The authoress delves into the identity of a place in urban space exemplified by the Warsaw Housing Cooperative (WSM) in the district of Zoliborz - a model of the town planning tendencies of modernism, emerging from the retrospective accounts by its residents. The context for an attempt at evoking the subjective experiencing of this particular place is the discourse held until this day and concerning the foundations of such ideological projects as the WSM and their consistent realisation.
A brief introduction to the problems and range of the titular research project, realised as part of an ethnographic laboratory conducted in the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at Warsaw University in 2004-2006. The studies, concentrated on places with a diverse identity, were carried out in Warsaw and its environs. They include research by Agata Chelstowska, Katarzyna Gmachowska, Katarzyna Kuzko and Magdalena Majchrzak.
Culinary travels may be understood literally as a trip to another place to gain some knowledge about the culture, also culinary culture. It may also be a metaphor used in advertisements or culinary reviews for the description of restaurants’ offer. Communicating food and restaurants in terms of culinary travel is explored in the article on the basis of Warsaw restaurants’ advertisements and reviews. Three directions of these culinary travels may be indicated: foreign/exotic, traditional Polish and Warsaw. Foreign travels mean the possibility of tasting the local cuisine and knowing its rules, as well as understanding other elements of the culture (folk art, language, music, clothes). Traditional Polish travels take consumers to the world of well-known tastes, often in modern version, and to the atmosphere of a mountain cottage or a country tavern. Warsaw travels mean not only tasting local dishes but also the availability of fashionable and popular places. Consumers taken on these travels are promised culinary experiences as well as other various cultural experiences.
The article is an attempt to analyze a cultural image of a historical event as a modern form of the mythical imagination. On the example of the famous defense of Ordon's Redoubt, immortalized by the poem of Adam Mickiewicz, the author shows complicated relations between the facts and the fiction. The very term 'myth' is used here in a rather broad sense, including not only the narration heroic itself, but also rituals, forms of commemorations, and – first of all – the changing topography of the city.
The article presents the results of the research on the religiousness of Warsaw burghers in the late Middle Ages based on the oldest preserved testaments. The sixteen documents from the years 1431-1526 show varied forms of religiousness characteristic of urban communities, including bequests to churches, legacies for the benefit of hospitals and the poor, choosing one's burial place and funding masses for one's soul. The repetitiveness of legacies contrasts with the wide spectrum of testators, which includes not only members of the patriciate but also poor inhabitants of the suburbs, women and men, artisans and intellectuals. In general, it seems that most of the testators were primarily concerned with the good of the urban community, which was supposed to cherish the memory of the dead.
Charitable care of poor adults in Warsaw in the second half of the 19th c. had various forms, which can be classified according to their functions. One of the forms was regular care, which concerned not only the old and the disabled, who had no means to support themselves with, but also other groups that needed help, for instance old teachers or bankrupt landowners, who could only partly cover their costs of living. At that time the poor were no longer committed to workhouses, since that form of 'help' had proved inefficient. A common way of dealing with beggars and vagabonds was to send them back to the place where they had been born. The law obliged communes to support the poor, but even police restrictions could not solve the problem of beggars in Warsaw. Another form of charity was temporary care of people who were temporarily in a difficult financial situation. Night shelters were organized, as well as special institutions for people who left hospitals and were unable to work. Temporary care was offered for example to poor seamstresses, craftsmen and workers, who were temporarily unemployed. It also concerned people who had a place to live but could not earn enough to support themselves. A house care institution was established, whose task was to supply such people with clothing, fuel and medicines, sometimes also with limited financial aid. Other forms of help included the distribution of Rumford's soup, organizing soup kitchens and cheap tearooms. The second half of the 19th saw new tendencies in charitable care of adults. The aim was not only to meet the daily needs of the poor but also to give them a chance to develop and change their life. New institutions were established to help the poor find jobs and develop their aspirations thorough education (e.g. free-of-charge reading rooms). Attempts of that sort were directed at both young and old people. Charitable care of poor adults, especially those who were able to work, evolved considerably throughout the 19th c. As to the care of poor and lonely old people, charity institutions remained largely helpless. It is difficult to judge whether the situation would have been different if Poland had been independent. The contemporary attitude to old people makes one very sceptical in that respect.
