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Kolęda - during winter months in Poland, just after Christmas and even after New Years you can be visited by a group of wandering carolers (kolędnicy) who go door to door, singing christmas carols and pastorałki , wishing health and good fortune for the occupants of the house (in exchange of small fee of money or something good to eat). The characters seen in the group vary depending on the region of Poland, but most of the time we can meet - a Death, a Devil, an Angel, an Old man (dziad) or old woman (baba), someone could see a King, a bearer of the colourful star that make them more visble, but almost always you will meet Turoń - a bovine like creature with large mouth and horns, opening and closing it's mouth threathningly. Then again, it's also a custom in other eastern european countries so the lineup may be different. These ones look friendly, right? Why don't you let them in?

(watercolour on paper, digital re-touch)

Check out my Tiktok, also my Deviantart

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There's a very similar experience from the other point of view for the Polish people who used to live in the Western part of the modern Ukraine. As a Pole who was born there, having lived as a minority amongst people who knew very little about your culture (despite the fact that there were signs of this culture everywhere in the architecture, the food, the borrowed words in the local dialect of ukrainian) was really strange.

When I was in middle school one guy told me, just out of spite, to go back to "my Poland", and being still a young kid I was really confused. My family has lived here for centuries and now I have to go back? Back where??? I felt like I didn't belong in my own hometown.

And I know that it was generational, as my grandfather hid his actual roots and came out with a more Ukrainian-sounding surname to survive during the soviet times, my grandmother spent all her life thinking that she was worse than her peers because her father was Polish and was made to leave his home, and, as many others, was not allowed to take my pregnant great-grandmother with him. My grandmother from my mom's side, Polish to the bone, almost forgot how to speak her own language and only remembered it thanks to the prayers and the local Polish priests, who made a great deal of supporting the local Polish community after the declaration of independence in Ukraine.

But the Soviet times were the toughest. My great-grandmother lost her husband, who was repressed, her name, most of her Polish documents and books. God, communists took even her cookbooks in Polish, because they wanted her to abandon her culture completely and adjust to the new regime. Imagine you have two kids and one on the way, and one day your husband never comes back home and you learn that he was taken by communists, but you have no idea where and whether he would ever return. Then they come for you, and to protect your kids, you give away your whole identity, you suddenly are not Helena anymore, you are Olena, and you are a citizen of the Soviet Union, whether you like it or not.

And your grandkid (my mom) would no longer learn the language your family had been speaking for centuries, and she would only learn scraps and pieces of your tradition which you remembered from your own youth, but were not allowed to truly follow, and she would have no community to feel comfortable within, and as a child she would be blamed by the old Ukrainian neighbours for the so-called "sins of her Polish people" - people, she never knew until she grew up herself and started seeking for connection with them.

To this day, my parents feel like they are "worse" than the Polish people who were born in Poland, just because they aren't "Polish enough". I mean - how could they be, if most of their people were forcefully removed from the region which once was filled with a variety of languages and cultures. Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Armenians and many other ethnicities literally lived as neighbours. And the War changed everything for all of them, making that part of the world exclusively Ukrainian - and even Ukrainian culture for the first 50 years was suppressed, as the country was treated as an inseparable part of the cancerous monster created by moscovites, the Soviet Union.

I apologise for such a big wall of text, but this topic is still truly painful for me. I've been trying to regain what's mine since the very childhood, learning the language and the culture previous generations were forcefully deprived of. I moved to "my Poland" a long time ago, where I feel accepted, but still treated as an immigrant, as a Ukrainian whom I never was, at best - only administratively, in the documents. And it's all because of this huge and painful past everyone in this part of the world shares. I truly believe there's nothing more degrading and immoral than striping a person of their identity and a forceful removal of them out of their own homes. It's a generational trauma that even my kids, hopefully born in Poland, will carry in them, knowing from childhood that their grandparents on their mom's side are Polish, but "different". I guess the worst thing is that we all speak of such things in the past tense, while it is still something that is happening - to Ukrainian people in the east of their country, on the territories occupied by russians. Many people from Donbas were forced to move - either to Ukraine or to Russia - in 2014, but many of the people remained and are forced to assimilate to russian culture, whether they like it or not.

