the talking bear

Coffee Culture in Kraków - Link Update

Polskie Radio (current) link to report and mp3. Audio also here.

http://www.polskieradio.pl/zagranica/gb/dokument.aspx?iid=49622

International Print Triennial - II

A longer package for the 'Focus' magazine on Radio Polonia. News on the IPT and also a discussion on new methods of graphic art and Polish print abroad. Aired Radio Polonia 21.09.2006.

Read on for the transcript, or if you're not feeling up to it, download the MP3 here. (7.9 MB)

The International Print Triennial has just kicked off in Poland’s southern city of Kraków. 4500 prints were submitted by 1191 artists for the competition, and out of those, 322 works by 229 artists qualified for the main exhibiton. This the 18th edition of the event, which also turns 40 years old this year.

There is more to this year’s Print Triennial than just the main exhibition though. Professor Witold Skulicz, the president of the International Print Triennial Society in Kraków, explains more:

The programme is huge: there are so many exhibitions that it's almost frightening, and I have to be present at all of them. Please imagine that apart from the main programme, we have created a seperate event, which is organised by the International Print Triennial. 20 galleries in Kraków are taking part in the Graphic Art Days, an event we would like to see becoming an annual fixture in the Cracovian cultural calendar.

Polish graphic art is currently living its great 5 minutes, and I believe that we shouldn't waste them.

Richard Noyce, British art critic, was president of the jury at this year’s Triennial. I asked him about the preparations for the event:

The fact of the matter is that the standard of works submitted this year was incredibly high. I was on the jury again in 2003, and I thought the standard was high then, but this year the standard has surpassed that, it is really an extraordinary high standard on an international scale, so the work of the jury was very difficult indeed. Very challenging, but ultimately very rewarding. The standard of conception is very high, the standard of execution is very high, there’s some amazingly original work, and underneath it all, it’s also very, very accesible.

Ingrid Ledent, an artist from Belgium, won the Grand Prix award this year. I caught up with her before the opening of the main exhibition:

I feel absolutely spoiled, because, well, if you see the quality of the works here, I think there are so many Grand Prix winners here, but it’s me who got it, so I feel absolutely spoiled, I’m so happy.

How are these prints made, are they digital, are they traditional, or is it a mixture of both?

Well, it’s a mixture of both, the main technique is lithography, but it’s combined with digital print. It’s a real traditional litho, even printed on the big stones, so I grain them and it’s the traditional way. But the thing is I make it in a traditional way, but I don’t use it in a traditional way. That’s the thing I try to do.

How do you see the future of graphic art?

Well, I’m very positive, I think with the influence of the new media people start to mix the things, so the traditional way still exists, while I think you can still do things using the traditional graphic methods, which you cannot do with the new media, and vice-versa.

Thank you very much, dank je wel, and many congratulations once again.

Do widzenia!

The International Print Triennial, or IPT, also acts as a forum for graphic art and the direction it is going in. Following on from the previous edition is the debate on digital print, which is becoming more popular as a medium for print-making. Davida Kidd, a Canadian artist who won the IPT Grand Prix award in 2003 and who is also exhibiting her new work this year, gives her opinion on the winner’s entry and on the new techniques being used today:

The standard of art is really high, and it’s interesting because in 2003 there was a lot of digital work and some of the work was very young that you knew there was going to be a change in years to come and that people would have a more sophisticated use for it.

I think it was a really excellent choice. It shows for example just what I was talking about that her work, at first view, it’s very minimal, and you’re not sure what it is, and you find out that underneath some very intricate handwork is a computer-generated image of skin, and the fact that it is computer-generated, or scanned, is really secondary to the fact that what the piece is really about is the traces of time that happen over a human being’s body with skin and scars and wrinkles. She’s taken a photograph of skin, a representation of time, and then she’s done these very very painfully intricate drawings of fine lines done by hand that superimpose over on top of the photograph. So, the drawing is a metaphor for time, the slowness of time passing and all of the traces and lines that happen over time.

