Lazienki Park

The next day, Wednesday, August 17th, we had been going to take the train to the great shrine at Czestochowa, but that would have required catching a 6 a.m. train on our own since Agnieszka had a 10:00 doctor’s appointment. Even getting up early enough to do that was beyond our strength at that point. In any event, we wouldn’t have been able to, because there was a sudden one-day railroad strike, for higher pay, and no trains at all were running. On the news that night we saw pictures of stranded travelers camped out in stations.

Instead, after Agnieszka returned, we took the bus downtown, to the Lazienki Park. One of the first things you see when you enter the park is a large garden. The center of attention of this garden is a huge bronze statue of Chopin. He sits under a bronze tree that is almost blown over by the wind. His hair blows, his eyes flash—the Artist as Romantic Hero.
But the heart of the park is dedicated to the artistic taste of a slightly earlier figure of Polish history, Stanislaw August Poniatowski, last king of Poland. In the 1780s and 1790s he turned a small bathing pavilion on an island into the Island Palace, his pleasant mini-Versailles. We walked around the lake, stopping at the Theater, which pretends to be the ruin of a Greek or Roman theater--the audience is separated from the island stage by a narrow bit of lake—the inspiration for Bregenz or Wannsee? There were a couple of “gondolas” on the lake, substantially wider than their Venetian counterparts.

We toured the palace (which has a nice Rembrandt), the Chinese-themed White Pavilion, the Orangery and a couple of other buildings on the grounds (one including a museum dedicated to Ignacy Paderewski, the pianist, composer, statesman and first president of the post-World-War-I Polish Republic).

We had lunch (nice bratwurst, etc.) at the terrace café behind the theater and ice cream from a stand in the park, then strolled out of the park and into the adjoining Botanical Garden, which was pleasant, but mosquito-infested.

We then took a bus to the Old Town, where we walked around, visited a church and stumbled onto a concert in the interior courtyard of an old building. There was a young woman on violin, accompanied by a young man on the piano, playing a violin sonata by some Polish Romantic composer whose name I don’t remember. Then the young man played, impressively, a wonderful piano piece by Paderewski. They finished with a piece by Hans Huber. I am sure that I heard the emcee call him the greatest composer of the second half of the nineteenth century, but Mary Joy insists that he said, instead, “the greatest Swiss composer of the second half of the nineteenth century.“ Either interpretation has problems. If I am right then the emcee was stark, raving mad. If Mary Joy is right, then he must have been impressed by the idea of someone being the greatest Swiss composer of the second half of the nineteenth century.