A POLISH VILLAGE IN THE MOUNTAINS
It was a Jewish trader who advised me to visit Jedlovka. He said that I
would see the peasants living there now as they had lived for hundreds
of years--in the simplest and most primitive fashion.
Jedlovka, I found, is a little straggling village in the foothills of
the Carpathians--the mountains which divide Galicia from Hungary. In
order to reach the village it was necessary to take the train at Cracow
and ride for an hour or more in the direction of Lemberg, which is the
Ruthenian, just as Cracow is the Polish, metropolis of Galicia.
At a place called Turnow we changed cars and continued our journey in
a direction at right angles to that in which we previously travelled.
It was another hour's ride by train to the foothills of the mountain.
At Tuchow, at the point where the railway, running southward, plunges
into the mountain, we disembarked again and continued our journey by
wagon. The road led up out of the broad plain through which we had
been travelling, into a narrow and sombre little valley. At the end of
this valley there is a little wayside inn. Higher up, where the road,
winding up out of the valley, leads out into a high, clear space at
what seemed to be the top of the mountain, there is a church, and this
tavern and the church, together with a few scattering log huts, were
the village of Jedlovka and the end of our journey.
I had had a vague sort of notion that somewhere in this remote region I
should meet peasants wearing sheepskin jackets, sandals, and leggings
bound with thongs, driving their herds to pasture. I even had a wild
hope that I should come upon some rustic festival, such as I had read
about, where the young men and women would dance upon the greensward,
to the music of shepherds' pipes. As a matter of fact, it chanced that
our visit did fall upon a feast day, but there were no shepherds and
no dances. What I saw was a crowd of women pouring out of the little
church, high upon the hill, and crowds of drunken men carousing at the
tavern below.
Before I proceed to tell what I learned of the peasant life in this
mountain country, however, I want to refer to one feature of Polish
life which was impressed upon me by what I saw on the way.
I have referred in the preceding chapter to the position which the
Jew occupies in the economic organization of Polish life. He is the
middleman and has the trade of the country very largely in his hands. I
was particularly impressed with this fact by what I saw in the course
of this journey. Although the Jews represent only about 13 per cent.
of the population of Galicia, I am certain that more than half of the
people on the train on which we travelled were people of that race.
There were Jews of all descriptions and in all stages of evolution,
from the poor, patient pedler, wearing the garb of the Ghetto, to the
wealthy banker or merchant fastidiously dressed in the latest European
fashion. When we left the train at Tuchow it was a Jewish horse trader
who drove us in his improvised coach the remainder of our journey into
the mountains. A restaurant at which we stopped to get something to eat
on our return was conducted by a Jew. Halfway to our destination we
passed a tumbledown cottage, close to the roadside, with a few trinkets
in the window and some skins hanging from the beam which ran along the
front of the building. We stopped and spoke to an ancient man with a
long white beard, who lives there. He, also, was a Jewish trader. As I
recall, he was engaged in buying skins from the peasants, paying them
in the junk which I noticed displayed in the window. When we reached
the tavern at the end of our journey it turned out that the man who ran
the tavern was a Jew. Apparently wherever in Poland money changes hands
a Jew is always there to take charge of it. In fact, it seemed to me
that the Jew in Poland was almost like the money he handled, a sort of
medium of exchange.
It was a very curious conveyance in which we made the last stage of our
journey into the mountains. Instead of the droske we had expected to
meet at the station we found what, under ordinary circumstances, would
have been a farmer's wagon, I suppose, although it was an altogether
different sort of farmer's wagon from any I had ever seen in America.
The frame of this vehicle was something like a great long basket,
narrow at the bottom, where it sat upon the axles, and wider at the
top. The rim of this basket was made of poles, about the size of a
fence rail, and this rim was supported upon the frame, which rested
on the wagon, by little poles or pickets fastened in the frame below
and the rim above, like a fence paling. The frame was so formed that
it might have served the purpose either of a hayrick or a carryall.
In this case it had been converted into a sort of coach or omnibus,
with hanging seats, supported with leather straps from the rim.
