(A travel report by Heike Zeller, PeaceBread member, consultant, presenter and owner aHEU – Regional Marketing Strategies)
Six of us travelled to Podlasie – a beautiful region in the east of Poland, bordering Lithuania to the north and Belarus to the east. Ukraine is not far to the south. Arable farming, meadows, fallow land, forests, watercourses and settlements alternate harmoniously. Several of us are now planning future holidays there.
We were:
* Dr Marion Schenk, founding member and core of PeaceBread.
* Dr Gibfried Schenk, founding member and managing director of PeaceBread.
Both had prepared the trip perfectly and told us about their very interesting life experiences in Central/Eastern Europe.
* Lukas Stede, PeaceBread member, former deputy federal board member of the Federation of German Rural Youth and now event manager at the Federal Foundation for Gender Equality.
* Dr Peter Buhrmann, Managing Director of the Association of Adult Education Centres.
* Philipp Conze-Roos, Deputy International Director of the Andreas Hermes Academy, awarded the ‘Great Podlasian Language Order’ by us as a Polish speaker at the end of the trip.
* Heike Zeller, PeaceBread member and owner of aHEU – Regional Marketing Strategies.
Our host Michał Matyskiel, the mayor of Suchowola, who had put together the programme together with Gibfried and accompanied us throughout the days, sometimes even driving the minibus himself, welcomed us on site. We also got to know his wife Beata, who runs the open-air museum near Białystok, including many events and courses on regional traditions.
After the long journey by train, we ended the first day with dinner together at the hotel. We sat around a table laden with delicious Polish dishes and had a very open discussion about the political situation in Europe, especially on the EU’s eastern border.
On the second day, we visited the family of Jerzy Popiełuszko, the Solidarnosz priest who was brutally martyred and canonised, in Okopy. Over the next few years, a state-of-the-art museum will be built in his honour, virtually opposite his childhood home, which will presumably create tourist incentives and indirect profitability for the entire region. The initiator and driving force behind the project is our partner Michał Matyskiel.
A ‘centre of three cultures’ commemorates the coexistence of Christian, Jewish and Muslim people in and around Suchowola and their culture.
We then travelled to Tykocin, where our FriendsBrot friend Artur Łajewski welcomed us and accompanied us for the rest of the day. Jews and Christians have lived together peacefully in Tykocin for centuries. We visited the synagogue, which was the centre of the second-largest Jewish community in Poland after Krakow and still has frescoes of Hebrew poems – tastefully decorated with ornaments – that are well worth seeing. After visiting the exhibition on Orthodox Jews and the small museum, we went to see the local church, which used to belong to a monastery, and the brick castle, which was completely rebuilt in 2002.
We then travelled to Artur’s workplace, the Biebrza National Park. In late summer, it presented itself to us as a vast landscape of litter meadows, forests and a few rare bird species. It was only during the final film in the visitor centre that we understood why Artur, Michael and Gibfried kept referring to spring: This is when most of the areas are flooded, the flora is lush and the fauna extremely lively.
On the third day, we set off early in the morning in a south-easterly direction to Kruszyniany. This is a Tatar village. Tatars were not only the warlike equestrian people, but are still a Muslim minority in various Central/Eastern European countries. Thanks to tourism, especially from Poland and Germany, Tatar families are once again living in Kruszyniany. Many of them come from Białystok to their holiday homes for the Muslim holidays. We visited the wooden mosque – outwardly resembling a church – following the lively explanations of the local guide, who is also responsible for its care and maintenance. Right next to it is the Muslim cemetery, which has been used for centuries.
In recent years, Muslim refugees who were found and identified by mushroom pickers in the woods on the Polish-Belarusian border have also been buried here. The fact that some relatives can at least attend the burial via streaming is only a small consolation.
In the afternoon, we were invited to Jerzy Wilczewski’s largest blueberry farm in Białousy. He himself drove us around his impressive farm on a lorry loading area, comfortably furnished with a generously laid table and benches. We watched sorting and packing in the packing house, walked through the staff accommodation and spoke to workers in the plantation. The whole operation left us with a very good impression – everything was personalised and of high quality, very well maintained and the people were friendly.
On the last day, we set off early again with Michał for Białystok station, got on the train to Warsaw, walked through the sunny city centre during the changeover and finally arrived back in Berlin.
Many thanks to Marion, Gibfried, our generous, friendly Polish hosts and PeaceBread for organising this trip! We all found it very enjoyable and enriching. It also made tangible what PeaceBread is all about and the power of direct encounters and dialogue between people. We spent the transfers and evenings in intensive discussions about what we had seen and therefore also about European and, in particular, agricultural policy. Beata Matyskiel’s worries about Russian attacks made it oppressively clear to us what it means to live on the border of an undemocratic part of Europe. The Polish military was also clearly present in Kruszyniany, one kilometre from the Belarusian border, with many military vehicles passing by.
The best moment of the trip for me was when Gibfried sang a Ukrainian song in the blueberry plantation and the workers all around sang along.
Pictures: H.Zeller und Dr. G.Schenk