|
| |
|
ZAKOPANE |
| |
|
|
| |
South of Nowy Targ, the road continues another 20km along the course
of the Bialy Dunajec before reaching the edges of ZAKOPANE , a major
mountain resort, crowded with visitors throughout its summer hiking and
winter skiing seasons. It has been an established attraction for Poles
since the 1870s, when the purity of the mountain air began to attract
the attention of doctors and their consumptive city patients. Within a
few years, this inaccessible mountain village of sheep farmers was
transformed, as the medics were followed by Kraków artists and
intellectuals, who established a fashionable colony in the final decades
of Austro-Hungarian rule. A popular holiday centre ever since, Poles
began discovering the place en masse in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the
postwar era the town grew to become one of the country's prime tourist
hot-spots. In step with the growing influx of foreigners, drawn by the
lure of the mountains (and what remain by Western standards bargain
prices), Zakopane has of late begun to acquire the hollow, overdeveloped
feel of a major European tourist trap. It's a must for the wonderful
setting and access to the peaks, but the distinctive traditional górale
architecture of much of the town is being increasingly submerged in the
welter of commercial developments.
The town
Zakopane's main street, ul. Krupówki , is a bustling pedestrian precinct
given over to the traditional assortment of restaurants, cafés and
souvenir shops, now spiced by the newly acquired collection of Western-style
takeaway joints, delis and billiard halls. Uphill, the street merges
into ul. Zamoyskiego , which runs on out of town past the fashionable
fin-de-sičcle wooden villas of the outskirts, while in the other
direction, it follows a rushing stream down towards Gubalówka Hill.
The Muzeum Tatrzanskie (Tatra Museum; Tues-Sun 9am-3.30pm; 3zl), near
the centre of ul. Krupówki, covers local wildlife, ethnography and
history, including a section on the wartime experiences of the górale ,
who were brutally punished by the Nazis for their involvement with the
Polish resistance and cross-mountain contacts with the Allied
intelligence. The museum is dedicated to T. Chalubinski, the doctor who
"discovered" Zakopane in the 1870s.
Towards the northern end of Krupówki, ul. Koscieliska veers off towards
an area liberally sprinkled with traditional buildings, kicking off with
the wooden Kosciól sw Klimenta (Church of St Clement). The low-ceilinged
interior gves off an attractive piney smell, and holds several examples
of a popular local form of folk art - devotional paintings on glass, in
this case depicting the Stations of the Cross. Outside in the graveyard
lie the tombs of many of the town's best-known writers and artists,
among them that of Stanislaw Witkiewicz (1851-1915), who developed the
distinctive Zakopane architectural style based on traditional wooden
building forms. The houses he built - all steep pointy roofs and jutting
attic windows - went down a storm with a pre-World War I middle class
who were crazy for all things rustic. Witkiewicz's memorial in the
cemetery is a typical mixture of thoughtful design and woodworking craft:
a smooth totem pole in which a niche bears a wooden statuette of a
pensive Christ with his head in his hands - a traditional folk depiction
of the Saviour assuming responsibilty for the world's troubles. There's
also a commemorative tablet to Witkiewicz's equally famous son, Witkacy
, standing by his mother's grave. Alongside the famous are the graves of
old górale families, including well-known local figures such as the
skier Helena Marusarzówna, executed by the Nazis for her part in the
resistance.
Just beyond the church stands the Willa Koliba , Witkiewicz's first
architectural experiment, and now a Muzeum Stylu Zakopanskiego (Museum
of the Zakopane Style; Wed-Sat 9am-5pm, Sun 9am-3pm; 4zl). Starting off
with a ground-floor display of the folk crafts from which Witkiewicz got
his inspiration, the exhibition moves on to the kind of furniture that
he set about designing - chunky chairs adorned with squiggly details in
an engaging mixture of Art Nouveau and folkloric forms. There's also a
scale model of Witkiewicz's greatest architectural creation, the Willa
Pod Jodlami, an extraordinarily intricate wooden house which brings to
mind a Scandinavian timber church redesigned as a country mansion -
enjoy the model while you're here, because it's difficult to get close
up to the real thing. Finally there's a marvellous collection of
Witkacy's often deranged pastel portraits, including a lot of distorted,
angular depictions of the people - mostly women - who featured
prominently in his circle.
Moving back towards Krupówki and turning south down ul. Kasprusie soon
leads to the Willa Atma , a traditional-style villa and longtime home of
composer Karol Szymanowski , now a museum dedicated to its former
resident (Tues-Sun 10am-4pm).
East of the main drag, near the bus and train stations, a wooden
building at ul. Jagiellonska 18b - it's just off the road in a side
alley - houses the Hasior gallery (Wed-Sat 11am-6pm, Sun 9am-3pm),
presenting the work of one of the country's key postwar artists,
Wladyslaw Hasior (1928-1999). Building installations from piles of junk,
or constructing pseudo-religious banners from pieces of metal, Hasior
was typical of many Polish artists of the 1960s and 1970s in developing
a quirky and often subversive form of sculpture that had little to do
with the ideological dictates of the Party. |
| |
| |
| |
| |
|