It seems that digital print is becoming more important than ever before. But to what extent is it changing the art that is being produced? Richard Noyce again:

There was some controversy at the last Triennial about the gulf between digital work and traditional work, and I expressed that hope, and I have to say I am not a practising printmaking artist, I tend to write about art more than anything else, but I expressed a hope, then, that the gap between the digital world of print and the traditional world of print would disappear. Some people thought that was close to heresy, but now artists are able to choose whatever they like and Ingrid Ledent is a very good case in point, that you can use digital, or traditional lithography, or combine them. And that is the way it has to be. Digital, for me now, is just another technique, it sits with woodcut, wood engraving, etching and lithography, and all the others. It is just another technique, it’s available to artists.

Karen Kunc is a graphic artist from the state of Nebraska in the United States. She is having an exhibition as part of the International Print Triennial, and it seems that this isn’t the first time she’s been to Poland:

This isn’t your first time in Kraków, you’ve been involved with the Kraków Triennial for a while, what’s the history behind it?

Well, I do have a wonderful long relationship with Kraków from 20 years, when I visited the first time as a guest to give lectures in Poland, I was in Warsaw and Kraków, and did alecture about my work, and I was very young at the time, so it was a learning experience about how to explain my work and I met so many Polish artists that became life-long friends, but then it took 15 years before I came back for Triennial in 2000, and then I also came back to teach at the Academy (of Fine Arts) in 2002, I believe. It was wonderful to come back and continue meeting people, I’ve followed the development of so many of these Polish artists that I met, for all of this time, and had an exhibition in the United States that I organised of Polish artists, so that was very important too, so I think there’s an emotional connection from our long history together.

The International Print Triennial is truly a feast for lovers of graphic art and printmaking. There is so much on offer, that it looks as if every building in the Old Town of Kraków has turned into a gallery for the occasion. The IPT has also signed an agreement with two other galleries to turn the Triennial into a truly international affair. The Horst-Janssen Musuem in Oldenburg, Germany, and the Kunstlerhaus in Vienna, Austria, will be exhibiting works that were submitted, although chosen by their own juries.

International Print Biennial from 1966; International Print Triennial since 1991. Has the brainchild of Professor Skulicz finally come of age? With forty years at the helm of printmaking in Kraków, we shall see in three years time when the Triennial comes round again.

International Print Triennial - I

News item for the International Print Triennial in Kraków. Account of the opening of the IPT: amazing graphic art! Aired on Radio Polonia 18.09.2006.

Read on for the transcript. MP3 can be downloaded here. (3.3 MB)

The International Print Triennial has kicked off in Poland’s southern city of Kraków. Graphic artists sent 4500 prints to the jury for the event, and from that 322 prints by 229 artists have been selected for the main exhibition of the Print Triennial. The 18th edition of the International Print Triennial also marks the event’s 40th anniversary this year, and the public is being promised a spectacular array of exhibitions by printmakers and artists from around the globe. Professor Witold Skulicz, president of the International Print Triennial Society, has no time to rest on his laurels, though:

The programme is huge: there are so many exhibitions that it's almost frightening, and I have to be present at all of them. Please imagine that apart from the main programme, we have created a seperate event, which is organised by the International Print Triennial. 20 galleries in Kraków are taking part in the Graphic Art Days, an event we would like to see becoming an annual fixture in the Cracovian cultural calendar.

Polish graphic art is currently living its great 5 minutes, and I believe that we shouldn't waste them.

Richard Noyce, British art critic, was president of the jury at this year’s Triennial. I asked him about the preparations for the event:

The fact of the matter is that the standard of works submitted this year was incredibly high. I was on the jury again in 2003, and I thought the standard was high then, but this year the standard has surpassed that, it is really an extraordinary high standard on an international scale, so the work of the jury was very difficult indeed. Very challenging, but ultimately very rewarding. The standard of conception is very high, the standard of execution is very high, there’s some amazingly original work, and underneath it all, it’s also very, very accesible.

The Grand Prix was awarded to Ingrid Ledent, an artist from Belgium who has exhibited at the Triennial before. She won with a series entitled ‘A Self-accomplishing Fact’, which was produced using a hybrid technique of digital and lithography printing:

I feel absolutely spoiled, because, well, if you see the quality of the works here, I think there are so many Grand Prix winners here, but it’s me who got it, so I feel absolutely spoiled, I’m so happy.

