Eerie Masuria: Revisiting the Wolf's Lair, Poland

I visited Poland in 2016 courtesy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland.
 
In Poland's northeast lies the beautiful region of Masuria.

It's a land of lakes and forests, but also has a dark past. When it was part of Germany in World War II, this was where Adolf Hitler sited his HQ for the invasion of the Soviet Union.

It was given the overly dramatic name of The Wolf's Lair (Wolfsschanze in German, Wilczy Szaniec in Polish).

Only partly destroyed before the Nazi retreat from the Red Army, the once-hidden forest base is now an eerie collection of monumental broken concrete bunkers among the trees; along with a monument to Von Stauffenberg's 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler (see the first photo below).

The site is a fascinating wartime relic, but also an eerie place to visit, walking among the huge shattered structures.

I first visited the Wolf's Lair in the depths of a Polish winter, when the ruins were covered with snow; then two years ago, I revisited in spring, when they seemed no less strange surrounded by vibrant greenery.

Here's what I found on my second visit...

By chance, on both visits (ten years apart), I was met by the same guide, Jadwiga - you can see her in the photo above. If you're ever visiting Masuria and need an English-speaking guide, I recommend hiring her services. You can contact Jadwiga by email, by clicking here.

And as a bonus, here's another shot of Bunker 13 - Hitler's personal bunker - from my first visit in March 2006, when The Wolf's Lair felt like a very cold and lonely place indeed...

Poland 3: Baba Pruski Scores!

The mysterious lady reproduced below is one of the more intriguing fragments of Poland's past.

I first encountered the Baba Pruski - as the figure is called - in the grounds of the castle in Olsztyn. This small attractive city is the hub of Warmia and Masuria, an attractive region with numerous post-glacial lakes, green countryside and not that many international tourists.

The region also has a history of being traded between Polish and Germanic rulers, having spent centuries under both the Teutonic Knights and the Kingdom of Poland, later being part of the German Empire and modern-day Poland.

Baba Pruski (Prussian Woman) goes even further back than that, however, being connected with the pagan Prussian tribes who predated the Teutonic Knights' rule.

No-one's really sure what the statues were for, though one romantic theory says they were used to honour heroes who died far from home. Other explanations link the figures to legends of people turned to stone by witchcraft.

Whatever the truth, Baba Pruski has become a local icon, and fibreglass reproductions like the above are often used by Olsztyn to mark special occasions.

And what's the big special occasion in Poland right now? It's co-hosting, with Ukraine, the Euro 2012 football championship. Hence, wandering through the city centre, I happened across these figures in a park...

1. Here are the two Euro 2012 co-hosts, Ukraine in traditional garb and Poland a bit more fanciful in the national colours (and you can just see Denmark doing a Viking in the background):

2. It's interesting that the Babas representing nations which have once invaded Poland tend to be given a military theme. The German Baba is done out in the garb of the medieval Teutonic Knights, arch-enemies of the Kingdom of Poland. Behind him, by contrast, is the Irish Baba being green and cute:

3. Similarly, the Dutch are given a light, bright treatment:

4. As are the tasty Italians. You can just make out the Greek Baba behind this one, and the Croatian one in diving gear:

5. Russia is given some of Churchill's "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" treatment, rather than the expected warlike garb:

6. As is the Czech Republic (anyone know who the mouse is)?:

7. Finally, we're back to the warrior look. Sweden may make you think of such harmless things as IKEA and Volvo, but possibly the artist had as inspiration the destructive Swedish invasion of Poland in the 17th century, known as The Deluge.

And the girl is in that shot because her mother was having no luck at all in getting her to move on. When you have a Viking to point at while sitting on a beanbag, why would you?

Companions on the Polish Road 2: Toruń to Lublin

“A good companion shortens the longest road.”

This sentence is an old Turkish proverb, and it proved very applicable to my recent research trip through Poland for Lonely Planet.

(Though I won't mention the three wars the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth fought with the Ottoman Turkish Empire in the 17th century - for that would be tactless)

Last week I described the Poles I met while travelling from Kraków to Gdańsk. This week, let's hear about the fellow foreigners I met up with on the way...

Toruń: From the train station serving this beautiful Gothic city in southern Pomerania, I had to catch a bus across the broad Vistula River to reach the Old Town. As I walked through the station underpass to the bus stop, a cafe advertisement caught my eye, as it was largely in English.

When I dropped into the Kona Coast Cafe the next day I discovered a genial American, Jon Greene, behind the espresso machine. He and his Polish wife had decided to live in Poland for a while, and he'd refused to consider anywhere but Toruń (a fair call, in my opinion). We sat a table and chatted for a while, and I gave my approval to the coffee. It's worth dropping by if you're in town - the cafe's at ul Piekary 22.

