He was considered a weirdo in the village. He played strange melodies on his fiddle, slept in stables and sties, had a habit of blessing newborns. And he created gnoteks, wooden sculptures of angels and saints. His name was Karol Wójciak, but he was better known as Heródek.
It was the beginning of the 20th century. Little Karol was already eight years old. On this occasion, his father got him his first pair of long trousers and a jacket. He was a shepherd and spent whole days out in the meadows. Close to nature. The clothes – worn down, dark-coloured – seemed too sombre to him. So he cut some holes and stuck wild flowers in them. Now he could wear them. His father kicked him out of the house for this. Heródek became a hired hand and a cow shepherd on the farm of his richer relatives. After that, he changed employers twice, each time staying in the same place for over 10 years, but never in the main house. He had his corner in the stables, sty or some tool shed. Only two years before his death, his last employers took him indoors to their room, where he slept on a podwyrec (which was a drawer slid out from under a tall bed). Did they decide to do it because of Heródek’s old age? Or perhaps because of his sudden popularity after the 1967 write-up in “Przekrój”? Perhaps it was unbecoming for Piotr Skrzynecki or Marian Eile, who came all the way from Kraków for his sculptures, to see his living conditions?
Best understood by children
His speech was slurred. Most likely due to a speech impediment that he was born with. Or perhaps he was difficult to understand because he spoke a dialect coloured with pre-World War I influences and a sprinkling of words from Hungarian and Slovakian. He was born in 1892 in the region of Orava, in a village called Lipnica Wielka. At the time, Orava was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and there were still strong Hungarian and Slovak influences in the region. In July 1920, part of the Orava and Spisz lands were incorporated into Poland on the basis of the Treaty of Trianon. However, Lipnica in its entirety became part of Poland only in 1924, after the exchange of territories with Czechoslovakia.
“Contact with the research subject is impeded by his slurry, old-age speech. He was best understood by children, so I used them as interpreters in my research,” Bożena Kłobuszowska reported in her 1972 article on Heródek. A psychologist by education, with a passion for ethnography, Kłobuszewska came several times to Lipnica at the end of the 1960s, and each time spent many hours with Heródek. She assumed that to understand his art, she had to first get to know his biography. She even ran some psychological tests, which revealed a slight mental slowness. But Heródek was already quite advanced in age, had gone through a serious thyroid disease and lived the hard life of a shepherd. And anyway, this slowness was never conclusively confirmed; people in the village saw him differently. Kłobuszowska’s tests also showed that he had an amazing memory. However, he was reluctant to talk about his childhood. Those memories must have been quite bad.
Sticks and roots
He came from one of the poorest families in Lipnica, from a run-down, primitive farm. His grandfather’s second wife was born Heródzina. She must have had a strong personality, Kłobuszowska deducted, since the whole Wójciak family took on a nickname derived from her surname. Heródek’s father was hot-headed; some thought him loony. It is not clear if he had mental problems or issues with alcohol, but it is certain that he beat Karol and threatened to kill him. Perhaps the taking in of the boy by better-off relatives was in fact an attempt at saving his life?
He carved ever since he was a child – animal figures out of sticks and roots collected in the forest, which he then put to use to tell invented stories. These were his only toys. When he was 13, the family burned them all down. He cowered and cried for a long time and then made a noose out of a rope, put it around his neck and tried fastening it to the hook in the wall. Relatives quickly managed to calm him down, and his usual good humour returned. I don’t know if they burned his figurines to punish him – for carving them instead of dutifully guarding the cows – or perhaps they did it because every piece of fuel was precious. One way or another, it shows their attitude to the boy and his creations. Consecutive employers and villagers treated him the same way many times. And in those cases, Heródek again didn’t get angry at them, but instead directed his aggression towards himself.
When he was 16 years old, he became friends with the Przywara family. Young Przywara was considered a local nutcase. Perhaps that was why Karol, a boy ridiculed by his peers, found a friend in Przywara. They went to church together; they ran away into the mountains for a few days at a time. And they watched the old Przywara carving Falling Jesuses and Virgin Marys. This friendship lasted one year. The Przywaras moved. They only remained in Heródek’s memory. He would keep talking about them until the end of his life; about his friend and about his father’s wonderful sculptures. These were not professional sculptures – Przywara only made them for his own pleasure. But meeting him influenced Karol’s creativity. He stopped carving animals and changed his subjects. Instead of roots, he started using a stronger material, gnoteks.
