Village Life in Poland, 1919
The typical Polish dvor or country house is built of wood, and has a verandah on two or more sides. The larger kind of house has two wings built round…
From: 1919 C.E. To: 1919 C.E.
Location: Poland
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Poland and the Poles by Alexander Bruce Boswell, 1919
The typical Polish dvor or country house is built of wood, and has a verandah on two or more sides. The larger kind of house has two wings built round a wide courtyard. It contains many rooms, all on the ground floor and opening into each other, so that the bedrooms are not removed from the living-rooms as in England. There is generally no upper storey and no stairs.
Wings are added as the numbers of the family increase, and the main block, together with the stables and the home farm, forms a very extensive group of buildings. Land formerly cost nothing to the squire, so building was extensive rather than intensive; and the bulk of the gentry, in view of the frequency of fires, Tartar raids, and from a general tendency to migrate, preferred to erect temporary rather than permanent houses, with the result that Poland is not distinguished for the solidity of its country houses like England, France or Germany.
To-day there is a tendency to use stone or brick, and to build more pretentious and lasting residences. The Polish country house stands in its own grounds, and usually has an avenue of trees, generally limes or poplars, so that its position is visible from a great distance over the plain.
The Poles were always great agriculturists; but in the eighteenth century agriculture declined, especially after the loss of Dantzig. It was revived in the Ukraine with the rise of Odessa, and the export of corn to Western Europe was transferred from Dantzig to the Black Sea ports, while Great Poland became the granary for Germany. Moreover, the Poles were ruled out of all government service in Russia or Prussia, so they retired to their estates where alone they could enjoy comparative freedom, in contrast to the Russian gentry, who flocked to the Court, the Army, and the Civil Service. The Poles became expert agriculturists, and their prosperous estates in the Ukraine can be easily distinguished from the neighbouring Russian estates, which are generally neglected by their absentee proprietors.
Almost all the Polish landowners manage their own estates to-day, and are usually assisted by an educated steward, who has completed a course at some agricultural college, either in Galicia or abroad, The estate generally consists of a home farm, near the house, and several more remote farms, each with their own land and under the control of an ekonom or manager.
The dvor is often a centre of education for the villages close by. The squire is generally president of the local agricultural circle; and, under Russian rule, there was usually a secret school for village girls under the lady of the house. The prejudice of the peasant against the squire, and indeed against educated people in general, is only gradually disappearing; but in some parts, especially in Poznania, the national struggle has combined squire and peasant in co-operative organizations against the common foe. Class antipathies are strongest in Galicia; but even here education and joint action in Parliament have introduced new ideas, and have brought about closer co-operation in the national and economic fields.
The Polish country house is best described in the words of Mickiewicz:
"Amid such fields as these, long years ago, By a brook, on a slope, amid a grove of birches, There stood a country house of wood on stone. Its white walls shone afar, the whiter still That it stood out from the dark green of poplars, That gave it shelter from the autumn winds. Not large the dwelling house, but neat and snug. A mighty barn it had, and near the barn Three stacks of hay its roof could not contain; 'Twas clear the neighbourhood was rich in corn. From the numerous sheaves, that up and down the furrows Shone thick as stars, and from the numerous ploughs Turning betimes the wide black fallow earth, Clearly belonging to the house hard by— Tilled well and truly, like to beds of flowers,— 'Twas clear that in this house had habitation Plenty and order—All might see the gate Open in widest hospitality."
Life in a Polish country house is a strange combination of simplicity and display. In a typical house there are many elements lacking which we should consider indispensable. There are few carpets. The floors are generally polished, and in the morning one can see a rosy-cheeked servant girl, in a red skirt and red kerchief, sliding barelegged on two dusters, till the floor shines like glass. The walls are often covered with nothing but distemper or rough-cast, with few pictures or ornaments. The drawing-room is often quite bare and empty save for a few chairs and a piano, though some houses have large collections of pictures.
All the Poles amuse themselves with music and the national dances. The writer stayed in one house where the whole family was intensely musical, playing on the organ, piano, and violin. The drawing-room is generally little more than a ball-room, and on the slightest pretext—a holiday, birthday, or the presence of guests—dancing will begin at any hour of the day or night, and continue for hours, with a magnificent contempt of time. Hospitality is universal and unlimited. Guests will be accommodated in all the rooms, and will sleep on sofas, on mattresses, on the floor, or even in barns.
Horses will always be lent to convey guests over long distances from house to house; and the stranger will be amazed at the close connection between one country house and another in the Ukraine, where enormous distances are covered in appalling conditions of dust, mud or snow. Mud is universal in the spring and the autumn, and a carriage must be drawn by four horses abreast. Accidents are frequent, and the Pole thinks nothing of falling out into the mud and snow, as the bad roads are proverbial.