Alceo Valcini was the Warsaw-based correspondent for the Italian daily “Corriere della Sera” during the years 1933-1946. Valcini encountered great difficulties with the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, Aldo Borelli, who was not interested in following the political life of Poland except for Poland’s clashes with the Soviet Union. Valcini managed to publish his articles as long as they stressed the influence of Mussolini’s fascism on Polish political life or if they dealt with Soviet political interference in Central Europe. Valcini was to be replaced by another journalist as correspondent from Warsaw because of his own pro-Polish views and scarce enthusiasm for the aggressive stances of Nazi Germany towards Czechoslovakia and Poland, but he nevertheless managed to witness Hitler’s aggression against Poland. His stories were the first accounts of German persecution of the Polish Jews and Warsaw’s civil population, although they had no chance of publication on the pages of the increasingly pro-Nazi “Corriere della Sera”. Valcini took notice of everything that happened in Poland between the outbreak of the war and the end of July 1944. In 1945, Valcini collected his memoirs in a publication entitled The Calvary of Warsaw, in which he gave a graphic account of life in the city under German occupation. Valcini witnessed to the uprising in the Jewish Ghetto and to the activities of the Polish Secret State. His book was translated into Polish in 1970, after having undergone heavy editing, possibly as a result of intervention by the Communist censors. In any event, Valcini turned out to be one of the very few Italian journalists who – in writing about World War II and the Nazi occupation of Poland – did not fall prey to Goebbel’s Propagandaministerium, unlike the much more celebrated reporter Indro Montanelli.
The historical building in 26 Koszykowa Street is the seat of a Public Library established almost a hundred years ago for the capital city of Warsaw. In 2007 this institution will be celebrating its round anniversary. Created in 1907 thanks to the initiative of the Public Library Society, it has been almost uninterruptedly gathering and rendering available scientific collections and the belles lettres. From 1914 it is housed in an object erected due to the funds and efforts of Eugenia Kierbedz, born Kierbedz, the daughter of Stanislaw, an outstanding communications engineer and the author of the first permanent bridge across the Vistula in Warsaw. The Library was designed by acclaimed architects: Jan Heurich Junior and his collaborators - Wladyslaw Marconi and Artur Gurney. The building is composed of the two-storey main part which occupies the whole width of the front of the lot, and a single-storey outbuilding in the back, connected by means of a narrow and also one-story passage, perpendicular to the north-south axis. The most representative is the front fragment and the passage built on a ground plan similar to the letter T, which originally served predominantly library purposes. It still houses the large reading room featuring lavish architectural outfitting, harmoniously corresponding to the monumental facade which refers to the principles of Classical architecture. The outbuilding adjoining the passage and granted two wings of different width and height (on the ground plan of the letter L) formerly contained book storerooms, which burnt down during the second world war. Almost from its very outset the Library has been forced to tackle assorted problems involving available space. Successive postwar transformations (such as the erection of a new reading rooms building on the spot of a non-extant house in 28 Koszykowa Street) managed to meet the constantly growing needs of this institution for only a brief space of time. This is the reason why despite numerous failures, up to this day the Library has not resigned from efforts to expand and modernise its facilities. The results of a competition organised by SARP have been announced in December 2005. First prize for a conception of enlarging the Library went to the Bulanda, Mucha Architekci Sp. z o.o. studio. The adaptation of the Library buildings complex will be carried out in stages, and its completion is foreseen for 2007. Will it be conducted with due respect for the historical substance, or shall it assume the form of a successful integration of the new with the old; finally, will it add splendour to the anniversary of the hundred-years old institution? We still do not know the answer.
The author traces the stories of 19th century literary characters – inhabitants of villages or small towns – who dream about living in big, modern metropolises. Those journeys are quite often phantasmatic and never go beyond the sphere of desires (Emma Bovary). They prove, however, that the modern writers sharply distinguished the small town lives from the lives in big conurbations. Those differences were also stressed by the economists (Adam Smith) and sociologists (Georg Simmel) quoted by the author. Strong market, great capitals, abundance of ever changing excitements, volatility and superficiality of relationships, boredom or extravagancies are all products of big urban agglomerations which are hard to find in everyday life of small towns. This led to drawing sharp borderlines (mental rather than real) which separated 19th century small towns from cities. However the author suggests that the modern authors equally often stressed the differences and similarities between cities and small towns. This could be observed in Bolesław Prus’s novel Emancypantki (The New Woman) in which the phenomenon of gossip blurs the borderline between a small town Iksinów and the city of Warsaw.
Stadion X-lecia (the 10th Anniversary Stadium) is no longer, and its sole trace is a hole in the ground...This text, a commentary to the book Stadion X: Miejsce, którego nie bylo (ed. J. Warsza), delves into the symbolic presence/absence of the Stadium in an attempt at conceptualising the tension between its modernist, monumental architecture and disintegration (which could be perceived as a form of entropy - a phenomenon which stirred the interest of artists (R. Smithson) and philosophers (G. Bataille)).
The author considers problems developed in his Secret City: the Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940-1945. Here, the question of the home mingles with the biography of the author and his mother.