Arranged in this way this farmer's wagon was a not inconvenient mode
of travel, and, driving through the fresh green country, dotted with
quaint, little moss-covered cottages which seemed as much a part of
the landscape as if they had grown there, the journey was made very
pleasantly.
The houses in this part of the country were, for the most part,
smaller, more weather-worn and decrepit, than those I had seen in other
parts of Galicia. In fact, in some cases the green-thatched roofs
were so old, so overgrown with vegetation, and the little whitewashed
frames of the buildings that supported them had so sunken into the
soil, that some of them looked like gigantic toadstools. As the day we
visited this part of the country was a holiday, we met along the way
many of the peasants, dressed in the quaint and picturesque garb of the
country, passing in groups of two or three along the road.
I had before this visited a number of the peasant houses and was
familiar with the plan and arrangement of them. The interior of these
houses is usually divided into two rooms, separated in most cases by an
entrance or hallway. In one of these rooms the whole family, consisting
of the parents and perhaps five or six children, live, eat, and sleep.
In this room there is usually a very large brick or stone oven which,
on the cold winter nights, I learned, frequently serves the purpose of
a bed. In the other room are the cows, pigs, geese, chickens. If the
farmer is well-to-do he will have a number of buildings arranged in
a hollow square having a goose pond in the centre and, in that case,
the servants will very likely sleep in the straw in the barns with
the cattle. I can give a more vivid notion of some of these houses by
quoting a few lines from the notes jotted down by Doctor Park at the
time of our visit:
To-day, for the first time, we visited some of the peasant houses
in a little village about three or four miles from Cracow. It
was difficult at first to make friends with the people. After a
time it transpired that they were afraid that, although we were
evidently foreigners, we might be Government officials of some
sort. This is, perhaps, not strange, since there are many races
in this country and most of them are "foreigners" to each other.
Our guide says the people fear the country will be some day handed
over to Russia. We got on better when the people learned we were
Americans.
Every window of the little cottages we passed was crowded with
laughing, curious children, with pink faces and white teeth. We
visited the home of a widow with ten "yokes" of land and two cows.
The cows give fifteen litres of milk a day, which is about ten
quarts. The woman carries this to the market in Cracow every day.
In the narrow little kitchen the children were all lined up in a
row against the wall as we entered. One of them darted forward
suddenly to kiss my hand. Mother and children were barefoot.
The cow is across the hall from the kitchen. These two rooms,
the kitchen and the cow-stall, are all there is to the house. I
discovered what the duck pond in front of the house is for. The
woman was filling it with straw to make manure.
One of the leading men in the village has a brand-new house made
of logs. The logs were neatly squared and the chinks between
them carefully plastered and painted. The house had three rooms,
besides a storeroom and cow-stall. I counted three barns in the
court, besides three outdoor cellars, one for the milk and the
others for the storing of vegetables. To my question as to what
the farmer did in the winter our guide replied, "Nothing. When
they want money they go to the hole where the potatoes and turnips
are buried and carry a load to the town." The owner of this house
was very proud of his new place and showed one room in which were
several huge chests, decorated and stained in bright vermilion
in the peculiar style of peasant art. These chests were filled
with clothes--peasant costumes of very handsome material, very
beautifully embroidered and decorated. The principal ornament of
the costume shown us was a belt studded with brass nails with
broad leather clasps, as large as a small platter, behind and
in front. It must have occupied the hours of a good many long
winter evenings to make the garments this man had stowed away in
these chests. Although there was plenty of room in this house, it
is evident that the family lives almost wholly in the one large
living-room.
The houses I visited in the mountain were constructed on the same plan
as those described, except sometimes there was only one room for the
whole family, including the cow, the chickens, and the rest of the
animals. It is very cold on the north side of the mountains in winter,
and the peasants and cattle frequently live in the same room to keep
warm.
In one of the little huts which I ventured to enter I found two old
women lying down, apparently asleep, on a heap of straw, while a cow
standing nearby them was peacefully chewing her cud, and several
chickens were busily scratching among the straw on the earth floor. As
there was almost no ventilation the air in some of these houses was
almost indescribable.