One of the artists to get a statutory award was Iwona Abrams, a Polish artist who has been living in the UK for the past couple of decades:

I have graduated from printmaking in 1987 in Poland, then I moved to England, where I studied at the St. Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art. Print was always a very natural wasy of working for me. The Printmaking Triennial in Kraków is an absolute treat for us artists. It’s one of the few remaining… I would say it’s just a celebration of the links that people establish through this kind of event, incredibly important.

The International Print Triennial in Kraków invites you to see some of the most interesting graphic art that is being produced today, and has events running until the end of November, not only in Kraków, but also in other towns across Poland.

Crazy Tours of Nowa Huta

I spent a Sunday not so long ago by going to Nowa Huta for a tour in a Trabant. Stalinist architecture and east-German cars go really well together... Originally sent to Radio Polonia on 15.09.2006. Read further for original uploaded material and transcript. Also Flickr photoset here.

UPDATE: Since Radio Polonia is now the Polish Radio External Service, I can't find the link to the podcast. You can download my original version (with extra music) here (10.6 MB).

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, my dears, it’s one of Crazy Mike’s souped-up Trabants, and he’s going to be taking us around Nowa Huta. ‘Nowa who?’ I hear you say. Well, far from the crowds of tourists that pack into Kraków’s Old Town, Poland’s southern city also has a little-known secret, on an absolutely massive scale. Nowa Huta, or ‘New Steelworks’ in English, is a district that is located to the east of Kraków, mainly known for its socialist architecture and huge steelworks that polluted southern Poland for decades. Once our party managed to squeeze into the car, away we went, through the smog-filled haze that the Trabbie left in its wake.

On the way to Nowa Huta, our guide Michał Ostrowski, or ‘Crazy Mike’, gives the lowdown on Nowa Huta and where he will be taking us:

The first stop is the communist restaurant, it hasn't changed so much for the past twenty-five years. Now they have redecorated it a little bit, but they kept the '80s vibration, and it's not so smelly as it used to be, but still it's a really funny place. The time has stopped there, the waitresses, the owner, the decor, it's totally the same you know, but there's no competition here in Nowa Huta, not so many restaurants, and clients don't really care... I'll show you a map of the district, and show you some pictures, tell you where we are...

Once at the café of our destination, anecdotes and some history blend to create a local narrative that describes Nowa Huta. First, an introduction and an example of one of the many paradoxes that the Polish strain of communism had to offer:

The name of the restaurant is Stylish, and it's really in some way... stylish. As I told you, the '70s-'80s decor, not so many changes, maybe there is Coca-Cola and advertising. This was the only city without a church in Poland, but people from the south of Poland, they came, they are very religious, they wanted a church, generally twenty years of fights, riots, they put up the famous cross, the government wanted to remove it, you know. Big story with the church, finally in the late '70s a church is opened in Nowa Huta, a symbolic date that God is coming to Nowa Huta. Very interesting, because you build a modern socialist city, and the payments are extremely dirty capitalist, and the paradox, there's a struggle for the church in Nowa Huta, how the Church appears in '70s, everybody comes after work, helps for free, I can paint so I paint, he's a brick-layer, so he is laying bricks for free, and he is an engineer, so he is making some plans for free, because we are building a church, for us, for the community, so this is clean communism yeah, so this is the paradox that the anti-communist symbol of the church is built in a very communist way.

After taking a shot of vodka and tucking in to some szarlotka, or apple pie, the history lesson begins:

This is called New Steelworks, and it's a district of Kraków now, but it was planned after the War to be a separate city, a model socialist city, the example for the future, the most logical plan, the most perfect city, and of course the town was built for the residents and the workers and their families because they built a big steelworks here. After the War we needed a big steelworks, and we needed to produce. There were of twelve possible locations, and finally Kraków is chosen and there are two theories: a very popular theory is the politics (politicians) decided that the steelworks and the workers' city will be located close to Kraków, because Kraków was conservative, anti-communist, religious city, former capital with a lot of churches, in a way dangerous, they worried about anti-communist rebellion, and there are some facts to show that it can be dangerous for the Communists. Kraków was not destroyed in the War, people were really strong here, and now they write here that politics decided to build it here as a revenge of Communists for Kraków, you know, just to counterbalance Kraków, put it in the shadow, to make people forget about Kraków and think only about Nowa Huta. But it's not totally true, there were a lot of economical reasons, poor over-crowded villages in the neighbourhood, so plenty of labour-force that can come. Good place to locate a steelworks, a big river to supply water, quite close coal mines, so you need coal, and iron, we don't have iron, so we take it from the Ukraine. A really good economical decision to locate it here, actually. It was not only the revenge. In ten years, the government builds a city for 100,000 people, I mean these people built it, so there is propaganda, there are songs about Nowa Huta even, people are coming from different parts of Poland, not so much forced to come here, propaganda makes them come, it's like the Wild West, the place where you go, you get an apartment, you get a job, you get everything that you need.