Giżycko: For some reason on this particular trip, I had to catch a lot of buses and trains around 6:30am - for some reason the next choice would always depart too late in the morning. So on a chilly weekday morning I found myself sitting on a bench in front of the humble train station in this attractive lakeside holiday town in Masuria, in Poland's northeast.

Another early train had just left so there was just me on the platform, eating my packed breakfast from the hotel I'd just checked out of (Polish hotels will always pack you a breakfast if you have to check out too early for the in-house breakfast, which is much appreciated).

Then a young guy walked up to me and asked something. I explained that my Polish wasn't fluent, then found out he spoke reasonably good English and was on holiday from nearby Belarus.

Aleksandr and I were both heading to the city of Białystok, which required a change of trains at Ełk. Now I love Ełk, because it looks like the English word 'elk' but in fact has a letter 'Ł', which sounds like the English 'W'. So the name of the place is pronounced 'e-w-k'... which sounds adorable, for some reason.

(You can learn a lot of utterly unreliable but amusing nonsense about 'Ł' at its Uncyclopedia page, which describes the letter as "The evil twin brother of L. He is an ally of ∩ and controls the Unicode Villain Organization of Eastern Europe, or UVOEE for short.")

Anyway, we got out at Ełk, marched into the station building to discover which platform our connection was on, then trooped off to Platform 3 to board the next train.

We had a good talk along the way; I was intrigued to learn that Aleks, a keen sailor, had been due to join the Soviet navy just before the USSR dissolved and the career opportunity disappeared. Now he works in an automotive business in Minsk and sails as often as he can. Poland's northeastern lake country is perfect for that, of course. And not far from Minsk.

Białystok-Warsaw: A few days later I was leaving Białowieża, a small town in the eastern Podlasie region, which is famous for the wild European bison which still live in the surrounding forest.

I was waiting for a bus at about - of course - 6.30am, when I got into limited conversation with an elderly couple in Polish, who were impressed that I hailed from so far away. Then a waiter from the hotel restaurant showed up, on his day off, and we had a more fluent conversation in English.

When I left the bus at Białystok, I had the vague impression I heard some people speaking English. But at that stage in the Polish journey I do sometimes imagine hear English - my brain seems keen to twist what it hears into something I can recognises. Odd, but true.

Anyway, I shook my head, walked across the pedestrian bridge that led to the train station, and bought my ticket for Warsaw and onward to Lublin.

Then I realised there really were people speaking English - two middle-aged American women being helped by a young Polish woman who, I discovered later, had walked them all the way over from the bus station to assist them, even though she was due to catch a bus herself. Nice to see the Good Samaritan spirit at work.

After she'd left, I introduced myself to the ladies, and also introduced them to the dubious delights of Polish train station coffee (a choice of instant coffee or percolator granules served in boiling water, which you allow to sink to the bottom).

We shared a compartment on the train to Warsaw. Pam and Margie (I think those were their names, from memory) both had Polish ancestry and had been travelling to various parts of the country; they would be transferring at Warsaw to a train to Kraków. So we chatted, then I waved them goodbye at the grim Warszawa Wschodnia Station, where I was catching a connection to Lublin.

Lublin: My final meeting came courtesy of microblogging tool Twitter. I'd exchanged a few comments about my Polish adventures with Polish-born Twitter user @rusticbynature, then realised she was tweeting from my next stop Lublin, so suggested meeting up. So myself, Ania and her American husband Jaime, a keen photographer, got together at the Złoty Osioł in Lublin.

It's a hidden-away pub-restaurant in the centre of town, dimly lit and full of rustic atmosphere, and I wouldn't have found it easily by myself. If ever in Lublin, see if you can locate it, starting with this address: ul Grodzka 5a. Its name, by the way, means Golden Donkey...

Poland 3: Stalked by Copernicus

Wherever I go in northeastern Poland, I inevitably encounter a man in a robe holding a globe of the world. This is none other than Nicolaus Copernicus, the astronomer who first proposed that the Earth orbits the sun.

He’s also a member of an exclusive club - famous Poles who outsiders sometimes don’t realise are Polish. I think of them as the Four Cs: Copernicus, Curie, Conrad and Chopin.

In fact the first three of this group were christened Mikołaj Kopernik, Marie Skłodowska, and Józef Konrad Korzeniowski. Chopin really was Frédéric (or Fryderyk) Chopin, by the way, as his dad was French.

No chance of mistaken identity within Poland though, especially in Copernicus' old stamping grounds in Pomerania and the neighbouring region of Warmia & Masuria.