God’s incarnations
“The term gnot comes from gnat, which means ‘bone’,” Maja Kubacka explains to me. “This is a colloquial name for a fire log. It’s long and narrow, so that it can fit into a stove. That’s why people called his sculptures gnoteks. And Heródek himself called them masters, persons, my ones, better ones.”
“Better ones?” I want to know.
“He carved saints. Virgin Mary with Child, Resurrected Christ, angels, bishops. And saints are God’s incarnations, so they are better than humans.”
I meet Maja Kubacka, an actress and director, in Kamienica Szołajskich in Kraków. She saw gnoteks for the first time in the apartment of Leszek Macak, one of the biggest Polish collectors of folk art and art brut. Macak displayed 14 of Heródek’s sculptures on a wooden trunk in his living room. Today Kubacka describes that encounter as “suddenly going silent”.
“They emit a strong emotional charge,” she says. “They have distinct eyes and they make contact with the person looking at them. It is an engaging contact, haunting. Verging on irritating. This tension of decoding appears, one wants to know what they are trying to say. And there is not one way to define it – academic tools of analysis are not applicable here. To get closer to such art, one needs to get to know the biography of its creator and motivation driving him. One needs to enter his life story. That’s when the perception of the work of art changes completely, looking at it changes. And emotions play a fundamental role in this process. What’s most important – let me quote one of the owners of Heródek’s sculptures – is not how you assess, but how you experience it.”
In the end, Kubacka had a eureka moment. What those sculptures wanted from her, a person connected to the theatre, was to stage a play about Heródek! So she wrote and directed two plays about him. The first one was A Failed Relative, which is what he was called by the family who took him in. The other one was Our Lipnica Heródek – a Theatrical Visit, with the cast made up of Lipnica residents.
“Swift like a little birdie”
To gather material for those plays, Kubacka carried out some field research in Lipnica. Heródek wasn’t in the village anymore, but there were people who remembered him. I’m curious to know which of Lipnica residents’ memories she found most moving.
“There are many records about Heródek coming to all weddings and christening parties in the area,” Kubacka answers. “Also to skubarkas – poultry plucking parties. He wouldn’t miss any funeral either. He mourned the dead, prayed for them and always carried a cross in front of the coffin, which was then set on the grave. But supposedly he also had a habit of appearing at houses where a child had just been born and blessing it. I finally managed to get in touch with a lady who told me all about it. When her eldest son was born, Heródek came to her house and blessed the newborn, saying, ‘May you grow as tall as a tree in a forest, may you be as swift as a little birdie, may you be as expressive as a cuckoo and may you eat the food from your Mummy as I am eating this doughnut now.’ And he ate the doughnut over the baby. This lady was a teacher and often corrected pupils’ work. Electricity came late to Lipnica, so she used to do it by the light of a paraffin lamp. One time, Heródek found her worried. ‘Why are you so sad?’ he asked. And she told him, ‘You see, I have no money for paraffin and I have to correct the work of pupils from two classes in candlelight by tomorrow.’ He replied: ‘Don’t worry or you will wither like this tree. Do you want your branches to dry out, do you want to fall? You need to still grow upwards, like a tree in a forest.’ The motif of growing, climbing upwards was recurring for him. Whenever he met somebody on the road, he invented a song on the spot about this person. He could also recite whole passages from the Bible, pilgrims’ stories, legends, folk tales. He most likely knew them from the church or from skubarkas. He memorized them, filtered through himself and added his own elements.”
“So he was included in the village community?” I ask.
“There is this phenomenon of the indispensability of a misfit in a society. It’s a cultural phenomenon. A misfit deals with some of the more archetypal, deeper needs of a society. He or she is on the one hand a scapegoat, and on the other hand God’s creation, who, because of his or her varied life-affecting afflictions, remains closer to God. A misfit’s prayer is very effective; he or she is well-connected upstairs. On the other hand, since God has punished him or her by making him or her so twisted, I can also harass him or her, I am allowed to do that. The misfit is on the one hand accepted and on the other hand ill-treated. This status was upheld, he or she was constantly on the margin, never able to advance in society. Heródek fits into the misfit tradition very well. He remained a shepherd until the end of his life. He personified the tension in the world, the fact that nothing is obvious.”