The article explores the mechanisms of memory culture and the commercialization of the socialist heritage from the period of the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL) (from 1945 to 1989) as a tourist destination, societal practice and cultural resource in today’s Warsaw. At the intersection of heritage studies, historical tourism and material culture, the ethnographic analysis focuses on three empirical case studies as examples of the commercial popularization of the history of the PRL. These are the communist heritage tours offered by WPT 1313 and the documentation of the socialist heritage at the Museum of Life in the PRL and the Neon Museum. These commodified products of Warsaw’s tourism and entertainment culture fill a gap in the tourist market, based on the prototypical, nostalgic longing of tourists for a sensual and emotional experience of the “authentic past”. This predominantly participant observation-based ethnographic study on the practices, spaces, images and agents filling this touristic niche, illustrates how they create sensual-emotive, aesthetic and performative fields of reifying, discovering and experiencing the socialist past. Finally, the paper focuses on how these polyvalent mechanisms shape the tourist infrastructure of Warsaw oscillating between critical distancing and entertaining appropriation of the socialist heritage.
At the beginning the author presents characteristic of little known family catholic monthly published between 1927–1939 in Warsaw. The social-cultural and literary paper was for the Polish intellectuals. In newspaper there are a lot of religious, historical and social problems and womanly column. Illustrated 'Rodzina Polska' was very attractive graphically. Author writes about form of book advertisements. Editorial staff chose rather religious books and novels, stories, diaries, biographies, albums, encyclopedias, dictionaries, pamphlets and fairy tales for children too. Advertisements were not regularly but adapt for the periodical. The most of them were from Pallotti Publishing House (Wydawnictwo Ksiezy Pallotynow).
The article presents analysis of urban social areas, resorted to delimitation areas on high and low status. data from last census (2002), based on demographical, educational, job and housing structure were used. On the basis of this analysis, comprehensives indicators of high and low social status were constructed and presented on the maps. Data were analyzed in statistical and urbanistic regions.
The article has a purpose to analyse the problem of supervision and control on activity of quarters of Warsaw. It tries to indicate the entities that are entitled to supervise and control them, describes structure, criteria, subject, legal measures of these administrative bonds and also - the relations between them. The article especially highlights differences between supervision and control carried out by state entities and also by local self-government powers. The conclusions of the article enable to acknowledge that legal traits and practice of supervision and control on quarters of Warsaw determine a range of their autonomy and have an impact on relations between their organs and local community.
A review of a book which presents the history of the Warsaw library collections during the German occupation. The author describes dispersion and dislocation of libraries, confiscation and exportation and creation of new cultural institutions into which the mixed and moved collections were incorporated. He also describes the activities of Polish librarians engaged in the Polish Underground State, who sought to save endangered collections. Contribution of German librarians, who were trying to take care of property entrusted to their authority, are also described.
The text looks at the origins of the modern art world in the mid-nineteenth-century Warsaw which remained in the grip of persecution by the Tsarist apparatus. It compares the two artistic communities, which were dubbed as bohemian by their later critics: the coterie of radical poets of the early 1840s and the group of visual artists active during the 1850s. The first was identified through its eccentric behaviour and dress, as well as its provocative actions in the streets of Warsaw. The second group was constructing their collective identity by means of informal sketches, preserved in seven albums by their patron Marcin Olszyński. Examining the collection of drawings, caricatures and photographs, the text argues that those informal sketches provide a unique insight into the ways in which the artists sought to establish their new professional identity, stressing their distinctiveness from other social groups, at the time of the major socio-cultural transition from noble to bourgeois patronage, and during the formation period of Warsaw’s urban intelligentsia.
Since 1527, Warsaw enjoyed a privilege forbidding Jews from settling in the town and the suburbs. They were only allowed to be in Warsaw during Sejm meetings and when taking their petitions to the royal court. From the turn of the 17th century more and more Jews were settling in private estates surrounding Warsaw, and later in the town itself. Around the mid-18th century they formed self-government structures, which constituted a germ of the future community. Officially the authorities did not recognize the existence of the community, but in practice they willingly communicated with the Jewish community via the structures established by it. In Praga, the Warsaw district on the right bank of the Vistula, the existence of the Jewish community was only recognized by the authorities in 1775, while on the left bank this did not happen until after 1795. For those confessing tej Judaic faith the most important thing was that from the middle of the 18th century they could satisfy their religious needs thant to gradual formation of self-government structures, whose powers encompassed the most important areas of life.
The weekly illustrated magazine 'Wedrowiec' was founded by Jozef Unger in 1863. During the first years the texts published there were reprints from the French 'Le Tour du Monde. Nouveau journal des voyages' (1860–1914). That was also the source of the woodcut illustrations. Articles on diverse fields, not limited to geography and exploratory expeditions, provided an overview of the latest achievements in science and technology. In years 1862-1883 'Wedrowiec' was used for educational purposes. It also created the right atmosphere for the growth of the intellectual establishment in Warsaw and also (through subscription) in other regions of the occupied Poland. Analysis of the issues published during those 20 years allowed to determine the fields and topics which were most valuable to Polish readers in the second half of the 19th century. This paper presents the results of preliminary research and serves as an introduction to the detailed analysis conducted by the author.
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