Luszowice Kmiecs

Without access to internet for several days...  on our own in a coffee shop now for a short time. Blog posts will be out of order.  Skipping Krakow for now, and with Lyon still waiting, here's Luszowice:

On Saturday, September 28, we took the train from Kraków to Tarnów. After a tasty dinner at the Tatrzańska Kawiarnia in the center of town — really a very pleasant little city — we found a taxi driver who agreed to drive us 19 kilometers to the village of Luszowice, the ancestral home of Zach’s paternal ancestors. Zach’s great-grandfather, a Kmiec whose first name we can’t recall, was born in Luszowice. We wanted to walk around the town, get a feel for it, maybe check out the cemetery to look for the name Kmiec. 

We didn’t find a town; we found instead a picture-book collection of houses strung out along a winding pastoral road.  It seemed to me to be very sweet.

Separating Upper Luszowice from Lower Luszowice was a church, high on a hill. 

Zach said he spotted one store, but I missed it. We went to a couple of houses, talked to a couple of people, one with a Chicago connection, but they didn’t yield any relevant information. So we went to the cemetery. And THAT was a bonanza!

We found no fewer than twenty-three (23) different gravestones bearing the name KMIEC.  There may be yet more that we missed as we walked around. Which ones are related to Great-Grandpa Kmiec? We have no idea! I photographed them all.  Here are just a few:

I was impressed with how carefully the graves are kept. Lots of fresh flowers.

Many headstones indicated date of death, but instead of date of birth they give the age of the person at time of death.
Stanisław here died in 1965 at the age of 67. So we have to calculate that he was born in 1898.

Many graves had planters built in.
I like these marigolds, just what one would find in a cemetery in Mexico at this time of year.
I wonder if there are tulips here in June?

Here's our most helpful and friendly taxi driver, without whom we could not have come here.

A real LIVE Kmiec

We were ready to leave when we noticed there was another section with yet more graves.  And more Kmiecs!

No info about Karolina except that she lived here and died here.

We ducked into the church to take a quick peek at what must have been an important place for Zach’s ancestors. Dodging a wedding party — they had a little white bus waiting for them in front of the church — we hopped back into the taxi and headed back to Tarnów. We’d done all we could do.

Our driver, back in Tarnów, requested to be photographed in front of this statue of poet Adam Mickiewicz.

Although it was only mid-afternoon, we discovered that all the shops in Tarnów had closed at 1:00 pm this Saturday afternoon. In an Irish Pub where the bartender was a young Polish woman, we ordered two Polish beers and frytki. Strolling around the back streets in the old part of town, we found a tiny Italian restaurant with a chef from Italy who spoke good Polish. The black ravioli with salmon turned out to be very fine, as was the linguini with pesto and pistachios. We ordered two glasses of red wine but the chef refused to serve red wine with the salmon. So Zach had white. It was a good day.