Although he never left his native Kraków except for relatively short periods, Stanisław Wyspiański (1869-1907) achieved worldwide fame, both as a painter, and Poland’s greatest dramatist of the first half of the twentieth century. Acropolis: the Wawel Plays, brings together four of Wyspiański’s most important dramatic works in a new English translation by Charles S. Kraszewski. All of the plays centre on Wawel Hill: the legendary seat of royal and ecclesiastical power in the ...
The crypt of Wawel Cathedral in Kraków is the Polish nation’s greatest pantheon. Here lie the earthly remains of its storied kings and queens, and two of its greatest poets, Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki. At the conclusion of his speech at Słowacki’s reburial in 1927, Marshal Józef Piłsudski commanded the guard of honour: “In the name of the Republic, I direct you, gentlemen, to carry this sarcophagus into the royal crypt, for he who rests within was no less a king.” S...
A young boy from the housing estates comes across a copse of old oaks to which he can escape, as to an oasis of calm. Although he may forget about it once he becomes an adult and “puts aside the things of childhood,” it will remain a locus of balance, decades later, for a single mother struggling with the difficulties of raising the child she loves. A husband, on the lip of an ugly divorce, drives across town in the middle of the night to rescue his wife, abandoned by her lov...