Kubacka shows me one of the rare surviving photos of Heródek. It must be somebody’s wedding. He had his role to play at weddings – of a fiddler; his music a bit strange, a bit inept. But following the rhythm. They ridiculed his music, but soon after they went back to dancing. On that photograph, he is close to other people, shown reacting in a lively manner. Somebody puts their arm around him. And he smiles, as if wanting this moment to go on and on. After all, he was a misfit on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes a stone was thrown, sometimes an apple. They say a group of adolescents took his fiddle away from him once. He was so distraught, he jumped into the river and started drowning, but he was saved. There was lots of laughter. On his way back from the fields to his corner in the barn, he could never be sure if his sculptures were still in place or if somebody had burned them in a stove or hid them for fun. And they mattered so much to him! They were like his own family that he carved himself, they were his only companions.
“At the time, the area was so very poor that what Heródek did seemed like wasting fuel. He sat by a stove and carved and what he carved could be taken from him immediately and burned. People didn’t think of it as ‘we are destroying a work of art’. His sculptures were not any more precious than the wood for burning. Heródek was perceived as a cheerful person, good, God-fearing, but not at all as an artist. He is an awkward legacy for Lipnica. Perhaps it might be easier if his carvings looked like the sculptures in the Lipnica church, even considering all his weirdness. But when it is something like that? Something that doesn’t correspond at all with stone or wood sculptures, religious, from wayside shrines or pedestals? This kind of art doesn’t fit with the local culture. Heródek would come and put a stump with eyes in front of people and say: ‘This is God.’ Well, how…”
“What kind of person was he?”
“Very practical, in fact. He knew how to take care of himself within this community. People threw pennies into his fiddle at weddings and he saved them, he was provident. He most likely became so resourceful because he had had to fight to survive since his youngest years. He had both feet firmly on the ground, he was anchored within nature, his surroundings, among those difficult people. And at the same time, there was this whole spiritual realm of his, his mission, clinging to contemplations of a higher sort. His feet were on the ground, but his head was in the clouds. He would tear images of naked women from newspapers and fix them with nails to the walls of the loo. He liked pinching girls, they ran away from him, laughing. And at the same time, you could talk to him about God, hell, paradise and about how one should live. On the one hand, he was a red-blooded guy; on the other hand, a prophet. I see him as an artist fully aware of his own otherness. He felt predestined to something more than just being a shepherd. He indicated that on many levels, for example in his fashion style. A huge coat, a four-cornered cap, seven ties worn over a naked chest or over a shirt. There is this one photo of him… If you could squint your eyes and swap these terrible clothes worn by Heródek for something from Dior or Gucci, everything would be just so! Hat askew, a trouser leg tied around like breeches, one pocket lower, one higher. This was his otherness, his aestheticism expressed within the means at his disposal. Theoretically he could have had a better life, he could have settled with somebody. But he didn’t want to. Wandering, which was his fate, gave him a certain type of freedom. He was constantly on the move, walking from place to place, going on long pilgrimages to Kalwaria, constantly playing his fiddle, singing. And carving stumps with eyes. What creative courage! Neither ridiculing nor any form of harassment or burning of sculptures was able to stop him. He did what he did; he lived his life his own way.”
The saints leave the cottage
In October 1959, Jerzy Darowski, an employee of the Tatra Museum in Zakopane, was conducting fieldwork in the Nowy Targ district. It was getting dark and he was about to go back, but went to peek into some cottage through a broken window. “There was a carved saint in the corner, covered with dust, but clearly recently made,” he wrote several years later. That was how gnoteks left Lipnica for the first time. The Tatra Museum bought 22 of Heródek’s sculptures altogether, and also started providing him with paints. Up until then gnoteks were raw, with no colours. There is a legend that sometimes Heródek coloured them red with his own blood.
“It certainly wasn’t such a dramatic act as our imaginations might suggest,” Kubacka reassures. “He didn’t harm himself on purpose. But when he cut himself while doing some housework, he used his blood to colour the nasolabial furrows of the sculpted figures or their smaller wrinkles.”
After being discovered by Darowski, the gnoteks gained colour, but no fame. Information about them only spread in a narrow circle of ethnographers.
In 1966, Maria Bujak, director of the Władysław Orkan Museum in Rabka-Zdrój, came to Nowy Targ for an amateur art exhibition. That’s where she saw those weird, block-like sculptures. She was struck by their authenticity. “We have a problem, you know,” she was told by the exhibition organizers. “We were sent these and we don’t really know what to do with them. Chuck them out?”
Upon her return to Rabka, Maria Bujak immediately packed her staff and a photographer into a car, and drove to Lipnica to find out who this Karol Wójciak was. In a few rounds, she bought 30 sculptures of his for the museum. “Write about him,” she told her husband, Jan Bujak, an ethnographer. And then she took the finished piece, “Heródek – an Artist from Lipnica Wielka” to the editors of “Przekrój”.
