Castle in Kamyanets

October 4 — Kamyanets-Podilsky, Ukraine.

The name of the city is also spelled several other ways:  Кам’янець-Подільський, Kam’ianets’-Podil’s’kyi, Kamieniec Podolski, Kamenets-Podolsk (קאָמענעץ,)  Cameniţa Podoliei,  Kamaniçe,  Camenecium,  Kamenyeck-Podolszk.

Here's the money we use here:

Breakfast this morning at the 7 Days Hotel ( 7 Днів ) was sumptuous!  Shredded lettuce, shredded carrots, tomato slices, hot cheese-filled crepes, cold french fried potatoes, fried eggs, eggy something, bread, a cheesy layered something, muesli, hot milk, cold milk, baked milk, and yogurt. Oh, and sausage.  It was great.  (We did not eat the sausage.)

We set out to see the city.

It's humbling to be so disoriented. What are they selling here?  We have no clue.

The golden dome must look stunning when the sun is shining!  Alas...

We liked the patterns of cobble stones in the street.

To get into the old city, we crossed the bridge over the Smotrych River.

Half-way across the bridge — the cold wind here is bitter. Can you see the padlocks?

Looking down from the bridge, we see a lower part of the city surrounding the river at the base of a gorge.  It seems quite removed from the life above.

Once on the other side of the bridge, we're in the Old City.

Finally!  A sign that gives the foreigner a clue!

Ha!  No trouble reading this one....but....what's "Street Pizza?"

KABA is probably pronounced "kava."  Pronounced the same way but spelled "kawa" in Polish, it means coffee. I'm fascinated by the B-V conversion. In Spanish the two letters have the same pronunciation.  What's the reason?  Is there a linguistic connection?

We seem to have reached the end of the city...

...and then we round the bend!

The castle was originally built in the 14th Century.
Unlike Wawel in Krakow, this castle is mostly in ruins, but is open to visitors.

On either side of the castle, far below, village life forms another world.

We went inside the castle but did not take pictures. It's essentially a ruin, with lots of dark spaces and stairways and little crumbling passageways. Very cool. 

A guy working the tourist trade had a raptor on a leash.  He let it stand on Zach's shoulder for a minute and was disappointed that we did not take a photo.

Afterwards, we had lunch in a restaurant built right into the castle wall.  Here's the view:

On our way back to the city, we looked for the Jewish synagogue.  According to the map, this is it:

Does this metal construction have meaning?
In so many ways here, we don't know what we're looking at.

Several blocks later, we came across this abandoned shell of a building.

You can imagine Zach's pleasure!

And then, right around the corner, right outside on the street, exquisite mosaics. 

Kamyanets-Podilsky is a city rich in history. We took a tiny peek, learned a tiny fraction. Tomorrow morning we catch the 9:35 bus to Chisinau, Moldova.

Krosno, Poland — Part One

Most people who write blogs write at the end of the day. They write about the day that has just finished and their images are current.

We have had days without access to internet in Poland while we stayed with family. So, although we are now in the Ukraine, I'm still publishing about Poland. Some of the following text I wrote while in our cousins' home in Krosno, and will cut and paste it below.

I write this for my cousins, for all of you in the Bienia Family Tree — in California, in Illinois, in Ohio, in Kentucky, in New York, in Maryland, in Paris, in Lyon, in Mięzyborów, in Katowice, in Krosno. 

Krosno, Poland — Sept 29, 2013

My maternal grandmother, Maria Bienia — Zach’s great-grandmother — was born in Krosno, Poland, in 1876. Grandma, her two brothers and her four sisters grew up in a house that no longer exists. I am writing now on the very spot where that old wooden house used to stand, in a new house — let’s call it House #3.

Zach, Władysław Wożniak, Jadwiga Habrat Wożniak, and Wiesiek Habrat, in front of House #3.
These were our generous hosts on this visit to Krosno. 

When I first came here in 1967, on my way home from Nigeria, the first wooden house still stood on this spot but was being used as a barn. My grandmother’s niece, Genowefa Moskal Habrat, and her three children lived in another house that had been built next to the old — let’s call that House #2.  That second house still stands today. 

This is House #2, as seen from ul. Kopalniana. Note raspberry bushes along fence!
Our cousin, Wiesiek — my grandmother’s grand-nephew — still lives in this house.
He’s now age 73. Wiesiek has lived here all his life.

Here's the front of the house. When I first came here in 1967, late at night, this was the door that opened for me.
These are the steps on which I sat with our cousins that year, peeling mushrooms found in the potato fields.

