THIS GUIDE AND ITS PURPOSE

BEFORE AND AFTER KONSTANCIN - THE PROJECT

This site is not meant to be a comprehensive guide to well known Konstancin sites and monuments, such as the graduation tower, the pre-war villas of the Warsaw elite and the spa facilities (though some entries may be dedicated to these places as well). Rather, our guide will take you off the beaten track to places which few foreigners (or even Polish visitors), ever have a chance to see and savour, to places which played a role in Polish history and local life long before the summer resort of Konstancin was established in the late 19th century, and will continue to attract visitors long after that glamorous dream of the new elite - Konstancin - has faded into obscurity, which may well soon happen.

-         to the workers’ utopia in Mirków, built as an ideal working-class settlement by the enlightened papermill owner Edward Natanson;

-         to the poor Jewish district in Jeziorna, the site of the wartime ghetto and the local synagogues, and to the nearby wood where the bones of many local Jews lie forgotten without as much as a simple memorial stone;

-         to the enchanted mill in Słomczyn, now empty and silent, where the last Jewish survivor hid from the Nazis and to Powsin cemetery, where she is buried in a Christian grave;

-         to the hillocks overgrown with grass which were once busy villages of the German and Dutch settlers in the Vistula valley, and to the remnants of the Mennonite cemetery in Kępa Okrzewska, the only relic of the once thriving community that lived peacefully side by side with the Poles for 200 years, teaching them how to drain and cultivate the floodland till the outcome of the last war swept them all away;

-         to the colourful region of proud tall peasants in felt hats, called Łużyc, where, on the Vistula floodland, many cultures and peoples met, attracted to the periodically flooded fenland by the rich mud soils deposited here by the river, where the ruins of the last windmills and the last log cottages now live out their days;

-         to the quiet and misty riparian forests in the Vistula valley, which once stretched all along the river, but now survive only in a few isolated places, some of the most beautiful of which can be visited in our neighbourhood; these provide precious sanctuary for a growing population of wild boars, deer and other animals;

-         to the sites which bear testimony to the complex and difficult history of our region: the WWI cemetery in Marynin, where German, Russian, Polish and Jewish soldiers fallen in 1914 lie peacefully together till the end of days; the grave of the January insurgents of 1863 hunted down by the Cossacks; and the memorial plaque on the river bank dedicated those who defended the ferry crossing in Gassy after the German invasion in 1939;

-         to the stylish 17^th-century manor house in Obory, where the idea of Konstancin Spa was born in the mind of count Witold Skórzewski, founder of the town, and where after the last war the greatest Polish poets and novelists met for many years to talk, drink and write the books that have become the canon of our modern literature;

-         to the romantic Potulicki Chapel in the Słomczyn Graveyard, tomb to a dozen generations of the family to which we owe both the spa and our town;

-         and to many other little known but fascinating places which lie only a few minutes’ drive or ride away from the prestigious centre of Konstancin Spa.

The blog originated as a Year 5 project conceived as part of the interdisciplinary syllabus track “My Region - Masovia”. In Montessori Academy of Active Education in Konstancin-Jeziorna (a private school operating for 20 years in the district of Mirków – see school site www.aktywnaedukacja.pl) pupils from years 3 to 6 (aged 9 to 13) get through three four-week-long interdisciplinary tracks every school year. While working on such a track, pupils discuss one chosen topic simultaneously at lessons of different subjects (maths, science, history, Polish  and literature, English, German, Spanish, arts, etc.), thus approaching the same problem area (e.g. “I – My Family – My Place – Me and Others” in Year Three, “My Region – Special Places – Local Traditions and Customs” in Year Five or “Growth, Change and Decline – Ideas of Time – Cycles” in Year 6)  from different angles. Each track ends with a competency test and a public presentation of individual and group projects, plus a series of engaging topic-related quizzes and games.

