Time moves slowly here in the town of Cieszyn, Poland. Lovers kiss on the Friendship Bridge; tourists ask locals where to find the best fried cheese, or the rotunda from the twenty-złoty bill. And the name itself just makes you smile—at least if you’re a Polish speaker, for whom it sounds like the verb “to cheer.”
In the Old Market, a small city square on the main street downtown, a Madonna and Child gaze down from a modestly high plinth. The sculpture isn’t a spectacular one, so it’s easy to miss—all the more so as the square can be jammed with cars. But don’t despair if you miss this local attraction because the statue is only a copy anyway. To see the original, you have to visit the Museum of Cieszyn Silesia—and it’s worth your while. It was long thought that the sculpture dated back to the nineteenth century. However, during conservation work in 2000, it turned out that under the layers of paint, there was an outstanding Gothic piece that was created in the Prague studio of Piotr Parler, a builder, architect, and sculptor. Over the years, the figure of the Madonna and Child was painted over many times. At one point it was covered in gold, and both figures gained gold-plated crowns. To get to the original, they had to take off more than thirty layers of polychrome. The precious original was taken to the museum, while a copy—a painted version, with gold elements—can be seen in the Old Market.
Exploring Cieszyn is like ripping away layers that have become stuck together, creating a diverse texture. Some come off faster, others cling on—you’re never certain whether you’ve reached a gold-plated polychrome, or the Gothic original.
The Wandering Border
Life in Cieszyn is slow, and staying here helps you become, for at least a day, a flaneur, a master of loitering. It allows you to discover various places, wandering with no goal or plan. The town of slightly more than thirty thousand (more than fifty thousand if you include neighboring town Český Těšín, which is just across the border with Czechia) is an almost ideal candidate to receive the title of slow city or slow town. It’s ideal to test the concept of the 15-minute city: one without a division into office and residential neighborhoods, one where everything you need is available within a fifteen minutes’ walk from your home. Many places are equally accessible by walking, though it’s often an uphill walk: that’s part of the charm of Cieszyn, which rises and falls.
The town meets many of its residents’ needs, but not all of them. For some, it’s proven necessary to work on the Czech side, e.g. in a foundry or car plant. From the station in Český Těšín there are a lot more local train connections, and you can easily (in four or 4.5 hours, more or less) get to Vienna, Bratislava, or Prague, so the concept of the 15-minute city crosses the Olza river, the international border. In the minds of many residents, there’s a voice that says “That’s obvious—I mean, this used to be a single city, before it was cut in two by the border.” That border appeared after World War I, when the old order lay in ruins.
From that moment at the end of the 19-teens, the pace of transformation gathered steam, and the new state bodies built on the ruins—Czechoslovakia and the Republic of Poland—competed in various ways for Cieszyn Silesia over the next almost twenty years. No vote was ever held to determine where the border runs; the closest neighbors fought each other, and administrative decisions were taken far from the heart of the region—Cieszyn, where people proudly recall the creation of the National Council of the Duchy of Cieszyn in October 1918. This didn’t change the fact that after World War II ended, the earlier decision about the border and the division of Cieszyn was sealed.
The situation of the residents, for whom the wandering border wasn’t simply an abstraction, was graphically described in the book Hospicjum Zaolzie (Zaolzie Hospice) by Jarosław jot-Drużycki, a commentator and ethnographer:
“Somebody born here at the start of the twentieth century as a subject of Franz Josef just a few years later, would have found himself living in Poland, only to experience the invasion by the Czech legionnaires two months later. Soon, he would have found himself under Polish administration once again, but only until the Spa Conference, which meant that he could willingly take up building the edifice of the First Republic of Czechoslovakia. Eighteen years later, having never changed his place of residence since birth, he would have found himself in the Republic of Poland, to one year later become a resident of the Great German Reich. If he survived that period, Czechoslovakia would once again be knocking at his door, and when he closed his eyes, bidding farewell forever to his family home, the Czech Republic would mourn the death of its citizen.”
The next connection between the divided parts of the town, a symbolic one of course, wouldn’t come until more than sixty years later.
It’s Good to Have a Neighbor
In today’s Cieszyn, a town on an open border, the only way you know you’re entering a different country is from the signs marking the border and an illuminated line on the Friendship Bridge—an obligatory stop for tourists, who take photos with one foot on each side. With the famous culture of the Czech tavern (hospoda) within arm’s reach, it would be a sin not to experience it, and to find out how much truth there is in the invitation “Ideme na jedno” (“Let’s go for one”). Of course it never ends at just one, and after a few drafts the words of the old hit by the bank Alibabka come automatically to your lips: “How good it is to have a neighbor.” Yes—though this neighborliness isn’t so obvious. Operating at the border of two states makes a lot of things easier in everyday life. Usually the direction of travel by local residents is determined by the exchange rates of their currencies. Recently, the Czech koruna has been doing better, so the neighbors’ language is heard in many corners of Cieszyn, which can be irritating for some, but also a life raft for many businesses during a crisis.
