I can easily remember the moment when I first realized that Kraków, the city where I’ve lived ever since I was born, was ruthlessly poisoning me. That moment was around seven years ago, when I first read about the creeping pollution in my home town. Before the anti-pollution activists first arrived on the foggy horizon, did no one really know about the air pollution in Kraków? Why didn’t anyone talk about it? Did we treat air pollution as a regular meteorological phenomenon that didn’t merit any special attention, just like, say, hailstones? I don’t know. It’s hard to understand, let alone explain. Perhaps smog did exist back then, but a social awareness of smog didn’t exist until 2012. To use a well-worn, yet accurate analogy, back then we were all Monsieur Jourdain, who realized he had been “speaking prose while knowing nothing of it”. We realized we had all been breathing death.

This realization brought with it a mass trauma on the scale of an infinitely postponed, yet irreversible medical diagnosis. Like a patient newly informed of their condition, we went through a phase of intensive rebellion: marches and demonstrations, anti-smog masks, plaques commemorating the victims of smog on city walls, an appeal to Pope Francis published in the Italian daily press. Next was the inevitable coming to terms with the fact of illness, and the anticipation of a swift recommendation for successful treatment. Incidentally, accelerated civil education took place. This means that even today, you can converse with just about anyone in Kraków on the subjects of lowering emissions or development in the areas of ‘ventilation corridors’.