The best Polish architects are planning the city, the cream of the crop, so it's a really good plan, not many collapsing constructions, quite well organised, and Nowa Huta appears, and as you can see it's based on a semicircle, with a main square, one, two, three, four, five avenues radiating from the square, precisely 45 degrees everywhere, four of the avenues are supplied with tramlines, the tram goes to the steelworks, around half of the steelworks, and goes to Kraków, so it's perfect public transportation. The steelworks is amazingly big, because if this is the city of 100,000 people, the steelworks looks a bit like this, six times bigger than the original city, it was the biggest steelworks in the world when they built it, it's around two and three thousand acres, so it's huge, it's like a big city, with a few hundred kilometres of rails, a few hundred kilometres of roads, so it's amazingly big.

They are fighting to get it on the UNESCO list, I don't know when, but it's the biggest example of socialist architecture, I mean the whole complex yeah, with not so much distribution of different types of architecture, so a local group is fighting for this.

A stroll around the huge Plac Centralny, or Central Square, shows how the city should have developed if it were not for lack of money, something that was all too common in the days of the Polish People’s Republic. Having admired the magnificent buildings and the net of wiring that powers the trams coming out of every corner of the square, it’s back to the Trabant and off to the steelworks for an inspection, before checking out an apartment which has retained its ‘80s style and décor.

The apartment has been left relatively unchanged, and gives you an idea of what living n such a place must have been like. Even the smell was, how to put it, stale… Mike explains, amongst other things, the problems of fruit and the troubles of young love in Communist Poland:

You used to wait like two months to get a fridge, this one's Russian, Minsk, so you had to wait for all the things, you don't go to the shop and buy, but you wait, you arrange, you have to really think, but finally you get everything. There were no fruits, no bananas, oranges, pineapples didn't exist, coconuts and mangoes, and all this stuff. Only Polish fruits. Western fruit was special stuff, families from the west were sending us food, I remember fruit packages. My father was in the States and he was sending us bananas, oranges, with the coconut we didn’t know what to do, and the pineapple, it was like really complicated stuff. When I split with one girl, when I was ten eleven years old, so she split with me because I was not responsible, and I gave her an orange as a splitting gift... You couldn't go the shop and by an orange, maybe during Christmas sometimes, you had to have a family approach (connection).

I like this washing machine it's called Francesca, and what's interesting is that the design is from the 50s, but they were producing Francescas until the end of Communist Poland, so until '89, and it also showed the type of development in Communist countries, that you have the design of something from the '50s, but you make it for as long as possible, because there's no demand from the market.

Crazy Mike has been taking rides to Nowa Huta for the past three years. How do you come up with such an idea though? He told me more after the tour:

I was working in the hotel as a receptionist, finishing my degree in law, so I had a contact with tourists, and once they called me from the hotel, 'there's a couple, they need two hours guiding, so I came with my little Polish Fiat, you know, old communist car, I wanted to take them to the castle, I just used the car as transportation to get to the Old Town , but they've already seen the Old Town, so I had to show them something else, so I took them to some off-the-beaten-path places, and they really enjoyed it, they really had a good time, very chilled out.

And do you have any plans for the future of your business, do you want to buy some more Trabants?

Yeah, I'll buy some more Trabants for sure, I'll extend the offer to some more freaky communist stuff like communist disco, you know, real Polish workers meeting. When we have groups we make a kind of little mayhem, Polish workers pour a little vodka, give pickles, and people get drunk and it's a lot of fun, so kitsch band playing and so we go in that direction, so there's less history, and more socialising, between tourists and Polish workers, that speak no English of course...