The two cities depend on each other. They offer solutions to various deficiencies, such as in transport, access to cultural events, and better organized public space. Partnerships in cross-border projects become an opportunity to patch up the municipal budgets and improve the quality of life of residents, for whom the border ceased to exist in 2007 when the two countries joined the Schengen passport-free travel area. The story of the symbolic process of two parts of the same town growing together was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The return of the border didn’t just mean it was no longer possible to go for a beer in your favorite hospoda in Český Těšín, or grab a coffee on the Polish side—some of the residents had to decide whether to stay with their families and lose their jobs in the neighboring town, or stay employed, leaving their loved ones behind for an unknown time. Left to their own devices, in an act of civil disobedience, they started to walk along the boundary river, displaying slogans such as “Let us leave for work and return home.” The protests drew as many as one thousand people. For many, the time of the pandemic reminded them of the words of Czechoslovak President Gustáv Husák after demonstrations in 1969: “A border is not some promenade in a resort town.” But this difficult time also had its brighter moments.
An Almost Ideal Rivalry
The pandemic chapter (and the divisions it sowed) is now history. The residents have returned to their everyday comings and goings, and the flaneurs can get on uninterrupted with their passion for contemplating the city. After they’ve visited various nooks and crannies and gotten into the rhythm of the town, they’ll most likely note that the border demarcated by the Olza River is more than just a territorial feature. It also brings with it an unending in-betweenness, which is reflected in several aspects, including language. The local dialect is neither Polish nor Czech, and it also differs from the variety of Silesian used in Poland’s Upper Silesia region. It’s just . . . local. Perhaps by using it people can discover an answer to the question that plagues the populations of borderlands much more than it does inland populations. As you can imagine, it’s a big question: “Who are we? Poles, Czechs, Silesians, locals?” Did earlier residents of these lands ask themselves similar questions, and did they seek the key in the language they used?
The language, or in fact the languages, also reveal the now-legendary multiculturalism of the Cieszyn Duchy, whose citizens spoke Polish (the majority language), but also Czech and German. In this linguistic enumeration, we lose a community which perhaps wasn’t the largest, but which did stand out in the history of this place: the censuses “didn’t capture” the Jews because most identified themselves as German-speaking residents of the Cieszyn Duchy. Today, the most visible trace of their presence is the abandoned cemetery.
The history of Cieszyn intertwines with the individual fates of those who arrived from various, often surprising, corners of the world, as is shown by this passage in Michael Morys-Twarowski’s 2023 Dzieje Księstwa Cieszyńskiego (History of the Duchy of Cieszyn): “Antoni Larquard, a tailor from Burgundy, had an interesting career; in 1627-1661 he was the prymator of Cieszyn (an official who ranked above the mayor, or burmistrz, in the hierarchy). In 1635, Tomasz Katanitsch (Katanić), a bugler from Koprivnica in Croatia was recorded as a resident; in 1702, Jan Józef Tassel, a wigmaker from Paris; and in 1729, Jan Deinerth, a glover from Åbo in the Kingdom of Sweden, i.e. from Finland’s Turku.”
The Italians have also left their mark in the chronicles of the city; the first to arrive, at the turn of the eighteenth century, were the merchants and in the following century, the workers. The local history aficionados Katarzyna and Maciej Russek describe features including the stepped slope reinforcement in Poland’s Cisownica, which today’s residents call the talianskie (from the Polish word for Italian, italianskie) steps. The language has preserved their pedigree.
The author of Dzieje Księstwa Cieszyńskiego dug up—in scanty source materials—traces of the presence of the Roma, for whom the entire duchy was a home. One group that left a strong mark of its presence in the sixteenth century was the Cieszyn Vlachs, who were connected mainly with mountain locales because of their pastoral tradition. The story of the multicultural Cieszyn would be lacking without addressing questions of faith. According to historians, it is highly likely that just two decades after Martin Luther’s famous act in Wittenberg, word of the new religious current had arrived in the Duchy, and some of the residents changed their confession. The path to tolerance and equal rights led through the difficult decades of the Counter-Reformation. One symbol of the coming thaw was the Jesus Church, a Lutheran church in Cieszyn, and the public worship service held there in 1709. Today it’s the pride of Cieszyn: not only a house of worship, but also a treasured concert venue. It’s one of the biggest Lutheran houses of worship in Europe, and also houses the Museum of Protestantism.