One chilly November morning in 2011, Year Fives set out on a short bike trip round the neighbourhood to collect materials and photos for our blog. We visited most of the places listed above, with a brief stop and talk in each of them. This, however, was only the beginning of the project. Back at school, all the pupils chose their own topic areas, began to edit the basic info for their entries and select materials to be presented online. Though most of our pupils have been learning English since kindergarten, we are not an English-language school and the topics proved rather difficult to write about in English for Polish Year Five students. However, after much editing and proofreading, we are now able to present the first entries and launch the site.

Map of Jeziorna ghetto in 1941. Before the war, Jeziorna was mainly a Jewish town. On the night of 22nd February 1941, all the Jews were driven out of the houses in the ghetto without any luggage and taken to Warsaw. Out of the thousand-strong Jewish population, only ten survived the war, including Sam (Solomon, Szlomo) Freiman, hero of Helga Merits' documentary film Memories of a lost world (fragments available here: http://www.sztetl.org.pl/en/article/konstancin-jeziorna/16,accounts-memories/27486,sam-freiman-wspomnienia-o-zaginionym-swiecie/ ). Sam Freiman's war memories can also be heard in audio version at http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=021M-C0410X0052XX-0100V0.xml  

DEDICATEES OF OUR PROJECT

Our guide is primarily meant for the sizeable foreign community (several hundred people) that lives in our neighbourhood, owning or renting houses, as well as for visitors who come to Konstancin for conferences, meetings, or treatment in the famous local hospitals and sanatoriums. Since Konstancin has no good online tourist site in Polish, however, we hope that this blog may also be of use to Poles who know English and are interested in local history and traditions, including those who settled permanently in our area and are now beginning to think of the place as their home.

REQUEST FOR CRITICISM AND CORRECTIONS

The site will not be free of errors, as we are not professional historians or experts on local affairs. If you find any mistakes or inaccuracies in our texts, please report them to the editors at: tomekz@aktywnaedukacja.pl .

Villa Julisin in Żółkiewskiego St. in Konstancin, named after the famous conductor, pianist and composer Jules Wertheim (1880-1928), seat of the Wertheim family and a venue for numerous cultural events in the 1930s, meeting place of Warsaw's business and artistic elite; occupied by the Nazi governor of Warsaw district Ludwig Fischer during the war, then by the "President" of communist Poland, the NKWD agent Bolesław Bierut; later a well known grammar school and a boarding house. Razed to the ground by its new owners in September 2008, presumably to make room for a more modern house. Dozens of Konstancin villas meet the same fate, destroyed or neglected on purpose by their owners, who prefer to wait for their annihilation rather than spend a fortune on the renovation of historical buildings protected by the law.

  

KONSTANCIN – A NAME WITHOUT A DEED?

When Macbeth revisits the three Witches (or Weird Sisters) in Act Four and asks them what they are doing, they reply: "A deed without a name". This may refer to the fate they are preparing for Macbeth: the illusion of the child not "of woman born” and of the Great Birnam Wood. Macbeth feels safe after hearing their prophecies and rushes headlong toward his doom.

We might use the famous quote from Macbeth somewhat à rebours by calling Konstancin “a name without a deed”. The deed was done at the start when Count Skórzewski parcelled out the woods, and had a modern summer resort with wide avenues mapped out, designed and built by the best architects, engineers and builders. The deed was continued when Konstancin became the favourite place of repose for Warsaw’s industrial, financial and artistic elites, where famous singers and writers frequented fashionable open salons and legendary concerts and parties were held; when in 1917 the town acquired the status of a spa, which it still maintains nowadays. But after World War II, the great deed seems to have largely been lost or abandoned. The villas, divided up into small council flats for refugees from Warsaw and from all over Poland, were quickly devastated; most of them have never regained their former glory. Much of the richest district in Królewska Góra, taken over by Wehrmacht in 1940, under the Stalinist regime became an enclosed and heavily guarded area for the new “elite” – the red barons of the security service and the puppet government, flanked by gates with machine guns aimed at the outside world. The nearly thousand-strong Jewish population of Jeziorna having been annihilated by the Holocaust, their dwellings were now taken over by those forcibly resettled from the government district. Then a working-class estate, consisting of austere blocks of flats, was built in the former Grapa Park in an attempt to give the former “decadent” summer town of the capitalist elite a new “socialist” character defined by the industry blossoming around the 200-year-old papermill. The old narrow-gauge railway was taken to pieces, severing Konstancin’s only good link with the capital (we still pay the price for this reckless decision losing hours in traffic jams), and an (incomplete) dual carriageway was built in its place to take the communist party leaders to their homes and meeting place up the Vistula embankment in Klarysew.

