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 ...