Here are a few snaps of the great astronomer that I've taken over my years of researching for Lonely Planet in Poland...

1. A Star is Born. This is the most striking statue of Copernicus, in front of the Gothic town hall in Toruń. This is where he was born, and there's not much danger of this fact escaping you as you stroll around this attractive city on the Vistula River - there's a Copernicus Museum and a Copernicus University, for a start.

Toruń isn't only famous for Copernicus, though. It has an age-old reputation as a manufacturer of gingerbread. And you can buy this gingerbread baked in the shape of Copernicus, if you like.

2. Rebel With a Cause. Copernicus looks a little sinister here I think, as if he's about to peel away from this wall in Toruń, trap the little beggar kid within his globe of the earth, then give him a good sharp lesson in astronomy.

3. Do You Want Cosmology With That? I spotted this Copernicus figure outside a hotel restaurant in the little town of Frombork, east of Gdańsk near the Russian border.

It was here that the great man made many of his observations and wrote his revolutionary work, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres ("A cracking read... guaranteed to make you question everything you've ever believed about an earth-centred model of the universe." - Nuremberg Times, 1543).

4. Touching Genius. I took this photo three days ago outside the drawbridge of the former Teutonic Knights' castle in Olsztyn. Copernicus was the administrator here after the Kingdom of Poland captured Olsztyn in the 1460s. The astronomer finally gets a chance to sit down here (must be tiring carrying that globe everywhere) and visitors sit with him and rub his nose for luck. Hence the shiny hooter.

5. You Say You Want a Revolution? The final shot is one I snapped in February 2006 on my first-ever Lonely Planet assignment, when the weather was very very cold. In those days this Copernicus statue sat in the centre of a roundabout - quite appropriate really. Recently the area surrounding him has been closed to traffic and repaved, creating a pleasant square in which to marvel at the Copernican achievement.

As you can see, I run into Copernicus everywhere. But is he stalking me... or am I stalking him?

Signs and Portents: Poland 3

Gone to Hel and back? Or just dying for a pie in the most unlikely of places? This week I continue my survey of curious signs encountered on a Lonely Planet assignment through Poland in the depths of winter in 2006...

1. There’s nothing like that nice Mr Shakespeare to encourage confidence in an English language school... though you might wonder whether Poles are really motivated to speak just like the Bard.

Interestingly, the great playwright used to be styled as 'Szekspir' in Poland, though the original spelling of his name is usually used now. Szkoła języków obcych means 'school of foreign language', by the way, and this example was in the beautiful Main Town of Gdańsk.

The Bard was pleased that his passing mention of Poland in Hamlet had been noticed by the right people.

2. Don’t ever say something will only happen on 'a cold day in hell' if you’re heading to northern Poland. For on the end of a long sandy peninsula north of Gdańsk lies the attractive village of Hel. And when I was there in March 2006, it was very cold indeed. Still, how many people can say they’ve been to Hel and back - and saw a Baltic grey seal in an aquarium on the way?

The tourism bureau wondered why its “Go to Hel” campaign was failing to bring in the visitors.

3. No, this scary metallic fish seen in Hel wasn’t an aquatic offshoot of the robots in the Terminator movie series. It was actually a warning about maritime pollution - the sign reads 'Don't litter the sea'. It was also a tribute, I felt, to the surrealism endemic in Polish poster art.

Newly-released papers revealed that Poland’s former communist rulers had attempted to construct an artificial dolphin for their Socialist World amusement park.

4. This bumper sticker belonged to Gdynia businesswoman Beata Zielińska, a former Adelaide resident who had taken the secret of Australian meat pies back to her homeland and manufactured them to be sold to Polish schoolkids. The sticker reads 'The pie is good and cheap'. Quite right.

The EU was willing to approve manufacture of the Aussie meat pie, but drew the line at Vegemite.

5. This starkly evocative sign was one of many stencilled onto the giant concrete ruins of the bunkers at Wilczy Szaniec, better known in German as Wolfsschanze or in English as Wolf’s Lair. This hidden complex in the East Prussia region of Germany (now the Masuria region of northeast Poland) was Hitler’s wartime HQ from which he directed Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

It’s supremely ironic, I think, that the Führer's nerve centre, where he spent almost all the remaining years of WWII, is now deep within Polish territory. If you’re going to visit the ruins by the way, I couldn’t think of a more atmospheric time to do so than the midst of winter, when the broken concrete blocks and surrounding vegetation are thickly covered by snow.

Von Stauffenberg intended to show the Führer exactly how he felt about him with a surprise novelty gift.

More intriguing signs and portents to come...