So it seems that Crazy Mike won’t be trading in his Trabant for a Ferrari just yet, although a tour around Nowa Huta is made that much more enjoyable when in the back of a genuine East-German motor that runs on two-stroke petrol and sounds like a lawnmower. Mike and his team can be checked out on the internet at www.crazyguides.com.

Live Music in Kraków...

Last Saturday in Kraków: 15,000 peeps go to see Jay-Z, including myself. Also got a look-in backstage and interviewed Tatiana Okupnik, of Blue Café fame. All-round blast. Check it out. Sent to Radio Polonia 11.09.2006.

Last Saturday Kraków hosted the Coke Live Music Festival, a new music event that is to put Poland’s southern city on the European event circuit. With the weather promising not to misbehave and a guaranteed audience of around 15000, it hopes to be one of the biggest festivals in the region, as a quick question to Mikołaj Ziółkowski, head of Alter Art, the event’s organiser, proved:

What does the Coke Festival mean for the music scene in Poland?

I think  it will be one of the biggest summer music festivals in Poland specialised in contemporary popular music, so this year it's Jay-Z, Sugababes and Shaggy, so for the first edition it's a great line-up, so for sure it will be one of the biggest and most important event in the country, and every year it will be closing the summer.

Unfortunately the Sugababes didn’t make it to the show, but Jamaican-born Shaggy gave a fine performance and American rapper Jay-Z electrified the crowd with his rhymes and beats. It was good to see that Polish bands also played at the festival. Tatiana Okupnik, famed singer of Blue Café, has recently come back from the United States, where she worked with a new line-up. She has now started her own solo career, and was one of the stars to get the crowd going. I caught up with her backstage after her set.

Tatiana, it was a great performance out there, how was it on the stage?

I felt great because I had a great band, wonderful musicians, and not only great musicians, but they are good people too.

You had great backing vocals...

Yeah, Keesha, Irene and Chris, who is actually singing with me on my record, he's got a beautiful voice, you heard it right?, and we have a collaboration on my album, and the rapper, he's also got a great rhyming style, and he also wrote a few songs for my album.

How do you feel playing on the same stage as Jay-Z later on?

Every artist has got to be proud of who you are, and it doesn't matter if you play with Jay-Z, with somebody who is not known, you've got to just love the music.

And your new album, 'I'm on my own', was that produced in the United States or in Poland?

Everything was done in the States, so, yeah, in the States!

The wildly-dressed Miss Okupnik is veering away from the style of her former band and has initiated a new kind of music that will hopefully get people rocking on both sides of the Atlantic: a mix of R&B, soul, funk and rhymes. She told me more:

They call me 'Euro-Soul', they said that this is my genre, so girls are singing, Tatiana is banging all around the world with a new style called Euro-Soul…

You got to love it though, and will the single come out first in the States or in Poland?

In Poland first...

Thank-you very much, dziękuję bardzo

Dziękuję, thank-you, merci, spasibo!

Miss Okupnik is shortly going to reveal when her new album will come out. Is Poland about to export a new star? Let us hope so.

The Coke Live Festival is planned to take place over two days next year, although the line up is not yet known. All in all, the concert was a great way to end the summer on a high note.

Stag Parties in Kraków

What will the world say? This is a 10-minute report on stag parties and drunk Brits in Kraków. The official Radio Polonia version varies a little (they cut the AC/DC and replaced it with something a little more... relaxing...). Filed on 21.08.2006. Original Radio Polonia broadcast here (part of the Europe East magazine).

This week I'll be taking a look at bar tourism in Kraków, Poland's southern party capital, where every week-end beer and culture come together in the same sentence, and tourists and residents alike go out on the town.

Since Poland's entry into the European Union two years ago, cheap airlines have broken through into the country’s airspace and provided countless numbers of new destinations in Poland, all under three hours away from airports in the UK. After initial problems with the airport authorities in Kraków over service taxes charged to airlines using the airfield in Balice, where the airport is located, the bubble soon burst. The John Paul II International Airport in Balice is the country's second busiest airport after Okęcie in Warsaw. And most of the traffic is from cheap flights from a selection of London airports in particular, and many other British towns and cities on the Continent.