True, there were also positive developments under communism: test drilling for oil in the 1960s paradoxically led to the discovery of brine waters deep underground and the opening of the graduation tower in the 1970s. Under the directorship of Dr Marian Weiss (1921-1981), the STOCER Rehabilitation Centre became a world famous orthopedic clinic where the best specialists worked wonders with spine patients. Also the paper factory flourished, and every Polish family still keeps somewhere in the loft the coarse bluish notebooks from Jeziorna that hold precious memories of school and childhood. In the nearby Obory Manor, the poets and writers drank gallons of vodka, built castles on sand, and composed the greatest works of modern Polish literature. This, however, could not change the fact that both the spirit and the essence of Count Skórzewski’s legendary resort had all but disappeared.

Then, after the fall of communism, the papermill collapsed and thousands lost their jobs, while the spa facilities and STOCER began to deteriorate, deprived of proper investment. Rapid and mostly chaotic urban sprawl in residential areas around Konstancin, including large housing developments, resulted in severe problems related to communication with Warsaw, to the sewage system and to municipal facilities, and soon became a threat to the once famous pinewood microclimate which had been Konstancin’s main asset as a spa. The great Polish novelist Stefan Żeromski used to say that neither Capri, nor Nervi, nor Nice smelt as sweetly as Konstancin; but now the new industrial investment, such as the asphalt-concrete plant, built in violation of zoning, of parliament acts and the area development plan, became a stinky sore on the living body of the town.

Konstancin entered the new millennium as a town still fashionable among the rich and famous, “snobs” who are willing to pay for the expensive plots in the centre (“Zone A”) nicknamed “the Polish Beverly Hills” and thus join the nouveau-riche elite. But it is a town without proper infrastructure, without a real tourist zone, with poor and declining spa facilities and with very little to attract visitors; with many of the most valuable villas falling to pieces, neglected or, worse, destroyed on purpose despite conservator’s protection to give way to modern housing. The town has turned its back on the river, which used to provide entertainment with its beaches and boat harbours, but has changed into a sewer. The town has largely become a name without a deed. And how much would anyone be willing to give for a name with little credit to it?

And yet, there is hope. The new owner of the freshly privatised spa has promised substantial investment in his contract with the Treasury, including a hydrotherapy and wellness centre, the modernisation and development of the cardiological and neurological hospitals. As the Finnish owners are closing down the papermill after more than 230 years, the town authorities are preparing a redevelopment plan for the old industrial zone, hoping to convert it into a new town hub with conference centres, schools, sport halls, cinemas, shopping arcades and galleries in the historical factory buildings and other facilities that will attract visitors to the town. Some of the old villas are being painstakingly restored to their former glory by their new owners. The inhabitants have joined forces with the town council and the mayor to ban heavy traffic from the streets of the spa, and have already won their first battle in the provincial council, which has addressed the Mazovian authorities with a request to reconsider the introduction of the ban on the main artery of the town – road no. 724 (Warszawska Street). The recent rebuilding and widening of the same road may partly help to solve the town’s communication problems. The public transport network was extended in 2011 and now also villagers can also reach Warsaw on a local bus using a Warsaw city transport ticket. Things are changing for the 114-year-old spa... but what does the future have in store?

Initial version of the Culture Park in Mirków - plan for the redevelopment of the postindustrial zone and protection of Mirków's historical architecture after the closing of the papermill in June 2012, Click on the map to enlarge. For details see: http://tomaszzymer.blogspot.com/p/program-koa-po-w-konstancinie.html