Layering the Landscape in Krakow

There are four artificial mounds on the outskirts of Krakow – two are ancient and two modern. The Krakus mound was supposedly constructed to house the remains of the city’s legendary founder. It predates the Christian era. The Wanda mound was erected a few centuries later to commemorate the heroism of a Christian princess reputed to have drowned herself in the nearby Vistula rather than succumb to marriage with a pagan chieftain. The Kosciuszko and Pilsudski mounds enshrine the heroic examples of the nineteenth-century revolutionary internationalist Tadeusz Kosciuszko and twentieth-century nationalist leader Jozef Pilsudski.

In September of this year I took part in the ‘Layered Landscapes’ conference at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. I talked about the layers of meaning that can be applied to English fields. As soon as the last session had ended, I crossed the city ring road to check out the Chelmonski exhibition in the National Museum, and then set off across the great Bionia meadow further westward for at least a mile, as far as the banks of the Vistula. On the other side of the river there’s a road that winds up through the densely wooded hinterland of Zwierzyniec. You soon lose your sense of direction here and wonder if you’ve missed a turning, but then there’s a break in the woodland and there in front of you is the Kosciuszko monument: dauntingly steep (as steep as Silbury Hill) and martial in aspect – like a tumulus and Martello Tower combined.

The walls girdling the mound harbour a museum that chronicles Kosciuszko’s involvement in a succession of independence struggles on the part of several ethnic and political communities during the nineteenth century, in both Europe and North America. Although not exactly a gun for hire, he could be relied on to swing into action whenever and wherever an anti-imperialist resistance movement took up arms. The autobiographical matrix for this lifelong crusade was of course the subjugation of Poland by Tsarist Russia. Polish Russophobia was inevitably turbo-charged during the Soviet era, and this added lustre – even more than usual – to Kosciuszko’s reputation.

Hence the exhaustiveness of the museum’s display and the automatic reverence accorded to anything that qualifies as a relic of his exploits. You can’t help but admire the fidelity with which the Poles pay their dues to long-dead patriots, and it has to be said that Kosciuszko was more resourceful than most. He was a highly trained and effective military engineer who invented devices that made the Hudson and Delaware rivers impassable for British naval ships during the American Revolution, while also designing fortifications that made impenetrable the American lines of defence.

The exhibition is heavy on the technicalities, and also on documentation: letters, reports, treaties, testimonials, technical drawings, order of battle charts and maps. It’s exhaustive, and the effect is exhausting, especially in a bunker-like environment. I felt my brain shift into hydroponic mode as more and more technical data failed to take root. After about forty minutes, I abandoned my post and climbed out into the fresh air, and onto the actual mound.

Perhaps the most striking thing about this monument is that it is not just an expression of nationwide patriotism but a literal embodiment of nationwide participation in its construction, because the soil comprising the mound was gathered from every part of the territory of Poland in 1820–3. Which means that physically it is an epitome of the entire country as it was under Tsarist rule. Thirty years later the Austrians took charge, and they militarized this vantage point by superimposing fortifications all round it. There’s an external staircase in stone that leads to the summit. It is constructed in a spiral but even so the ascent is dauntingly steep – much steeper than it looks from the ground – and the view from the top is staggering.

The elevation is modest – a mere 1,000 feet above sea level, or thereabouts – but the top of the mound is about 200 feet above the plain in which Krakow sits and it is ringed by hills nearby and by mountains in the distance: the Carpathians to the south, and the Tatras to the east; to the west is the Wolski forest; to the north are the limestone cliffs of the Ojcow National Park. With this kind of purview, you’d see trouble coming long before being within range of any firepower. On the other hand, you might be the source of trouble yourself, in which case, this is the ideal lookout point from which to devise a plan of attack.

At the time of the mound’s construction, Krakow was Poland’s capital city, and the prime target for any invasion. Unsurprisingly, the suburbs are crowded with cemeteries, and the road downhill to the south-western suburbs goes past the Salwatorski cemetery. I’ve taken this route twice, and on both occasions a burial service was in progress, with mourners wearing military uniforms.

The Old City in the centre of town is now under invasion by seemingly endless waves of tourists. But it’s the suburbs that provide the most lasting reminders of the other kinds of invasion: military invasion by Austrian and Tsarist troops: ideological invasion by the Soviets. And the architecture – once you’ve reached the concrete tenements on the outskirts of the Debniki district – is unchanged since the days of communism. There are more things in the shops now, but many people are still occupying flats that consist of two living rooms, a boxroom bathroom, and a kitchen like a small corridor. Once the front door has been closed, the only real difference from the days of the Polish People’s Republic is the number of channels on the TV.

It is perhaps inevitable that the Kosciuszko mound should have been chosen in 1990 as the site of the first Polish commercial radio station: RMF. Political freedom brought commercial opportunism, which is unlikely to have been a priority for Kosciuszko and his followers. From the top of the mound you can see the commercial vehicles thronging the ring road, but what you can’t see is the relentless seepage of ideological messaging being soaked up by the phones and iPads of Krakow’s ever-expanding population. Forget the enemy at the gates, the enemy is in the porches of your ear, and down in the depths of your eidetic bunker.

It is an incorporeal enemy, leaching incessantly from an ever multiplying number of sources. The nineteenth-century liberationists could never have dreamed of the slow-release invasions of twenty-first-century technology. They first emerged into the anthroposphere with radio, and they have been evolving ever since. It was Bruno Schultz – the great Ukrainian fabulist who wrote the finest Polish prose ever to be devised – who imagined domestic reality harbouring an infinite capacity for transformation. And it was precisely in those crevices which are overlooked, the dark spaces in the attic, the unlit corners of the cellar, that new forms of life would evolve and breed, and metamorphose into conditions we can neither grasp nor fathom. And before we could realise what was happening, we would grow dependent on their messaging, without which we find ourselves reduced to the condition of those prisoners who can only communicate by knocking dully against the wall that separates them. Kosciuszko believed in fortifying the walls, both human and architectural. Schultz knew that walls are always already our primary medium of transmission. The writing is on the wall; the cave painting is on the wall; the projection is on the wall. Walls are communicating vessels as well as barriers. There is no exclusion principle that cannot be breached and undermined in the twenty-first-century version of the public sphere. And it may be that the most effective instrument of resistance to this gathering tide is poetry.

Three poets celebrated Kosciuszko’s heroism at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Coleridge’s 1894 poem, the earliest of the three, was misconceived in that he believed his subject to have been killed during the armed struggle against Russian forces, whereas he had only been wounded and taken captive. Hunt’s much more opaque sonnet of 1815 amounts to a somewhat laborious assertion of Kosciuszko’s entitlement to a place in the Hall of Fame. But Keats’s sonnet of 1816 is remarkable. It imagines the effect of Kosciuszko’s intervention in the rebellion against the Tsar being felt in ‘worlds unknown’ where it is transformed into ‘harmonies’ that ‘burst from clouds concealing’. It is almost suggesting that the truest experience of freedom is found in a virtual world that is parallel to embodied experience, and that its truest expression is in a ‘loud hymn, that sounds far, far away’. Keats is not predicting here the evolution of the internet or the iCloud, but it is astonishing that he should conceive of vocal music as the true medium for expressing resistance to indoctrination. Like his contemporary Constable, who devoted many hours and materials to recording the ceaseless evolution of new cloud forms, Keats was constantly alert to the evolution of unprecedented and unrepeatable forms. When the form in question is a public monument like the Kosciuszko mound, its evolution is continuous, as different layers of material, and of individual and collective meaning, are applied to it. Its story is being constantly re-written. Layered landscapes indeed.