Walking barefoot puts your thoughts in order, unclogs your head and can be a synonym of freedom. But it’s also part of a cultural code that helps us break routines or enter the realm of sanctified behaviour.

How can we manoeuvre in this labyrinth of meanings? Look below your feet and in front of you. On this path, we’ll be accompanied by Professor Arnold Lebeuf, a cultural anthropologist who for years headed up the Sociology of Religion Department at the Jagiellonian University’s Institute for the Scientific Study of Religion. When I ask about the sources of going barefoot, he refers me to his book Stopa bosa, stopa obuta. Semantyka motywu ikonograficznego [Barefoot, Shodden: The Semantics of Iconographic Motifs], and it will be our roadmap.

In every family, a child’s first steps are a celebrated event. Very often they’re memorialized in a souvenir – a cast of the tiny feet. Shops offer kits for this occasion: a magical can with child-safe plaster, a frame with a forming substance. You just have to press down and close up your most precious memory in a box. Why do we place such weight on footprints?

Our footprints have been speaking about us and helping us understand, for as long as we’ve been around. You can read them like a book. Some theories about the beginnings of writing refer to animal tracks. According to a Chinese legend, which Lebeuf takes from the Sinologist and researcher on ancient China Marcel Grant, writing was invented by a minister in the court of the mythical emperor Huang Di, observing the tracks left on the ground by birds. He arranged these marks into letters. “For hunters, reading tracks must have