An ancient Polish custom in Carnival time is the Kulik, described in Malczewski's "Marya." The guests of a country house, in masks and fancy dress, turn out in carriages or sledges and pay a visit to their neighbours, who in their turn are compelled to join the procession. The party proceeds from house to house, in each of which they receive hospitality; and so the progress continues till all the Polish gentry in the district have been visited and have joined the procession.
Accidents are frequent and taken as a matter of course. Not only are the roads execrable, but a carriage is often held up by a bank of earth or a stream across the track. The writer was once met at a station in the Ukraine by his host in a motor car, which carried not only a chauffeur, but a gardener with a spade. After a long run the car was held up by a stream, and the host got out and asked his guest to smoke a cigarette, while the gardener dug a way round through a bank into the forest, where the water was more shallow. It is often necessary to overcome obstacles of this kind, and to find a way round. The word objechac (to go round) is one of the first Polish words a stranger must learn.
The Poles are enormous eaters, and have a splendid cuisine of their own. The feast begins with zakonski, or hors d'oeuvres, which form a whole meal in themselves. Various dishes are spread out on a side table, consisting of vodka or some other stimulant, herrings, sardines, slices of ham or wild boar, cucumber, mushrooms, potatoes and other delicacies.
Then comes the dinner proper. First of all, soup of great quantity and variety. Beetroot and mushroom soups are excellent, and Poland is famous for its frozen soups (chlodnik). With the soup, meat pies are usually served. Then come fish or game, then meat, and then sweets.
When the main meal is finished, the samovar is brought in, tea is drunk and a number of small cakes are eaten. These cakes are of great variety, and there are different kinds for the different festivals of the year. For Christmas there are cakes flavoured with saffron; others contain poppy seed. For Carnival and Easter, tasty doughnuts and other sweet delicacies are made. Most of these cakes are made by the ladies in a country house.
The house is usually largely self-supporting, and the lady is always an excellent house-wife. The greatest festival of the year is Easter, when a side-board covered with tempting food is laid out, and decorated with leaves and flowers. In the centre there is always a symbolical lamb and many Easter eggs made of sweet-stuffs, and painted with various designs. This table is blessed by the priest, and called the Świencony or "sanctified."
All Poles pay calls to their friends at Easter and partake of their hospitality. Hot soup is generally provided, but the cold viands are the chief part of the feast. In the towns, where guests eat cold meats with their friends all day, the result is generally violent indigestion; and the doctors are always busy for a week or two after Easter. At the end of any meal, all the guests kiss the hand of the hostess, and thank her for the meal.
Another custom is that of singing carols (kolendy) at Christmas time. “Waits" go round the various houses, dressed in all sorts of costumes, representing animals or biblical characters, the Devil or Herod, with all kinds of musical instruments, and sing the old Polish carols, some of which are of great antiquity.
The life in a country house is a queer mixture of ceremony and easy-going simplicity. Some houses keep up great state, with a mass of servants, some of them called Cossacks and dressed in Cossack liveries. In all houses there exists an unexpressed, but strong patria potestas. The old gentleman and lady are held in great awe, and observe the ceremony and courtesy of an older age. They say the last word in all matters affecting the family honour; and marriages are often arranged by the parents, as in France. The dowry of the daughter plays a large part in such matrimonial arrangements.
Despite this superficial ceremoniousness, the relations between all members of the family are close and affectionate. The old days have passed away when the parents scarcely saw their children, except at a formal interview, when the son of the house was often flogged just like the peasant, except that he was allowed to lie on a carpet. The age of ignorant magnificence and artificiality have given place to a more modern mode of life.
All the country gentry to-day are zealous and scientific managers of their estates, and many of them occupy themselves with intellectual and artistic pursuits. One house the writer visited in the far south, where the squire was a keen archaeologist. He had excavated 120 kurgans or tombs, and had a magnificent museum of Greek, Scythian and Slavonic ornaments and curiosities.
The old country life of the szlachta survives strongly in the Ukraine. Yet even this region has given to Poland in recent years many writers, musicians and social workers. In Poland proper, the dvor is completely modernized, and the Polish landowner has little to distinguish him from his Western counterpart, save a greater sociability, a more ceremonious observance of the virtues of hospitality and charity, and a number of customs inherited from his ancestors.
Alongside the country house lies the cottage as the mainstay of Polish life. The Polish peasant is almost always a landed proprietor. There is no communal ownership of land in the Polish village, as in Russia; so that the villages are not so compact, and often consist of a number of scattered farms.
The Polish peasant in the past was a very humble member of the Polish community—in fact he scarcely belonged to it at all. He had for 350 years no civic rights whatever. He was the serf of his master. It was only the easy-going and patriarchal relations between squire and peasant that made life tolerable for the latter. But through all the period of serfdom, he clung tenaciously to his land, like all the Slavs.
