04.22.04

Bukowina Tatrzańska

If you think of Poland as shaped like home plate, the Tatra mountains run just along the country's southern tip, right where the catcher would be if the catcher were Slovakia (and Hungary were the umpire). I understand that baseball metaphors may be lost on some of my readers, but chances are anyone unfamiliar with baseball comes from a country that does a decent job teaching European geography. No harm is done.

The key point to retain is that Poland has mountains, they are somewhat ridiculously concentrated in one spot, and they're tall enough to keep the ferocious Czech and Slovak tribes to the south from ravaging the country.

When I was I tiny little monoglot I used to spend winters here with my mother, staying in the inexpensive and ubiquitous guest houses that dot the foothills, many of them built with money earned from a couple years' illegal construction work in Chicago. Whatever else you may say about socialism, it made for some splendid vacations - not only did everyone get copious vacation time, but those vacations were often subsidized to the gills by whatever factory or organization one happened to work for. And whatever you might say about American exploitation of illegal immigrant labor, it paid for a hell of a lot of home construction in southern Poland. In a way the region was a synthesis of everything that was good about the great rival economic systems.

I didn't care one whit for détente as a kid here, I was far more interested in sledding, jumping into snowbanks, and the enormous suppers served every day at two in the afternoon. Later on in life I assumed that my memories of those suppers had been inflated by nostalgia, but after returning to the region in my teens and being served a twelve-egg omelette for breakfast, I decided my memory was probably not exaggerating at all. Pickles the size of a bratwurst, stuffed cabbages served whole to a five-year-old, eight hard-boiled eggs "garnishing" each washbasin-sized plate of soup - for two childhood winters, I ran around in the snow like a maniac all day, pausing just long enough to eat gargantuan meals and endure the ordeal of changing into dry clothes, the wet ones peeled off layer after layer like an onion skin.

It was a paradise for kids - there were endless places to go sledding, horses pulling sleighs, long hikes up to Morskie Oko (a strange kettle lake high in the mountains), the funicular up to the very highest of the summits. Even the occasions where I did myself serious damage turned into happy opportunities - a broken left arm after slipping on ice earned me an introduction to the rescue helicopter crew, a group I idolized. The pilots (who risk their lives every winter to rescue unlucky and unprepared day hikers) sat drinking coffee in their lounge and expressed amazement at my fortitude.

A sledding accident the next year propelled me into a stack of cut pine trees, with branches sharpened and bark removed, used in those parts for drying hay. I got a hell of a gash on my cheek, but it healed as a handsome little scar that served me well later in life, suggesting a totally fictitious smoky manliness, air of danger, some dimly-remembered knife fight.

The region extending from the Tatra Mountains north to the outskirts of Krakow is called the Podhale (rhymes with koala), a word that means "below the pasture" and gives you a fair idea of what the local economy was based on before everyone started sneaking off to Chicago. The Polish highlanders (górale, rhymes with Podhale) are a linguistically and culturally distinct group, and like pastoral moutain people everywhere they are renowned for their hard drinking, their hospitality, their mistrust of strangers and their enduring (and eminently marketable) folk traditions. The highlanders have always been ultra-patriotic, and extremely Catholic in a country where people already take their Catholicism pretty seriously. When the pope visited his home near Krakow (he comes from nearby ), the region essentially emptied out for several days, as everyone went to welcome back their native son (the highlanders consider the Pope one of their own). Church services here are stunning - everyone puts on ceremonial Sunday clothes, which are handmade traditional garb, the men wearing large light-colored felt pants, the women beautifully embroidered frocks. Weddings last for three days and usually involve enormous quantities of vodka, endless music and dancing, and the occasional application of the ciupaga, or ceremonial axe, to resolve amicable disputes between the guests.

Before the war, the focus of life here was raising sheep. Galicia and the Polish mountains belonged to the Austro-Hungarian empire; our local friend and guide can still remember her father talking about the yearly transhumance before the First World War, when the shepherds would take their flocks across the mountains to summer pasture almost as far as Vienna. Life back then was harsh and dirt poor; the poverty helped isolate the region from the lowlands, while the pastoral wandering put the highlanders in contact with their brethren all the way down the Carpathians, one reason the lanugage and culture here are unusually distinct.

The Podhale became a popular winter getaway towards the end of the nineteenth century, and especially after the 1919 rebirth of the Polish state, when the beau monde would come down from Warsaw and Kraków for winter frolics in the city of Zakopane. During the Second World War, the Polish side of the Tatry suffered like the rest of the country under German occupation, but the collaborationist Slovak side boomed with strange Nazi sanatoria - you can still find their overgrown ghosts in the forests there. As the country returned to some semblance of normality after the war, the area again became popular vacation destination, a good place for skiing in the wintertime or hiking in the summer. There was a bit of a crash in the early nineties, after the borders opened and people flocked to more exotic, satisfyingly mountainous places like Switzerland and Austria, but recent anxiety about terrorism and a desire to stay closer to home have helped revitalize domestic tourism. For unknown reasons, the area has also become immensely popular among Ukranians, the wealthier of whom helicopter themselves in for weekend getaways. No one can fully explain the fad, but no one is complaining about it, either.