A new phenomenon in Kraków is the drinking culture of tourists from the UK celebrating a bachelor's ‘stag party’: I say bachelor, but not for long. Hence the celebration of these parties is becoming commonplace as more and more young Brits decide to forget about their fiancées back on the island and get slightly inebriated in the process.

The origins of the East European stag party began in Prague during the late 1990s. The Bohemian jewel was opened up to curious British and other foreign tourists, and quickly made a name for itself as being both a beautiful city and for having ridiculously cheap alcohol.

“Basically it's a lot of stag parties, week-enders, who come here for cheap beer, strip-bars and the like, they're quite boisterous and loud, but not too much trouble. I think in general, Czechs don't know what to make of them, it's a completely different culture, and they're a lot louder than the Czechs. They tend to stick to Irish bars, more so than anything, so they're not really here for the culture. They don't tend to be very adventurous regarding Czech food, or Czech drinks, you know.”

So it's pints of Guinness and all-day breakfasts...

“Yeah absolutely, burgers, breakfasts, Guinness, cider, the same as at home.”

Declan O'Brien, owner of an Irish bar in Prague for more than a decade, has seen the changes over the years. The trend is abating though. He continues:

“The stag-party trade is kind of slowing down a little bit, compared to what it was five year ago, I think the likes of British men's magazines have stopped plugging it so much, with 20p beers and things like this, so I think they're moving further east, Riga and places like this, but now it's starting to quieten down here.”

Moving back to Poland, stag parties are creating havoc for bartenders around the country. Or are they? The reactions in Kraków have been mixed to the onslaught of drunk Englishmen, but not everyone's complaining all the time, as a visit to some of Kraków's bars showed.

“They come in tours, they come every week, they visit us starting Friday and finishing Sunday. They take, I call it ‘tourism drinking’, because they start Friday evening, they visit pub by pub, restaurant by restaurant, but generally, they come here, because we are a kind of pub, this is not a restaurant, this is a place to drink.”

“Generally they are very good, they are very interesting persons, for example yesterday we had two guys from Bristol, typical English guys, and generally I can say that they have fun in here, and what they say about Kraków, they like it very much, and I think they will come again.”

Back at Balice, Kraków's airport, one of the afternoon flights has just arrived from London. Remek, who works at the information desk and witnesses the arrival of thousands of tourists each summer, explains more:

“They come here to have fun in Kraków, I think, they are young people, they got free week-ends and they need to do something with it. There were years when Prague was very popular, there were years when Budapest was popular, right now it’s Kraków, it’s normal, so they are coming here to have fun, so I think they are very happy, actually.”

Of course, there are two sides to the coin. Over the last summer, more and more people have started to complain of bad behaviour on the part of drunk Englishmen. To get an idea of the scale of trouble caused, I asked a city policeman to tell me what he knew. He refused to comment in front of a microphone. On another occasion, in a bar which has become notorious for drunken brawls often caused by the islanders, I merely had to step inside to be turned away. So there evidently seems to be a problem in Kraków with groups of British men causing a disturbance. Many bartenders criticise the English for drinking too fast: a trait caused by restrictive licensing laws in the UK, which simply do not exist in Kraków, where many bars are open until the last customer standing, which sometimes can mean seven or eight in the morning.

Bronek, a computer technician and also one-time bartender, is genuinely upset with the current situation:

“I don’t want to use hard words, but they don’t behave here, they are not very polite, I think that they come here to have a nice party, but they do a little bit of a mess. They want to make signs on the doors that Englishmen are not allowed, because they don’t want to serve beer and other strong alcohol for them because after a couple of shots and a couple of beers, they behave like animals. They are drunk all the time, and then they go back to their place, that’s all. And I don’t like such types of tourists coming to Kraków.”

So I’m on the train from Balice, Kraków’s airport, going to the centre, and I’m here with Daniel, someone who has just flown in from London. So Daniel, you tell me that you saw some stag parties on the plane. What was it like?

“Well, I was sitting next to one of the members of the stag parties itself, and I have to say he seemed the most affable of gentlemen, and he seemed to be coming to a country with more than the intention of drinking himself silly.”

This was his sixth visit to Kraków. But the story is different for those that live here, including British expats, whose number is ever growing. Aeddan Shaw, an English teacher and all-round educator, has lived in Kraków for over four years.