However burdensome the forced labour he carried out for the landowner, he always worked at his own plot of land. Since the emancipation of the serfs, an enormous revolution has taken place. The Polish peasants are not only free and possessed of their own land, but they are taking a great share in the national life, and are giving to Poland many of its leaders in all departments of life.
It is enough here to mention the names of Wawrzyniak, the great social organizer and financier, Kasprowicz the poet, and Przybyszewski the dramatist—all sons of peasants—to illustrate this great cultural advance. The entrance of the peasant into political life is discussed elsewhere in this book (see Chapter VI.), and to-day the new Polish parliament, in contrast to the great reforming Sejm of 1791, consists chiefly of peasants.
The Polish peasant was scarcely conscious of his nationality even as late as the Insurrection of 1863 in which he took merely a passive part. But he has resisted the blandishments of alien governments, and declared himself a Pole, and to-day the main support of Polish nationalism is among the peasants. He has not lost his sturdy attachment to the soil, he has associated himself with all the best of the national traditions, and he has contributed to the national resources his great qualities of courage and tenacity, his vast undeveloped talent and latent abilities.
His main interests are the land, religion and patriotism. He is first and foremost a tiller of the soil, who would be lost without his land. He is devotedly attached to the Catholic Church; and the Polish priest, though most often of another class, is always respected and followed by the peasants. Lastly, he is well acquainted with the national tradition. He knows of Piast, the mythical founder of the Polish monarchy, of Casimir the "peasant king," of Jadwiga, who sacrificed herself to convert the barbarian Prince of Lithuania to Christianity, and of Kosciuszko who first gave him his freedom.
On the death of the last-named hero, the peasants of Poland brought baskets of earth from all parts of Poland, and raised in his honour near Cracow a great mound, which bears his name to this day.
Whereas the educated Pole knows by statistics that Dantzig is no longer a Polish town, the peasant knows by tradition that it is. He refuses to accept the German advance as permanent, and his stubborn resistance to facts has made him a more dangerous opponent to foreign oppression than the enlightened squire.
Many a peasant in Poznania has been unable to find his way by rail or road to his native village, owing to his ignorance of, or refusal to admit, its new German name. The Russians introduced roubles and kopecks into Poland, but the peasant continued to calculate in the old Polish gulden and groschen (zloty and grosz). The attempt to educate the peasants in the Russian language was a mere farce.
Many a systematic German or Russian plan for attack on the Polish nationality has failed before the inarticulate, but obstinate conservatism of the peasant. He has fewer national traditions than the gentry, but they are a fundamental part of his life, and he is less likely to lose them than the emigrant gentry, whose imagination and intellect has often been allured by fresh alien ideas. The peasant reckoned little of romanticism, socialism or modernism, of art or politics; and this ignorance was his chief strength.
To-day he has acquired a knowledge of these things, but his conservative strength remains, and is a great national asset. The individual peasant, when he is educated, may chase some butterfly fancy, like the intellectual; but the mass of the villagers remain in the cottage and at the plough. The national virtues of imagination and sociability are qualified by sound common sense and the conservatism that is bred of close contact with the soil.
The religious spirit of the peasant is revealed in his conversation, his resignation to the will of God, and his respect for the village priest. His ordinary greeting is "May Jesus Christ be praised," to which the answer is " for ever and ever." The whole country-side is covered with shrines, from a large monastery like that of Czenstochowa, to which he makes pilgrimages, to the small chapels at the crossroads or wells and the universal wayside crosses, which generally hold a figure of the suffering Christ with some kind of decorative scheme.
One of the chief characteristics of the village is the crowd in and outside the church on Sundays and Feast days. And Polish religion is no mere formalism, as it often is in Russia; it is a deep reverence and devotion to the Roman Catholic Church, which permeates all the life of the peasant.
The great festivals of Easter, Christmas and All Souls' Day preserve also many features of paganism; and purely pagan is the festival of St John's Eve, known popularly as Sobotka. A bonfire is lit at sunset, and the whole village gathers round it, the young men in their national costumes and the girls in all their finery, with wands and wreaths of flowers. They form a circle round the fire, and dance to the accompaniment of music. The musicians play ancient melodies on instruments something like the lyre. As the excitement increases, the young peasants jump over the bonfire. If there is water near at hand they take buckets and throw their contents over the village girls, and many superstitions are attached to the whole ceremony.
The wedding ceremonies are also interesting. The bride wears a wreathed crown, and the whole company is dressed up in full costume and wreathed with flowers. The procession is generally equestrian, in carts and on horseback, and accompanied by music and singing.