It would be dishonest to tell you that the region is dotted with ski areas without explaining that in Poland, a ski area consists of a hill, a highlander in a shed, and a long metal cable with handles on it. Aspen this is not. For a cross country skier, however, the area is a near paradise - a village on every ridge, hundreds of years' worth of footpaths and back roads, and beautiful views in every direction. The houses in the Podhale have sharply sloping roofs, to deflect the copious winter snowfall, and they look lovely against the ridgelines, with wooden ornamental work and symmetrical little balconies on every floor. The truly old houses can be stunning - a handful of wooden churches have survived for several hundred years without burning down, and in their own way they inspire as much awe as a cathedral.

Much more frequent than the real old houses are concrete-block skeletons of newly started houses, or abandoned half-finished houses from many years ago. For reasons both cultural and economic, real estate has long been king in this part of Poland. Under Communism, practically the only thing you could do with extra cash was to build yourself a house - there was nothing to buy, and opening a bank account was both unwise (hyperinflation) and difficult if you couldn't easily account for the origin of all the money you were trying to deposit. And if you were returning from Chicago with a few thousand dollars in Western currency, you most certainly could not go to a bank - even owning dollars was illegal for most of the sixties and seventies. A large house was a great investment - not likely to drop in value, a place to lodge your children once they grew up, and a steady source of guest income in the tourist season, particularly after the law was relaxed to allow for bed-and-breakfast style private hotels.

The other way to store large quantities of money, of course, was to buy copious amounts of grain alcohol and store it in the attic.

Ha ha, only serious. Forbidden to keep hard currency, people logically turned to commodities that were easy to store, easy to sell, and were guaranteed not to lose their value. And it's hard to imagine any set of political or economic circumstances short of the Second Coming where it would be impossible to exchange alcohol for ready cash in Poland (one suspects that even during the Second Coming they would work something out). Grain alcohol is the ultimate liquid asset - compact, valuable, always in demand - with only two shortcomings: susceptibility to fire and susceptibility to the man of the house, who in these parts can rarely sleep easy knowing that just a lock, a few wooden planks, and his wife's constant vigilance separate him from a month-long bender.

If you are lucky enough to get your hands on it, grain alcohol of course tastes great straight, but you can also use it to prepare this tasty beverage:

Herbata po Góralsku

(Highlander Tea)

Fill a glass 3/4 full of freshly brewed, strong, hot tea. Add a heaping teaspoon of sugar and enough grain alcohol to fill the glass completely. Stir, let sit for five minutes, serve hot. For an extra kick, use only half a glass of tea.

Care should be taken in consuming this beverage, because the hot alcohol vapors rising from it very liable to sting your eyes when you go to take a sip - it's also probably flammable, although I didn't have the guts to test this hypothesis while sitting half-drunk in a large wooden house. The longer you let the tea stand before drinking, the lower the alcohol content will be (keeping in mind that 'lower' is a relative term).

Like carp or a decent loaf of rye bread, grain alcohol is one of those things that it is mysteriously difficult to obtain in the United States. The same country that can put a man on the moon, or offer fifty seven varieties of flavored coffee, somehow cannot provide its citizens with a commodity as basic as 190-proof ethanol in the convenient 1/2 liter bottle. And so the Polish tourist is forced to resort to smuggling.

Curiously enough, the prohibition against bringing grain alcohol across the Atlantic has nothing to do with import restrictions - rather, it's because the silly airlines insist they will not transport a highly flammable liquid. A moment's thought exposes this as nonsense, since airliners fly around all the time filled with extremely combustible kerosene, which is not only more dangerous than ethanol, but also has an unpleasant, greasy aftertaste.

How to Smuggle Grain Alcohol Into the United States by Maciej Ceglowski


1. Purchase a bottle of vodka and a bottle of pure grain alcohol
2. Fill a basin with boiling water, and soak the bottom half of the grain alcohol bottle until the label slides off
3. Clean the glue off the bottle completely with soap and water; pat dry
4. Soak the vodka bottle in a fresh basin of boiling water
5. Once the glue on the label is softened, lift the vodka bottle out of the bath, set it next to the grain alcohol bottle, and slide the label from one to the other in one fluid motion
6. While the label is still pliant, center it, pat dry, and let cool
7. Drink the bottle of vodka

Once the glue sets, you will have a bottle of grain alcohol cunningly disguised as vodka, and a pleasant warm feeling all through your organism.

Not all the luxuries of this part of the world are so easy to export, of course. If you want the best toasted cheese to be had anywhere, or ham so good that you will weep for the lost years you could have spent eating it, you have no alternative except rush to the Carpathians. And there's no way to bring home the clomp clomp of hooves on snow, the distinct stench of ancient Hungarian buses, or the ferociously bright stars when the tramontane wind blows. But holed up homesick in a cold winter room on another continent, pouring half bottle of vodka into your mug of Lipton gives you a fair first approximation.

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