Going back to my family's history, I feel like it's my duty to speak up on every opportunity to bring attention to the Polish minority of Ukraine, because it still exists. It's suppressed, it's misunderstood and it gets smaller and smaller with each year because many youngsters either move to Poland or reject their Polish identity completely to embrace the Ukrainian one, but it exists. Older people remember the pain in the eyes of their parents, who survived the war and whose close people were either forcefully relocated or repressed and sent to Syberia. I'm not saying that part of the world is utterly Polish (not anymore at least), but it used to have Polish culture and the Polish people of that region deserve to be remembered and mentioned at least once in a while. So that my mom wouldn't break into tears, moved, every time she's being treated as equal by other Polish people, so that my grandmother wouldn't be scared to speak polish, haunted by the painful memories of the past, so that the many kids born to people of Polish descent would be proud of their ancestry and wouldn't completely reject it because of the peer pressure. I think it is necessary to carry on the memory of the people who used to live there, but mostly no longer do.

i don't think it is a uniquely polish experience, but surely universal for every pole

when you go somewhere and you think about the people, who were there before, but they are not anymore and in a way you took their place, but you know, that you cannot t r u l y replace them and quite frankly, you dont even want to

visiting regions around muszyna and seeing all greek-catholic churches turned into roman-catholic ones, because lemka people are not here anymore, as they were deported. you see their road side chapels and graves 100 years old and you know they lived there for so long, but they don't anymore

almost every single polish city has at least a memorial tablet dedicated to jews, who lived there before the war and whose fate you don't want to think about, really, having been learning about it since you were like 10. watchful eyes can still see balconies, that look out of place, but which once were most probably sukkas, or sometimes even a hole in a doorframe, where a mezuzah used to be. and abandoned cemeteries. so so many of them

there is a karaite cementery in warsaw, but when you think about it, can you name one karaite person? or someone masurian, so to speak? boykos?

to, in a span of ~10 years, go from a country with almost 40% of ethnic minorities among its citizens to a country that is pretty much homogenous is so outlandish

everywhere you go, something, s o m e o n e is missing. and will never come back

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𝔠𝔬𝔷𝔶 𝔥𝔬𝔪𝔢

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paintings round 3 poll 26

tap to view full images

Halny by Stanisław Witkiewicz, 1895

propaganda: skłębione chmury, gwiaździste niebo i ty twarzą w twarz z wiatrem, który kładzie drzewa [billowing clouds, starry sky, and you - face to face with the wind that can fell a tree]

Night in Ukraine by Stanisław Witkiewicz, 1895:

propaganda: dynamic and peaceful at the same time, you can really get lost in it

about the artist: He was kind of a snack, google him. Also, he was an architect and created the characteristic Zakopane art style by combining the traditional architecture of the region with art nouveau style.

submitted by @slaviclore :)

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Piernik - Traditional Polish Gingerbread Cake (recipes in Polish)

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St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Lublin at midnight, November 14th

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𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔰𝔴𝔢𝔢𝔱 𝔦𝔪𝔭𝔢𝔫𝔡𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔴𝔦𝔫𝔱𝔢𝔯

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For some reason, when the days get darker I suddenly become more nostalgic

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another window view photo just to keep my post consistent and colourful in these trying times:D

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Delphin Enjolras (French, 1865-1945)

La Lettre

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Cloud Blanket~ Based on a photo I took in Switzerland. It was raining that day, and at first I was disappointed by the weather because we couldn't go hiking in the rain, but the low hanging rain clouds were so beautiful that I became glad for the rain.

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Snow Effect with Setting Sun (1875) by Claude Monet

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Antiquarian Shop in Lublin at midnight, November 14th

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It's probably not very interesting, but, I was looking through Polish paintings and noticed a trend...

Józef Chełmoński (1849-1914)

Mieczysław Korwin Piotrowski (1869-1930)

Czesław Wasilewski (Ignacy Zygmuntowicz) (1875-1947)

Jan Karmański (1887-1958)

Wiktor Korecki (1890-1980)

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I can't get over the sunrises I'm lucky to witness in my window

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someone gently close my laptop and turn off the lights please