Time and Stone

Saturday night, on walkabout, we passed Kościół Święta Andrzeja, the Church of St. Andrew, and Dr. Banaś pointed out the projectile/gun ports in the wall at levels that would seem not the most effective (behind the van). In those days, churches served as fortifications as well as holy places, and Jan Długosz reported that St. Andrew’s “was the only church to resist the Tartar invasion of 1241.” (78) Of course, time has built up the surface surrounding the church, which explains the seeming misplacement of these defensive vents, buries the church  in the dust of the every day, and so now one descends stone steps to enter what was once at street-level—over nine hundred years ago.

I don’t know whether any of these stones are in more or less the same place they were in 1241, or in 1079, when the foundation was laid. (Ten seventy effing nine.) The stones that are piled here in Romanesque fashion seem old enough, rough, rude, weathered, war-scarred, the repairs motley enough to imagine invaders killed under the walls and souls saved within. But only the stones remain bearing the stories as only stones can. Mutely, abandoned anchors of what happened. No, nothing is permanent, and yet, some things are more permanent than others. Hardness and quiet.