Eastern Pilgrimage

Podlaskie is a mystical place. By some it’s considered the backwater of Poland, but it can also be considered one of the most beautiful regions. When fog blankets the damp geography an alien and spiritual world reveals itself, causing a stir in one’s poetic soul.  It can capture the imagination and spark an alluring rustic wonder. All along the border with Belarus in Podlaskie there are Eastern Orthodox communities. We were driving along that border, heading to one of the garrisons of Polish Catholic nationalism, Białystok. But before that, we made our way to an Eastern Orthodox site. The holiest Eastern Orthodox site in Poland.

I have experience with Eastern Orthodoxy from living in Georgia and Russia. It’s frustrating sometimes to keep track of the stifling conservativeness these churches represent in their respective countries. The Georgian church has been criticized for using violence and intimidation against alternative groups, like the LGBT community, and the Russian church is known for being too connected to politics in a system that needs a lot of reconstruction. Polish-Ukrainian-Belarussian Eastern Orthodoxy on the other hand has provided me a different dimension. The religious community is typically rural, and less strict in their practices. Whereas in Tbilisi, most Georgians would make the sign of the cross when passing a church, on the other hand rural Orthodox Christians living in Poland are less likely to do so.

The holy site of Grabarka Hill is a pilgrimage, and when you arrive you are struck by the jumble of uncoordinated crosses that seem to hold some spirit of the organic randomness prevalent in the aesthetic of Eastern Orthodoxy. Looking at the protruding randomness sprouting from the hill, I came to the understanding that some people walked great distances with these crosses, which can get to a decent size of a few meters tall. Legend has it that this hill helped prevent a cholera epidemic, and that’s where its sacredness comes from. A resident was told in a dream to go to the top of Grabarka Hill with a cross, which he did so after the advice of his priest, and from that moment those that drank the water were cured, and the cholera epidemic vanished.

Crosses from pilgrimages to Grabarka Hill
Photo taken by the author 

Orthodox churches always have the thick smell of incense. The scent pushes you into a deep comfort, and makes you appreciate your immediate spiritual existence. We walked inside and admired the icons around all the walls. It’s a small site, and not terribly interesting if you are not overtly religious, but it does put some interesting perspective on the communities that live on this border. I remember kayaking along the Bug river, which acts as the border between Belarus and Poland for a while, and hearing about Orthodox and Catholic Churches that were for communities that lived on the other side of the border. A catholic church directly on the other side in Belarus and vice versa an Eastern Orthodox church in Poland. It’s an inter-exchange of people across a border mostly distinguished by guard towers and patrols, giving it a stronger feeling of a frontier rather than a border. Here the exchange of distinct identities still exists in Poland, and it runs all along the border. The farther west you go, the more homogeneous Poland becomes, and even though you can find relics of a heterogeneous past, you will not find heterogeneous company. 

Polish Islam

It felt like it was taking forever. The surroundings reminded me of the drives on rural Whidbey Island back in Washington state. Heavily wooded, straight and tedious. I had the role of driving for the first time after over a year hiatus, and it was reminding me how much I didn’t miss it. The town of Supraśl was the only major highlight on the road, and another indication we were no longer in the heart of Polish Catholicism, being the location of one of only six Eastern Orthodox Monasteries in Poland. 45 kilometers east of Białystok, we took a right in Krynki, and suddenly the way got more exciting. A small undulating road brought us closer to the heart of Islam in Poland. The Tatar village of Kruszyniany.

The village is nestled between a forest of oaks and pines, and the defining feature is the green Mosque, built with elements of Christian architecture, making it one of the most interesting combinations of sacred architecture in Poland. Imagine a small Romanesque church with two towers, except instead of a pale stone exterior, the outside is painted green, and the apexes of the towers have a crescent moon rather than a cross. The structure is wooden, and the current one dates from the 18^th century, built over a pre-existing Mosque. Currently the village is home to only about 160 people, and not all of them are Tatar. Right now, there is estimated to be somewhere around 2,000 Polish Tatars, and almost 15,000 Tatars in the region, if you include Lithuania and Belarus. Historically, at its peak, the population of the Tatar community numbered around 200,000. That was about 500 years ago and it included territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which pushes the Polish border much farther east than the current one. 

The speaker in the Mosque
Photo taken by the author

While we were there, the village was flooded with Polish tourist. Encumbering buses ejected their passengers onto the gravel in front of the Mosque, where they congregated, waiting to snap a selfie in front of the green edifice. We snuggled up with a group entering the Mosque, and made our way inside, taking off our shoes and feeling the softness of the rugs beneath our feet. Sitting down, we listened to a lecture by a humorous Polish Tatar about the history of his community in Poland. His features subtly held some Asiatic essence, hinting at his ancestry from the Central Asian steppe. According to him, the Tatars were given land, and allowed to marry the local woman, in return for protecting the frontier region and fighting in military campaigns. This village really felt like a frontier region. The border to Belarus is less than 6 kilometers away, and felt malleable and undefined, being without any strong geographical distinction. Adding to that feeling was the categorical split between western oriented Poland and eastern oriented Belarus.

After listening to his tale, we took our time to look around the quaint wooden interior. The air was deep and refreshing, and the walls were festooned with frames of tapestries, in them depicting the Kaaba in Mecca, and proclaiming that “There is no god but Allah and Muhammed is his prophet” in Arabic script. We followed the group of Polish tourists, who seemed humbled by the experience of diversity in their homeland, towards the graveyard that lay at the end of the gravel road. Graveyards always hold some sort of key to history. They are the public records that reveal, without a doubt, the existence of a pre-established community. Though it has been tried, deliberately destroying them to erase that history is not so easy. Many times the remains are able to make a comeback through renovation or reconstruction. The Nazi’s tried to destroy the signs of a Jewish past, but you can still find many Jewish cemeteries throughout Poland, attesting to the existence of the substantial Jewish communities that once populated the land. Furthermore, look at the cemetery of the Defenders of Lwów at Lychakiv cemetery in Lviv, Ukraine, revealing the Polish past of that city. I even wrote about the German’s buried in Nidzica, in the northern Mazury region of today’s Poland, revealing its historic connection to East Prussia. Every cemetery reveals parts of an undeniable past, and simultaneously they play a part in reminding us about our inexorable transient future.

The Muslim tombstones of Kruszyniany could be characterized in different categories. Some of them were very similar to the black stones you would find in a typical Polish cemetery, but lacking the cross, and instead having the inscription of Allah, or some other Arabic writing, or just the crescent and star engraved on the stone. Others would be written in Cyrillic, attesting to the time that the Russians ruled this land from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century. And others would have a more distinct character, different from anything I’ve seen in Poland or Russia, made from little stones and being half the size of the regular tombstones.  

For over 500 years Tatars have been burying their dead on this land. We were witnessing their existence in a country that, at the current moment, is having such a hard time acknowledging the good qualities of other identities besides their own martyred Catholic one. It’s a threat to stability and cooperation that Polish Catholic nationalism is rising and attempting to bury the beautiful mosaic that once was the frontier lands of Mitteleuropa, but it’s comforting to see many groups, like the tourists visiting Kruszyniany, are making an attempt to discover the layers of Poland’s diverse past.

Inside the Mosque
Photo taken by Kasia Kaczmarska