When I was a child, my grandmother told me about how she washed clothes in a stream that ran alongside the house. The stream is still here.

Ślączka stream

When I visited in 1967, the family had no running water in the house.  This used to be the only source.

Grandma spoke of milking the family cow, of walking it up a hill to the pasture. That hill is still here, of course, although the view of the hill is now blocked by a bunch of trees. The family had a cow when I visited in 1967, and still had it when I returned in 1972.  Our cousins down the street, Leonarda Moskal Zajdel and her son, Jan, still had a cow when we visited in 1995. Alas, none of the families around here still milk their own cow. The horses that pulled the plows are gone. The cows are gone. People here now buy milk in the store. Is this progress? It certainly makes life easier...

Some time before Grandma left for America in 1905, an oil well was dug on this land. When Zach and I were here in 1995, the rig was still chugging away, albeit rather slowly. Ten-year-old Zach swung on it then and got his hands totally greased. 

Today, this well pumps even slower, and only two hours a day, from 5 to 7 pm. 
When it’s not pumping, it gurgles.

Several yards away, there used to be another well, the first in this area. This plaque marks well No. 1, 1888 to 1948.

A few feet away, Jadwiga has her garden. Everything's been brought in now except some carrots and her lovely squash.

We took a stroll down to the Wisłoka River, a tributary of the Wisłok.

Wiesiek says when he was a kid, he swam here. Our grandparents must have swum here, too. 

We snuck through a fence onto this swinging bridge. It sways when anyone walks on it.

The bridge was built to give access to the oil wells. The wells are powered by a motor which moves a horizontal wheel.

Can you hear the constant rhythmic screeching of the wheel?

This place — this Wisłoka river, the little stream, the fields, the water well — this place was home not only to my grandmother, Maria. Her sisters Wiktoria and Aniela, Agnieszka and Anna grew up on this land, too. Her brothers, Jan and Franciszek, also called this place home. It feels like sacred ground to me; perhaps that’s because of the distance in space and time. Nostalgia? I wonder if the people who live here now feel such reverence toward this land. Perhaps my emotions stem from Grandma's assumption, when she left in 1905, that she’d come back in a couple of years. She never did, never could, and her stories conveyed a sense of longing and sadness. I’ve felt almost a responsibility to come here, four times now, to come to this place that Grandma longed for. To see it for her.

We piled into Władyław’s car and drove into town. (On my first two visits here, in 1967 and 1972, we walked into town. No one had a car then. When Zach and I were here in 1995, Władysław already had a car.) On this Sunday afternoon, we were delighted to find a squash and pumpkin festival going on in the main square!

Ha ha! Do these Grannies sometimes rage? Do they sing? They sure do have fun!

We checked out a couple of churches near the main square in Krosno. One was built in the 14th century. Here are a couple of little details that I especially liked:

Another, the Franciscan church, was built in 1657. 

Bell tower at the Franciscan church.

Stanisław Janik, brother of our great-grandmother, Zofia Janik, created wood carvings for several churches.  Here is some of Janik's work, still in the Franciscan church in Krosno:

I'll save our second day in Krosno for another blog post. Time now to get some dinner!

Midnight Train to Ukraine

Last night, October 2, in Krosno, Poland, we walked down ul. Stapinskiego from the ancestral home of the Bienia family to the bus stop down the road. We flagged down the bus to Rzeszów, kissed a cousin goodbye, and we were off, in the dark, down a narrow road heading north. An hour later, in Rzeszów, we carried our luggage down the street to the train station, a desolate and deserted place. It was 10:00 pm.  The train for Lviv would not come through until 12:23. Across the street was a hotel which had a teeny bar. We stayed there until it closed at 11:00, each of us polishing off a large Tyskie beer.

The midnight train came rumbling through around 12:05. We found our little 2-bed sleeper in the last car and made ourselves comfortable, me in the lower berth, Zach climbing like a monkey to the top. I congratulated myself; we would have a solid five hours of sleep before the train rolled into Lviv at 6:03.

Hah! An hour later, we were awakened by a pounding at the door! The conductor opened our door and turned on bright lights. We were at the border! Polish border guards scrutinized our passports, moved on down the narrow train corridor. Loud voices, the open door, the bright lights, made sleeping impossible. This went on for at least 45 minutes. Then the train began to move. We closed our door, turned off the light.