The patchwork national-confessional social arrangement in Cieszyn supplied an impulse toward a kind of competition, which led to the construction in the town of one structure after another, and the creation of various associations. “The Catholic-Protestant rivalry led to the establishment of the Silesian Hospital; Polish-German competition put up the German Theater Society’s building. Of course, there were frictions,” says Irena French, head of the Museum of Cieszyn Silesia, in Andrzej Drobik’s book Rozmowy o Śląsku Cieszyńskim. Perspektywy (Conversations about Cieszyn Silesia: Perspectives). There’s a long list of schools, government offices, cultural institutions, and private residential buildings which still serve the local community, and were built thanks to the determination and resourcefulness of the town’s former residents.
Weaving History
In Cieszyn you can see particularly clearly the layers from which the city was formed day by day, and more so over the centuries. Of course, they’re exceptionally old, including Castle Hill and the Romanesque Rotunda of Saints Nicholas and Wenceslaus seen on the twenty-złoty bill. The hill reminds us that the fate of Cieszyn’s castle and the city itself was strongly influenced by two families: first the Piasts, then the Habsburgs. Cieszyn is one of those places where you can get the impression that the spirit of His Most Serene Highness, Franz Joseph I, still walks the streets of the town. Though it’s true that he didn’t have a lot of opportunities to do so: he visited just four times. Today, this personage appears less and less in locals’ conversations, but some residents still recall the controversy from almost two decades ago when his portrait was hung, and later removed, in the meeting chamber of City Hall. Some councilors and the mayor refused to take their oaths under an image of the emperor, who personified a different, alien world order. Franz Joseph is missed less and less in Cieszyn, though he does pop up from time to time, for example on the pages of Junasz Milewski’s book Nonkonformista (The Nonconformist).
It’s hard to shape the impression that in recent years, the collective imagination has been captured by Przemyslaus I Noszak, who gained fame as the most distinguished ruler of the Duchy of Cieszyn (ruling in 1358-1410). More than one resident of Cieszyn has been captivated by the story of this influential representative of the Cieszyn Piast family, who carried out many diplomatic missions on behalf of Emperor Charles IV. Memory of the duke has been revived thanks to history aficionados such as Władysław M. Żagan. And having gained an advocate, Noszak has also been blessed with a festival whose program includes a procession and a litter race, as well as a beverage named after him that’s produced in the local brewery.
Today, the story of the Piast duke seems to be fading. But Cieszyn, woven from many stories, always has another one on hand. For some time now the city has been telling yet another one: about a tram. From the perspective of the big city it may sound absurd, but in the heart of Cieszyn Silesia the narrative about the former tram line, running from the train station (in today’s Český Těšín to Bielska Street (in Cieszyn) through the then-undivided city, still remains alive, even though this means of transportation lasted only from 1911 to 1921. Today, the tram has its ambassadors: in Cieszyn, aficionados organize walking tours. There’s also a cafe and a social-cultural monthly, and recently, even a taxi company with “tram” in its name. In one neighborhood, a mural was unveiled where you can admire the historical vehicle in all its glory.
Crank Poetry
When conversations on literary subjects take place in cafes and the hospody, the argument is heard that, in Cieszyn Silesia at the beginning of the twentieth century, the level of literacy was very high, and so today the region is busy taking advantage of this heritage. So is there a literary genius loci? Gustaw Morcinek, Julian Przyboś, Kornel Filipowicz, and thus also Wisława Szymborska, Jerzy Kronhold, Tadeusz Sławek, Zbigniew Machej, Adam Miklasz, Andrzej Drobik, Ryszard Koziołek, Renata Putzlacher, Anna Cieplak and Karin Lednická aren’t the only authors connected with Cieszyn Silesia. Today, the imagination of the younger residents (and not only them) has been captured in a series of stories called Kocia szajka (The Cat Gang), whose serial adventures play out in specific spaces of Cieszyn, and even Český Těšín. Author Agata Romaniuk plays (along with her readers) with a detective-story narrative form, local legend, language and personalities all woven in.
Not long ago, near the Friendship Bridge, next to the Avion Cafe, there appeared a trilingual poetrymatic. You just turn a crank, press a button to choose from a list of works you want to hear, and out comes the melodic sound of a poetic interpretation of a verse or song by one of the authors connected with Cieszyn Silesia. Could anyone more accurately – sometimes critical, sometimes with sentiment – present the double-town phenomenon on the Olza?
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