It was in this part of the country, in the vicinity of the village
tavern, that I found people who were poor, even by the very moderate
standard of comfort that prevails in rural Poland. We passed on the
drive up the valley a number of little huddling straw-thatched huts.
One of these, which did not seem to be inhabited, I determined to
explore. The building was of the prevailing type, with the cowshed in
one end and the living-room in the other, but the thatch was no longer
green, and age had imparted to the whole of the outside of the building
a very dismal, weather-worn appearance. The windows were evidently of
skins, of the same brown colour as the building itself. The entrance
was through what would evidently have been the cowshed, but this was
empty. The door into the living-room was open, and, as I entered, I
saw at first only a cow tied to a manger. At the other end of the
room, hovering about a little stone hearth, on which a little fire of
twigs burned, were an old man and woman. As is frequently the case
in many parts of Poland, there was no chimney, and the rafters of the
house were deeply incrusted with the smoke which had accumulated in
the peak of the roof and filtered out through the thatch or through an
opening at the end of the building. The old people seemed very poor and
helpless and, as I was about to leave the room, they held out their
hands and begged for alms. I should like to have stayed and talked with
them, but unfortunately I had no one with me at the time who was able
to speak the Polish language.
As I learned that a number of people had gone to America from this
valley I suspected that these old people were some of those who had
been left behind and perhaps forgotten by the younger generation who
had gone across the seas. I made some attempt later to learn if my
suspicions were well founded, but no one whom I afterward met seemed to
know anything about the history of the old people.
The wealthiest landlord in the vicinity was, as I learned, a Polish
priest, who owned four different farms, and most of the people in
the neighbourhood seemed to be his tenants. He lived in a big, bare,
rambling house, surrounded by great barns filled with cattle and
produce of various kinds. I stopped to call at this house, thinking
that I might learn something from him about the poor people I have
referred to, but the good priest was not at home and the people whom I
found at this house did not seem to be able to tell me anything.
The tavern, which was a long, low log structure, built on the same
general plan as the houses in the village, was crowded with revellers
and steaming with the fumes of beer. Men were standing about, swinging
their arms and shouting at each other at the top of their lungs,
and almost every one of them was drunk. Several of the men present,
including the proprietor, had been, as I learned, in America. One of
them, who could speak a few words of English, gave us an especially
hearty welcome. Some of the money which pours into Poland from America
had reached even this remote corner of the country, it seemed.
I asked the proprietor, who had lived in Newark, N.J., for a time and
spoke a little English, whether he liked this part of the world better
than America.
"It is easier to live here," he said. Then added, "when you have a
little money."
"But when you haven't any money?" I suggested. He shrugged his
shoulders. "Then go to America," he said.
He told me a good deal of land had been purchased in this part of the
country with money earned in America. Land was worth from 500 to 1,000
guilder per "yoke," which is about $100 to $200 per acre, a very large
sum in a country where wages are, perhaps, not more than 25 or 50 cents
a day.
At nightfall we returned to Tuchow, which appeared to be a typical
market town. The town is arranged, like many of our country villages in
the South, around a large open square. In the centre of this square is
a great covered well, from which the town draws its water. Four pumps,
with long twisted iron handles, arranged in a circle about the well,
serve to draw the water to the surface. Around the four corners of this
square are the tradesmen's shops, most of them with low, thatched roofs
projecting over the sidewalk to form a cover for the walk in front of
the shops, and frequently supported, on the side toward the street, by
curiously carved wooden posts. The little shops were not more than six
or eight feet wide. There was usually one little room in front which
was for the store, and another little room back in which the shopkeeper
lived. As the ceilings were usually very low and the windows under the
wide projecting roofs were very small, it made everything appear very
snug and tight, somewhat as if every building were holding on to all
that it contained with both arms.
It all looked very interesting but very quaint and old-fashioned. I
noticed, however, that there were one or two new brick buildings in the
town, and the evening we arrived every one was in great excitement over
the installation in the public square of two new electric lights, the
first, I suspect, that had been seen in that part of the country. It
was evident that in spite of the apparent solidity and antiquity that
things were changing here as elsewhere.