, I had just arrived in Poland,
slipping down through a winter fog into the damp snowy cold of Małopolska,
“Little Poland,” the capital of which is Kraków. A year later I miss
everything about Poland—except the damp cold. But since so many of the good
things about Poland in winter are a response to the damp cold, a quiet
resistance to it, an occasional defiance of it—vodka, tea, grzaniec (“hot, spiced wine”),
a peppery barszcz, conversation with
family or boon companions in pubs and cafés and cukiernie (“sweet shops”), and szarlotka—perhaps
I miss the damp cold, too. The slush on cobbly pavements. The snow falling
clumpily from trees. The smell of wet cement, a little salty, a little savory.
The typical cold in Minnesota is not the same, but drier, edgier, and its polar
vortexicality, not in the least to be preferred. The chill cold dripping down
one’s neck on Karmeliczka Street,
while hardly pleasant, doesn’t begin to compare for discomfort with the
rolling, bitter, avalanche of subzero temperatures and subarctic windchills. BRRR.
At the moment, I remember my arrival in winter Poland warmly.
I have been reading Długosz desultorily,
intermittently, since coming home and yesterday arrived at the year 1414, exactly
600 years ago. Sometimes such coincidences seem more than coincidental. But I
have to say, little noteworthy appears to have happened in 1414. Yes, the
plague abated somewhat, but the Teutonic Knights were up to their old
bedevilment. While King Władysław defeated them spectacularly at the Battle of Grunwald in
1410, he neglected to push his advantage, failing to take their fortress at Małbork
and leaving them a stronghold for continuing mischief; the Order appears to be
winning the “peace,” duping the King, taking advantage of his diplomatic good
nature, and “using gold and bribery as arguments rather than justice” in
international forums of arbitration. Władysław concludes a truce “for winter
is approaching and dysentery rife among his troops.” He’s still angry with his
kinsman and ally, the Grand-duke of Lithuania. Heresy visits Czechoslovakia in
the person of Jan Hus. Same old, same old, and without much encouraging to say
to readers 600 years hence.
But having now read Jan Długosz himself, and not just read
of him, his long and unflinching account of hardship and misfortune in the
middle ages, with rare visions of peace and goodness, I have a new appreciation
for his name, accomplishment, and the resting place of his bones in the crypt
as Na Skałce.