“I think there’s a difference between the people who come here for a holiday, or for a week-end, and the people who live here, really. Obviously, people who live here have roots, they appreciate Polish culture, they try to experience more than just beer and parties. I think it’s getting worse in terms of the number of people coming to Kraków, and their reasons for coming to Kraków. I’m a bit worried we’re becoming a second Prague. Now there are cheap flights to Kraków, when I first came to Kraków, it cost £350 to fly here, now you can fly for about twenty quid, and as long as that’s the case, people will still come here. Hopefully it’s just a stage, it’s just a phase, and then people will find somewhere more popular and fashionable place to go.”

Others expats living in Kraków mention that they feel embarrassed about the situation, thinking that the Brits that come here give them a bad name.

I went out on a Saturday night in Kraków to go ‘stag hunting’.

11 pm and the Rynek is packed with drinkers. Amongst them is a group of Brits on a stag party – the main culprit is wearing nothing but a pair of leather shorts, saying that he is in Poland to be punished…

“Basically we’re drinking loads of everything.”

Enough said… Later, at 2 am, I found a group of Londoners in the Jewish quarter of Kazimierz. This is what they had to say:

“I’m fairly drunk, I’m quite happy really, I mean, I have to say, it’s a beautiful place. Come to Kraków, the architecture, the culture, the Jewish quarter’s fantastic, the vodka, however, takes the biscuit. The vodka’s fantastic. We find most of the English people here quite embarrassing, and we like to think we’re above all that, but we’re not. So here we are, drunk again, here, in Kraków.”

Refreshing to see that the English have retained their sense of humour in all this: locals, however, do not always see the joke. Perhaps, as has been mentioned, and has happened in Prague, the stag parties will move to where the beer is cheaper and where flights still arrive within three hours of take-off. For now though, Kraków, as well as many other Polish and central European cities, has to take the force of inebriated Brits. Just a fad? Or more vodka to come?

The International Cultural Centre

Material about the International Cultural Centre, Kraków, 09.08.2006. An in-depth view on the one of the country's busier cultural centres... Radio Polonia version here.

Recently Kraków, Poland’s second city and dubbed ‘cultural capital’ of the country, has become one of the major tourist capitals of Europe. One website even lists it as the fifth best place to visit in the whole of Europe, beating other major cities such as Paris and Barcelona. The city is currently on the World Heritage Site list of UNESCO, and the roads and paths that make up the city turn time on its head, transporting you to a distant land. But there is more to Kraków than the old buildings, churches, and the street festivals that flood the Old Town and the Jewish district of Kazimierz.

The International Cultural Centre looks like any other building which is on the Main Market Square, but what lies behind the building’s façade is another matter. The International Cultural Centre, or the ICC, is one of the only institutions in Poland apart from the National Museum and National Theatre that is publicly funded. It is at the forefront of keeping intact Kraków’s heritage, as well as also engaging in debate as to the city’s future both on the local scene as well as at national, European, and even global levels. I went to the Centre to find out what it is that these people actually do that makes Kraków the beautiful city that it is today. Katarzyna Jagodzińska told me more:

This is the cultural institution and we deal mainly with cultural heritage, this is the key wordof the ICC, so we deal with cultural heritage, which is culture, which is heritage, monuments, urban planning and art, and we do this through organisingall sorts of art exhibitions in our gallery, we publish our own books, albums, research materials, conference materials, we run the educational programmes, the summer school and thepost-graduate studies, and we do all sorts of promotion work. We promote our work, the work of Kraków and work of Poland in the field of culture in the international and intercultural fields.

The conferences are very important, where we do invite specialists and researchers from various countries, from abroad, from central Europe, but not only from western Europe, from the United States, as well as from Australia, as the next year visitors from Tasmania are planned. So we do discuss, we create a forum where people can share our views, we can share our experience, which is the experience of central Europe and western Europe, and we try to find some conclusions: what next, now we have the 21st century, we had our fifteenth anniversary conference, so we are actually discussing about how should we approach the cultural heritage in the 21st century, and how can we attract the public and researchers to continue our work.

And could you tell me, how long has the ICC been in Kraków for?