There is a wealth of folk melodies in Poland, about love and war and all the chief incidents in the life of the peasant. Above all, music is universal, and the national dances are to be seen at every village function, especially the Mazurka and the Krakowiak.
The Polish village is often very scattered. Its chief street is seldom paved. Dust and mud are universal. Particularly bad are the Polish bridges, which have given rise to many proverbs, such as the following:
A Polish bridge, A German lenten fast, An Italian church service— All these are humbug.
The village generally centres round the church, which is often a very fine edifice and, as in Ireland, a contrast to the mean buildings near it. There is also the village well, which is a prominent feature of the scenery. A long, heavy log, weighted at one end, is connected with the bucket by a strong, thin branch, the balance being so fine that the bucket can be easily lowered into or raised from the well.
The cottage is always built of wood, with the joints dovetailed or bolted at the end. The roof is thatched with straw, and is generally very wide and quite overshadows the building. There is often a verandah, and there is always some sort of decoration in the form of paintings round the door and the windows, or ornamentation on the pillars of the verandah. Some of the better cottages look exceedingly neat, with geranium pots in the windows, and plenty of decoration all round the walls, though the general effect of the dark logs is gloomy. Inside, there is always a large stove, a table, chairs, and generally a spinning wheel.
There are pictures of saints on the walls, and many of the interesting Polish cut paper hangings, which are of ancient origin and display considerable artistic skill in their designs. There are also ornaments made of hay or straw wreathed into various patterns, and known in Polish as "spiders."
The cottages always have a stable and barn adjacent, and generally a small garden behind them. Flocks of geese and pigs are usually tended by the children, who also look after the cattle and horses further afield. The horses usually have their legs hobbled, as there are few fences in Poland, hedges are unknown, and the wide plain is open to them. It is a common sight from the railway train to see these animals jumping clumsily about, followed by merry, gaily-dressed children, with wreaths of flowers in their hair and clad in the gay dresses of the country.
The costume of the Polish peasant is very picturesque and of immense variety. It is different in each locality. The costumes of Lesser Poland are quite different from those of Poznania, which in their turn differ from those of Kujawia, Mazovia, Lowicz and other districts. Some of the colours are extraordinarily bright, a contrast to the monotonous gloom of the soil or the dazzling whiteness of the snow. The women's costume is bright but ungraceful, probably owing to the influence of the Church, always anxious to avoid any concession to the senses. The women carefully cover their heads with a kerchief. It is always possible to tell from a peasant's costume to what district he belongs. But in the neighbourhood of the towns the ordinary costume of Western Europe is beginning to oust the more picturesque traditional dress, while hats now appear on the heads of some of the women in every village group.
The Jew is a common feature of the Polish village, and lives quite happily with the peasants, as he has done for centuries. He is always extremely busy with moneymaking, and seems curiously alien among his peasant neighbours. The popular attitude towards him is more one of jocular contempt than of any national dislike. But the recent attempt to turn him out of the village has led to some friction.
The common peasant cart is simply a plank on four wheels. Two long pieces of wood are joined to it by a number of short branches which form the sides. A long journey in this primitive, springless conveyance is agony for the uninitiated. The driver talks to the horse in the most affectionate way, and stops him with that extraordinary Slavonic sound—tprrrr!
The Polish village, whether in Prussia, Austria or Russia, has complete autonomy in theory—a revival under very different conditions of the wide self-government enjoyed by the Polish peasants before the days of serfdom. In the kingdom of Poland the Commune, in Polish gmina, consisting of a group of villages, became the unit of local administration in 1864. The members of the gmina elect their Mayor (Wojt) and his assistants (soltys) as the executive power, and they elect also the members of the local tribunal and other functionaries.
The gmina manages its own property, makes roads, builds hospitals, controls the elementary schools, assesses taxes; and for all these activities the village Mayor is responsible to the village Assembly. Originally this local autonomy was perfectly free from control, because the Russian government intended the Commune to be a democratic bulwark against the Polish gentry. But when it became obvious that the peasants were just as patriotic as the other classes, Government interference began. The Polish Mayor, being often illiterate, was assisted by a clerk, who was nearly always a spy, or, at any rate, a mere tool in the hands of the Russian governor of the district.
When Russian became the official language in the administration of the Commune, the position of the clerk became all important, as he was the only official who knew Russian well, and could easily manipulate an assembly of bewildered peasants who could not speak Russian. A great struggle has taken place to defend the Communal institutions, the only remnant of autonomy existing in Russian Poland; and the gentry played a great part in rousing the peasants to a consciousness of their own strength. In Galicia, the Communes were naturally perfectly free, while in Prussian Poland they were autonomous, but suffered from considerable Government interference.
Boswell, Alexander Bruce. Poland and the Poles. Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1919.
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