Andrew and I were driving around the Polish countryside with his parents this past July and it was awesome. Last I wrote, we had arrived in Torun!
I wanted to start this post by talking about Mennonites’ relationship with the Vistula River. I started doing research because even though I had read this stuff, the truth is I never finished reading a single article — my attention always leaps to another. Look. I’m never going to learn enough about this so as to not embarrass myself. I’ll just do the best I can, as is, hit publish, and let people correct me from there. HERE I GO.
I read somewhere that the Vistula River “flows from the Polish mountains” — meaning, from the Tatra Mountains which are at Poland’s southern border. So the Vistula flows north to the Baltic Sea, but certainly not in a straight line. It’s kind of remarkable that this large important river is all within one European country. SO. The thing for me, with the Vistula, is not only its pretty name (isn’t it though?) but the fact that, as far as I can tell, all the people that I’m descended from had lived in the Vistula Delta for around 250 years and were there because they’d been persecuted in The Netherlands and Flanders (if you dare click that link, brace yourself for an even less-informed post by yours truly) — and Poland was the only place in Europe that tolerated faiths other than Catholic. They’d already been getting used to accommodating other beliefs because of their German/Lutheran population. Speaking of which… I have a LOT more to say about the whole German thing. But Andrew says I conflate all of these: German population in Poland, what (and when) Prussia existed, Teutonic Knights, the Hanseatic League, Low German, and how these Mennonites of Dutch and Flemish ancestry came to think of themselves as ethnic Germans. (I’m probably making a royal mess by throwing all this into one sentence and then casually walking away but OH WELL. I’ll jump awkwardly into all that in subsequent posts.)
Mennonites were tolerated in the Vistula Delta because they kept the flooding at bay. In fact, they were invited to come over in the 1500s because of their land-draining abilities (windmills, dykes, et al). If you look at some really old maps of Poland you’ll see the northeastern part was under water, it’s all blue, with just some islands! There had been massive flooding and the landlords who owned those lands wanted them to be profitable again and needed people to reclaim them from the flood waters. Enter the Mennonites. They accomplished this, but at great cost. I think I’ve read somewhere that about two-thirds of them perished in their efforts, died of swamp fever, stuff like that. Plus sometimes the dykes still broke, re-flooding their homes and villages. But mostly the Dutch immigrants (many of whom were Mennonites) were better at managing this situation than others had been, and so they were tolerated here for hundreds of years.
ANYWAY. We had just one night in Torun, it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so we had just one night to explore. With Rick Steves’ guidebook we set out to follow his little walking tour.
We learned that medieval tales loom large in Torun. Below is the street just outside our hotel. We walked here many times before realizing what that wrought iron gate thingy was for on the left.
A dragon lives here!
That dragon has that portion of the sidewalk all to itself. There is an exposed waterway under that grill, that leads to Hotel 1231 where we were staying. Someone had once seen a dragon here. That’s why there is a little statue of a dragon here now. I found this charming.
Continuing our walk around the city walls…
All this castle-y medieval stuff isn’t very far from Obernessau. Mennonites had interacted here, they had seen this stuff, it had all been part of their lives. Wow!
Now I must tell you about Polish rose donuts. They’re called paczki but never once did I call it that there — I had to look up their actual name just now. This has nothing to do with Mennonites. Just food, which I love. I’d learned about these rose donuts from random social media accounts about Polish travel and it became my goal to consume one because I really love eating flowers. It was at this point on our stroll that I accomplished this goal. This donut shop stopped me in my tracks.
I asked what the lonely donut was filled with and was told “red fruit” — hoping that meant rose, I bought it, and IT WAS ROSE! It tasted SO GOOD. I felt like I’d won the lottery.
We strolled more and encountered many more medieval storybook characters in statue, including the goose who laid a golden egg.
Torun is also all about gingerbread. Half the shops sell the stuff. But I was content with the one I had had found in our room upon check-in. Nevertheless, we did take a selfie together in the reflection of one of the gingerbread bakeries.
By 9:47pm we were having a beer, and acknowledging our exhaustion. We soon realized the place we had landed at closed at 10, and though she was not kicking us out, we knew we should go.
But we did not head back to the hotel. First, Copernicus. The guy who realized the earth revolved around the sun — maybe a dangerous thing to realize in the 1500s. Copernicus is from Torun, so we had to see his statue:
And the church where he’d been baptized:
And the house where they’re pretty sure he had probably lived:
I guess everyone comes from somewhere and in my unscientific mind I’d always assumed Copernicus was from a land I would never visit, but now here I was, learning that there was a bit of a window wherein Copernicus existed in the same time and place as Mennonites (some of whom I may be descended from). It’s possible they passed each other in the town square!
By 10:43pm, Andrew and I were wandering back to the hotel.
By 1:08am I was still awake, logged into Grandma Online, taking screenshots of my relationship to my ancestors – the ones from the villages we were about to explore.
