Rest day in Zakopane: Day 125

A day sightseeing and resting in Zakopane. 

I woke up stiff. My legs struggling with the movements needed to walk me to the toilet. With exercises it wore off although straighening my leg was a movement it objected to. It led me to arrange a relatively short day tomorrow. For breakfast I fancied a croissant and coffee, and it seemed there was just the place down the road. However they had turned the croissant into a huge range of sandwiches while also introducing it to the digital age. I had to order at one of those screens you now see in hamburger joints. There were numerous choices, I chose a ham and cheese croissant but then had to specify what kind of sauce I wanted, whether I wanted gherkins etc. and that was before specifying what type of milk I wanted in my small, medium or large size latte. The filled croissant was messy to eat although it did give me a healthy dose of protein and lettuce for breakfast.

A little later I visited a couple of museums on the local area. Originally, people from the area were called Highlanders, and before the arrival of tourism in the 19th century scraped a living from potatoes, sheep and hunting. Their main resource was the forest, so they built wooden houses raised off the ground on stones with steeply pitched roofs, "tiled" with wooden shingles. Intricate woodwork characterised the furniture and decorated parts of the house, and they made wooden instruments: simple violins, basses and pipes.

Visiting tourists brought increasing wealth. Architects such as Stanisław Witkiewicz admired the Highlanders' wooden houses which inspired the Zakopane style towards the end of the 19th century. Larger, modern, wooden buildings were constructed with the traditional rooflines and ornamentation of the Highland houses but with greater size and exuberance. To an extent it seemed an affirmation of a Polish identity at a time when Poland no longer existed. Despite there once being a Polish-Lithuanian Empire, by 1795 Poland had dissappeared altogether, swallowed by Austria, Russia and Prussia. Not until after the First World War did it re-emerge, having maintained a separate existence through its language, literature and culture. Now it is a thriving, proud country. 

Villa Koliba, a house built by Stanisław Witkiewicz in Zakopane style.

Today Zakopane exists only as a tourist town, I found it thronged with visitors despite it apparently being the low season. Lines of stalls met me from the funicular yesterday selling local cheeses and jams, toys for children, ice cream, waffles, riffs on traditional clothes and anything else that might encourage a passing visitor to buy. On the main street, shops mingle with restaurants and horse drawn carriages ply for trade driven by men dressed as the "Highlanders" that have long since gone. I frequently became entangled with long lines of school children on educational visits to the historical sites. I visited an old wooden church having often passed signs for such buildings, several kilometres off my route. They are part of the area's heritage. Beside the church was a cemetery. Although many gravestones were of stone, there were also wooden markers in traditional styles such as crosses or crucifixes with a little "roof" on them.

Church of Our Lady of Czestochowa, the oldest wooden church in Zakopane.

After a morning visiting the Tatra Museum, Villa Koliba and the old church, I spent the afternoon resting in my room, which has a little kitchen area with sink and microwave. Although well designed it has a large number of lights, the switches for which are difficult to find, not being located in any simple relationship to the bulbs they operate. It rained heavily which has made me glad of my little appartment, cosy inside rather than out in the wet. Dinner was at a restaurant where a Highland band was playing. Unfortunately the portions were so large I was unable to finish. The meal also lacked vegetables...

Main pedestrian street in Zakopane.