“And so, in May 1967, a torpedo was released,” Kubacka says. “Heródek even gained more esteem among the locals. After all, if people from the city come, are interested and buy, there must be something about it. He gave the money earned from selling sculptures to his employers. It was also then that he saw a new function in his sculptures. Before, he kept an eye on them; he wanted to have them close to himself. When he saw how they affected other people, he started saying goodbye to them, though not without some regret. He even went around the houses and gave them away to the farmers. They became his tool to carry out his mission. Because Heródek wanted to fix the world. And he thought that if somebody was given one of his sculptures, if that person became its owner, it would change them for the better. If not through anything else, then ‘you will be happier having it around’. Gnoteks turned into missionaries, builders of a better world.”
“How much?”
I speed along the road from Kraków to Zakopane towards Orava. I enter Lipnica Wielka. The Lipniczanka River winds along the village. In the last 20 years of his life, Heródek went down to reinforce its banks during spring and autumn floods. “I also want to do something for the village,” he explained. And to stop swelled water from flooding the surrounding fields, he built dams on the river every night; he threw stones onto the banks and entrenched them. The residents laughed at him. After all, by the morning there was no trace of his work. And his employers got angry because he came back soaked, his clothes had to be dried again and his colds cured.
I meet with Bronisław Kowalczyk, head of the Lipnica unit of the voluntary fire brigade. He shows me the Smreczak farm, the last one where Heródek lived.
“We wanted to open his museum here, but the owner died recently and the negotiations stalled,” Kowalczyk says.
A handsome, traditionally-decorated cottage stands behind a fence. There is a cross fixed above the attic. Between the windows, on an outside shelf, there are two gnoteks. Yet it seems they are not real but pretend ones. Kubacka reckons that there are only three left in the whole village, still in private hands. There is a new house next door. Its owners have the keys to the cottage. We ring the intercom, but nobody answers. I won’t see Heródek’s podwyrec sliding from under the bed. All I can do is imagine it.
“I was in the second grade of primary school. Every Sunday we walked seven kilometres from Kiczory to Lipnica for mass,” Kowalczyk tells me. “On our way back, we always stopped here. Heródek stood in the middle of the road, in a very long coat. With huge pockets. He carried whatever people gave him in those pockets, some biscuits. Because he went from house to house. They were his fridges, his supplies. No, he didn’t go hungry, the Smreczaks surely fed him well enough. They took good care of him. There were many of us boys in the group. I was the youngest, so I just listened. The other ones made fun of him a bit, they mocked him. And he laughed. He liked pinching girls – he would have pinched you straightaway. But we admired him for the gnoteks. They stood in the middle of the cottage on special shelves. It was a makeshift shop of a kind. I don’t remember how much they were. We got some money from our mum, me and my brother, so we bought one each. The other boys did the same. We paid this so-called aunt of his, she was authorized to take the money. Those sculptures weren’t cool, kind of whittled. I didn’t like them but since everybody was buying them, we did too. And then, at home, we put them on our cabinet, next to our cars and other figurines.”
“And were you fond of them?”
“Of course! I don’t remember them very well. I chose a little Jesus. His eyes were highlighted and his hands, well, they didn’t stick out, they were kind of integrated. We bought all those sculptures but now we have none. Later there was a fire at home, we lost them. Sure, I miss them.”
Ms Wilhelmina Karlak works in a pizzeria where I stop by to have a coke.
“Of course I remember him,” she smiles. “We were a bit scared of him. He wore this long coat. But mum explained to us who he was and told us there was nothing to be scared of. He sometimes walked us to school. I had an amber necklace, he liked it a lot. He asked if I could give it to him. Mum agreed. He wore it later.”
I travel upwards, all the way to Kiczory. This used to be a settlement belonging to Lipnica, now it’s its own village. I find Albin Stechura working the field. He approaches me in a boxing T-shirt, with a pendant on his neck. He is a graduate of the Kenar Art School in Zakopane. At the age of 20, he became an art teacher in the nearby primary school at Murowanica. He bought two sculptures from Heródek in 1966.