Well, this year in May we celebrated our 15th anniversary, so that means that our institution was founded in 1991, it was two years after the abolishing of Communism and after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

You have a library here, what kind of books do you have here and what is it used for?

Well, this is a very specialist library, so it deals mainly with culture, it deals  with art, with monuments and urban planning, so with everything the ICC deals with. So we have over 13000 volumes, and the library is mainly visited by the specialists in the field, and by the students of art history or the Academy of Fine Arts, so there are plenty of books which we cannot find in any other library in Kraków as well as in Poland, so we do have the books thanks to the international exchange, so we send our publications to other institutions, then they send us theirs.

You told me earlier that you deal with cultural heritage, could you tell me what cultural heritage is?

Well, I woudn’t say that cultural heritage is only about the buildings, it’s all about culture, and culture is not only the buildings, the urban planning, it’s also something that decides about our identity, so this is also art which is very important for us, for our gallery, which is visible for the visitors, for Polish and international viewers, so this is art, and these are also the publications of art, the publications on everything connected to culture and cultural thought. So it’s not only the buildings, not only the buildings that we’re sitting in, which is actually very ancient, so in the basement we have Gothic, here we have some Gothic pillars, and it’s all blended with a modern style, so do not connect cultural heritage strictly to the buildings.

So, cultural heritage is all around us: Kraków’s unique atmosphere is due to the identity and the culture of its residents, and also increasingly by the people that also visit this place. So, next time you’re in Kraków, don’t just look at the buildings, but also breath in the air, soak up the atmosphere with the help of a coffee at one of the city’s many cafes, and relax. The city has a future ahead of it: we shall see in time though what that future will bring.

The ICC is open to the public, and has a gallery with seasonal exhibitions. At the moment there is a collection of Rembrandt prints on display, as well as pictures by his competitors. More information can be found at www.mck.krakow.pl.

Morrismen in Kraków

Material for the 43rd Beskidy Highlander's Festival, 03.08.2006

My first report for Radio Polonia done in Kraków.

This year brings the 43rd Beskidy Highlanders’ Week of Culture. The main idea behind the events that make up the festival is a return to the traditions that are now often lost in these times of globalisation and modern lifestyles.

The festival began in Wisła in 1964, and has since then attracted many local music and dance groups from the Beskidy area and also now from around the world.

Every year there are about four thousand dancers and singers that take part, over one hundred groups, and for nine days in five towns there are forty five main concerts.

One of the groups that is taking part in this year's festival are the self-styled "World Famous" Chameleonic Morris Men from England. These men have toured the world showing their dancing and playing their music, having visited places like Japan, Kazakhstan, most of Europe and even further-off places like the USA or Inner Mongolia!

I caught up with them on their day off in Kraków...

We're here as part of the International Folk Festival here in the Beskidy region, and we're here on our day off, but when we go for our day off we like to do some dancing and singing, playing, so, we've been in Kraków all day, and we've been enjoying the city, enjoying the beers, and been playing some music and dancing.

We went down the Salt Mines, and we danced down the Salt Mines, and we've been here for the rest of the day, and we'll be going back this evening to Szczyrk.

And what do you think of Polish folk music, have you listened to any?

We have indeed, and we've been very impressed with what we've seen, with the dancing and the music, the costumes, and the pretty young girls.

Of course!

The festival is open to all visitors until the 6th August, with concerts and other events going on until then. The main venues are in Wisła, Szczyrk, Żywiec, Oświęcim and Maków Podhalański with activites going on in other towns of the Beskidy region, such as Ujsoły, where the St.Lawrence Bonfire will be held on Saturday 5th August, and Jablunkov in the Czech Republic. More information can be found at the organiser's website at www.tkb.art.pl.

Podcasting

As promised, I'm going to be uploading some of my podcasts for Radio Polonia. The full transcript of each 'package' (as it is called in the trade) will also be available. I own the copyright on both the audio and the script. If you want to use them, please get in touch.

The podcasts are all in mp3 format. The editing might be a bit dodgy, as these recordings are sent to Warsaw for further editing before being put on the air. The dispatches are usually about current events in Kraków, Poland, and intended for an international audience, not just from the UK or US. I hope you enjoy them and that they provide you, the reader (and listener, I hope!) with some more insight into what this place is about.