I tried to get back to sleep and was almost there when... another pounding on our door!  Now we had entered the Ukraine! This time, Ukranian border police were there. They asked for our passports and took them away.  Some time later, they were back, women in camouflage, asking us questions.  Where did we live? How many days would we spend in Ukraine? Did we have family in Ukraine? Where were we going next? Did we have family in Moldova? Finally, about 3:30 am, they were gone, the car was once again silent, and we turned out the light. Ahhh. OK, now we can get in a good two hours of sleep before our alarm goes off at 5:30. Wait! Time zone change! It's not 3:40! It's 4:40! Reset the alarm!

Stumbling out of the train at 6:03, we found ourselves in a bustling train station in Lviv. How do we find out where the bus station is? Where's the information window? Here's how you find out: You go up to a random window, labeled in cyrillic alphabet. (Had we taken the time to learn how to at least de-code the alphabet to be able to pronounce words? No.) You figure out that here, no one in line stands politely back to allow the person at the window some privacy. People budge in ahead of you in line, because you are obviously a fool. You ask, "Do you speak English?" The answer is No. You ask in Polish, "Can you tell me where the bus station is?" The woman behind the window says, in halting Polish, "Go to window number 2." There is no one at window number 2. A gentle looking man approaches from behind us, asking where we are going. I ask again about the bus station. We are speaking Polish. "We have eight different bus stations. Which bus station do you want?" How do I know? "We are going to Kamyanets-Podilsky," I say. He says we need the central bus station and that he can take us there.  "Can we walk?" I ask. "Can we go on foot?" "It's about 13 kilometers away," the man says. We agree on a price in Polish Złoty, and then I realize I have no Ukrainian Hryvnia, which I'll need at the bus station. The man accompanies us to a "bank-o-mat" and I withdraw 200 Hryvnia, about $24US.

We follow the man outside to his taxi. It's totally dark out, and the man has my suitcase. He's walking very fast, and I am grateful that Zach can keep up with him. Zach is right behind him as the man walks up to a regular car, not a taxi. Whoops!  Is this a mistake?  Or not?  We take our chances and get in the beat-up old car. The man drives just like a taxi driver, zooming in and out of the pre-dawn traffic. We go through the heart of this big city and out the other side. Where is he taking us? I'm worried. And then there it is — the main bus station! All lit up! We get out, pay the driver exactly our agreed-upon price, thank him. Our first encounter in the Ukraine, and it was a good one.

But there we are. Absolutely no place to sit down, no waiting room. Forget coffee — there is no restaurant or snack shop anywhere at the bus station. We hand our reservation for the 10:15 am bus to a woman at the only open ticket window. People crowd around me on both sides, watching what I'm doing. No privacy here at all. I pay the woman for two tickets to Kamyanets-Podilsky. She tells me to hurry up as I search for the right paper bill.

It's now 6:40 am. Our bus doesn't leave until 10:15. It's still totally dark outside. And it's freezing outside — literally freezing. We have had just about an hour and a half of sleep, total. We have had nothing to eat or drink. We hang around inside, standing up against the wall. Kill time. Take turns going into the WC. Now it's 7:15. We stare at the unintelligible list of bus departures, trying to make sense out of it. Wait! Here's something that starts with a KAM...  Could that mean Kamyanets?  Must be! It's got a departure at 10:15. Wait! It's got another departure at 8:00! I wait in line again at the ticket window. Can I exchange these tickets for the 8:00 bus? Yes! For a small fee! Back we go to the bank-o-mat, then back to the ticket window.

Here's how we can tell we're on the right bus.

We get on the 8:00 bus! Yea! Zach stays awake, I drift in and out of sleep. Zach likes the countryside.

The windows kept steaming up. 

We pass a few cows, horse-drawn carts, a few women working in the small fields. The narrow road is filled with potholes, so different from the smooth new asphalt of the Polish roads. Here, for long stretches, the bus weaves around the potholes at 5 or 10 miles an hour. This is the main road between Lviv and Kamyanets-Podilsky. Up in front, the bus plays sexy music videos, competing for our attention with the fascinating countryside. For a while, the windshield wipers brush away snow. It's cold.

More than six hours later, some time after 2:00 pm, our bus pulls into Kamyanets-Podilsky. We are bone tired, incredibly hungry. We're here for two nights before moving on to Moldova. Tomorrow we'll rest, maybe post something more about Poland on the blog, maybe see the famous castle in this city. We feel farther away from home here in the Ukraine than we did in Poland. It's good to be here.

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.