“One larger one, a big block. You need strength to lift it. It has wings made of old gnoteks, painted red. It was called,” Stechura imitates Heródek’s raspy voice, “Archangel Gabriel. The other one is shorter, green, a bit wonky. A Suffering Angel, but did he suffer, I don’t know. Yes, I paid him directly. ‘How much for this?’, I ask. ’50 złotys for the big one and 20 for the smaller,’ he says. How much was it at the time? What could I convert it to? Beer? I don’t know about that, but I can tell you in bottles of vodka. At that time, you could buy a red label bottle of vodka for 51 złotys. So those two sculptures would be a bottle and a half. But the value of money was different then. You didn’t earn much in bottles of vodka. A year or two later, after the piece in “Przekrój”, I organized a school trip to see Heródek. Beforehand, I put some info on naïve art on the school bulletin board. I made an introduction for the pupils. They were in the eighth grade. I explained that naïve art is something else altogether, but they didn’t get it. At the meeting with Heródek they said that everybody could do it. But they didn’t laugh, they were prepared.”
A black-and-white photograph from this meeting survived, taken by Stechura: Heródek surrounded by a dozen or so female students in front of an open door to the barn. They are all smiling, including Heródek. Those standing at the back are holding small angels up in the air; there is a large angel standing proudly in front of Heródek. It’s almost the same height as him and has huge, spread wings.
“How do you remember Heródek?”
“As an eccentric. He had a fiddle and used to scrape away a bit. It was clear it was no melody of any kind. He said he could play happy or sad tunes but both sounded the same. He just felt it inside.”
I go even further, turn left behind the school and go all the way to the end of Kiczory. There I stand for a long time, knocking on a door and calling Ludwik Młynarczyk. I am about to leave when a tall, towering figure appears in the yard. We sit in an arbour.
“You needed to understand his music. I did.”
Młynarczyk moved to Kiczory in 1959. At the school (where I turned left), he was a music, geography and history teacher. At the end of the 1960s, together with three other teachers, he started a band called Heródki, which in the 1970s won first place at the All-Polish Festival of Folk Bands and Singers in Kazimierz Dolny.
“They asked us about Heródki, Heródki, where did the name come from? So we told them that we wanted to keep Heródek’s name in musical performances. But we didn’t copy him. The idea was for us to be musicians such as he was, just of higher class, our music had to make sense. We were a country-wide sensation – music-playing teachers! Whenever we had an important gig, somebody had to come to cover for us at school. On top of that, I made money as a folk musician. I also played at weddings. Heródek always appeared on such occasions with his fiddle. But not as a village tramp, stinky or unkempt. He was a tramp that people liked, decent and one of a kind. Who didn’t ask for handouts, but offered a service of some kind in return. I always introduced him and invited him to play with me. He played several tunes and we accompanied him. This was a great honour for him. He showed off, you could sense joy in his music and we didn’t belittle him. But it was common in the village that when somebody was not playing to a high standard, people would say that he played like Heródek. Some even said his playing was a profanation of the Orava music. But I will say it again: he had his own system of playing and tuning his fiddle. His own way. He visited me here several times. On the first occasion I tuned his fiddle because I thought we would play in my scale. But no. He retuned his fiddle and played these melodies his way. He could bring forth the similarities in different tunes just by slashing with his bow, without running his fingers on the strings. The one I remember best is this.” Młynarczyk sings: “Black soil, black soil, I’m not angry at you / You took my mummy away and now I am homeless.”
Babia Góra view
I go down, back to Lipnica. I drive past the church where Heródek used to go. He stood here by the font and played music for newlyweds. He looked at the sculptures in this church and imagined his own masters standing here. I get out of the car and climb the hill, to the cemetery. I walk past its crest and continue down towards the opposite fence. I find him in the second to last row. A decent gravestone made of grey terrazzo funded by the Smreczak family. Plenty of artificial flowers and burnt-out candles. He got ill in August 1969. We still don’t know what it was. He suddenly felt bad and continued to deteriorate, disappearing in front of other people’s eyes. He didn’t even want to hear about a hospital. In the end he gave in, persuaded by Maria Bujak, who got him a place in the hospital in Nowy Targ. He was taken there by an ambulance on 22nd August. He died on 1st September.
I stand by his grave, from which I have a great view over Babia Góra. I think it is so close, vast and majestic. They say Heródek used to climb it at night. He thought of it as his paradise.
My gratitude goes to Maja Kubacka for her substantial help.
While writing this text I consulted the following pieces: Karol Wójciak-Heródek. Portret ludowego artysty by Bożena Kłobuszowska („Polska Sztuka Ludowa” 1972, no 4), Heródek by Jerzy Darowski („Polska Sztuka Ludowa” 1968, no 1–2), as well as the information published on the website www.herodek.pl.
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