Dylan's music is unmistakable. Even when the lyrics are in Polish. It's a hard rain's a gonna fall. How long the guys in the Lizard King can last out is uncertain. The pressure for change lurks at every corner.
Just behind the square, in a street named after the Polish musician and politician Jan Paderewski, Bang & Olufson have a sparkling new shopfront. "Good sound by design" gushes the slogan. Along the way, Burberry rubs shoulders with Escada. Smart suits and stiletto heels sip American cocktails in Habana, one of a possé of chic bars that cluster in the side streets around Poznan's main square.
Until now, the square itself remains Polish territory. Sacred and precious. Poland pure and simple. Even Dylan's planet-rending song is in Polish. The menus in a dozen or more bars and cafés are in Polish. But a hard rain's a gonna fall. Just watch. Just wait. Poznan's historic market square is about to be drowned by a roaring wave of commercial avarice.
Poznan lays claim to one of Europe's finest town squares. True, it lacks the pristine lines of Kraków's celebrated Rynek, and it is less fêted in literature and art than Venice's Piazza San Marco. Nor can Poznan's square compete with the architectural purity of Zamosc's showpiece central square. But that is to miss the point. Poznan has a city square that must surely be the envy of communities across Europe, precisely because it is so very much the hub of everyday affair in Poznan.
For centuries, the city’s central square has been the theatrical and social focus for most of Poznań life. It was here that, over some seven hundred years, Poznań’s regular market developed into one of the most influential in central Europe. It became a place where merchants and craftsmen bantered and bartered, where everything from salt to silk had its price. In the streets immediately around the square, various religious orders vied for souls: Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans and more.
Poznań’s square staged some of the most dramatic scenes in Polish history: resistance against Prussian domination, the 1919 uprising and assertion of a new Polish state, and later meetings of Solidarność. Poets, philosophers and politicians have all proclaimed the virtues of Poland and all things Polish from the open galleries of Poznań’s fabulous Renaissance Ratusz (town hall).
The square has been rebuilt many times, surviving wars and revolutions, fires and even a devastating hurricane. The showpiece Ratusz, a delicate tiered creation in green and white, its facade embellished with scenes of Polish heroism, has been altered here and there, but the essential sixteenth- century Italianate design remains unchanged. It stands in the very centre of the square, surrounded by a cluster of buildings old and new — a weigh house which serves as a reminder of the importance of Poznań market, a row of artisans’ cottages with an engagingly chaotic roof line, a museum and an art gallery.
Each new regime put its own imprint on the place. The post-war years saw the careful restoration of buildings destroyed in early 1945, and the addition of some very nineteen-fifties concrete and glass structures in the middle of the square — just behind the Ratusz. Architectural purists might judge these incongruous intruders to be a travesty, but many locals take another view: the appeal of Poznań’s square is that of a living, evolving entity. It is like a lush forest that has developed over centuries, with a myriad of different ecological niches. One can tuck into the back alleys behind the town hall, slip past the delicate statue of the Bamberg girl, and emerge by the museum. Or take a sedate stroll around the perimeter of the square, all Renaissance facades and antique shopfronts.
But a hard rain’s a gonna fall, and the good citizens of Poznań seem utterly oblivious to the waves of change. Who knows how the square will fare? This most delicate and fragile of organisms, a place that Poznańites have counted as their own for centuries, is about to be exposed to a new ruling piety — one that counts success in terms of retail sales, gross turnover and profit, and gives no space to priests, poets and philosophers. Nor probably to the Lizard King.
Poznań’s lead architect Giovanni Battista di Quadro, having put the finishing touches to Poznań’s Ratusz, retired to live in a house on the corner of the square — privileged to spend the rest of his days looking out on the various buildings he had designed.
Renaissance town planning in Poland was among the most adventurous in Europe. The north Italian notion of the città ideale found consummate expression in new city centres like Zamość and Poznań. And the sponsors of these planned communities often required that their principal architects make a lifelong commitment to the towns that they designed. Poznań’s lead architect Giovanni Battista di Quadro, having put the finishing touches to Poznań’s Ratusz, retired to live in a house on the corner of the square — privileged to spend the rest of his days looking out on the various buildings he had designed. The exterior of Quadro’s house has some nicely detailed friezes depicting scenes from the architect’s life, and the interior is today a museum devoted to the life of Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Polish Nobel laureate who wrote Quo Vadis.
Quo vadis Poznań? Will you really sell your soul and let the amiable cafés that have served a dozen generations be ousted by Starbucks?
Many are the Polish families who made a pilgrimage to Poznań, often in the post-war years staying in the tourist hostel on the north side of the square. Cheap lodgings in simple rooms overlooking that remarkable town hall. In recent years, the hostel tried to reinvent itself for another age. It was rebranded as the Dom Turysty, but its stale corridors never quite lost the hostel image. Now that building stands empty, awaiting the developers, but still the old woman who for twenty years has swept the adjacent pavement comes every morning on the dot of eight to keep the flagstones clean.
To Częstochowa the pilgrims travelled to pray in front of the Black Madonna. To Kraków they went to pay homage at the tombs of Polish kings on Wawel hill. And to Poznań they came to catch the very essence of Polishness. Was it not here, on a gravelly island in the Warta river, that Mieszko, leader of the Polonians was baptised and assumed the mantle of being Poland’s first ruler? That was way back in 966 AD. Over more than a thousand years since, Poznań has slowly developed into the principal city of Wielkopolska. Today, the island in the Warta river is as quiet as it was in Mieszko’s day, a leafy haven with the peaceful streets around the cathedral populated mainly by priests and nuns.
The Raczyński library in Poznań oozes neoclassical elegance (photo © hidden europe)
The modern city on the west bank of the Warta is a fourteenth-century foundation, and it is not for nothing that it was later dubbed Posnania elegans civitas . A place of grace and style, with a single magnificent square serving as showpiece centre. Over the centuries, the Poznań beyond the square has evolved beyond recognition. It has industry aplenty and hosts a bevy of important trade fairs. The city also has one of Poland’s foremost universities. And it is a city that has had more than its fair share of moments in history. The development of Solidarność in the nineteen-eighties was foreshadowed by the Poznań uprising of June 1956. Those heady days are recalled in two huge crosses in a small park in the modern part of the city. That park, once named after Stalin, is a homage both to Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s romantic literary hero, and to Poznań’s fiery tenacity in refusing to bow to a style of socialism imposed from abroad. No surprise therefore that when the late Pope John Paul II visited Poznań in 1997, his first stop was at the celebrated Poznań crosses. There he addressed the city’s young people — those who, as he put it, “will take on responsibility for the future of Poland in the third millennium.” In that speech, he highlighted the dangers of lives and culture being subverted by consumerism or enslaved to economic growth.
A dozen years later, that Pope has gone to his grave and litter gathers around the Poznań crosses. A short walk away, the storm clouds of consumerism hang heavy in the side streets around the city’s handsome old square. Armies of brand names await. It’s a hard rain’s a gonna fall, and no-one in Poznań seems to have quite realised what this new wave of commercial modernity will bring.
The Lizard King will surely not survive. Nor will the dozen or more cafés and bars that serve cheap beer and simple Polish fare. Chic restaurants will open where once the locals ate a plate of pierogi. There will be menus in foreign languages. Jugglers will arrive. And horse drawn carriages that ferry tourists on pointless journeys better undertaken on foot. Men with their faces painted white will pivot silently on precious spots where once Poles fought for their freedom. And magicians will arrive, peddling their trade in every corner of the square, playing such fantastic tricks before heaven as may make the angels weep. The hard rain’s a coming, Poznań, and life on the square is set to change forever.
