Gdansk, August 4th

I woke with heavy rain and cold, Arkansas-like late November cold, weather. A good day to spend in museums and a good day to be in a city and not in the hinterlands. First to the Narodowe Museum, a great gothic heap restored from ashes.....lots and lots of gothic madonnas (after a while they look a bit like medieval barbie dolls), a Wal-Mart full of precious porcelain (though the early Delft...and not all blue...was something)...but what knocked me on my ass was the first Hans Memling Triptych. The huge thing was commissioned by the Medicis' banker...and was hijacked on its way to Italy by the Kapers, those Danzig pirates underwritten by the local oligarchy (they were Scots, Poles, Prussian, Kashubian and Lithuanian pirates.....the 15th-16th century equivalent of Air America/)...the great hulk of this triptych languished in Gdansk until Napoloean stole it after Tilsit...it was returned to Danzig...then stolen again by the Nazis...only to be found in the DDR deep in a Thuringian air tight cave by the Russians...and returned again. It is larger than life and is bound to give anyone a nifty frisson....The center panel is all about the Second Coming of Christ, to the right is hell...to the left is heaven (a nice twist)...the angles and archangels are massive, the normal people lilluputian. I sat there for such a long time that the guard came up and asked, I think, if I were ill. The museum's other biggie is the only round painting Breughel Daddy ever did...and it, too is a glory. Afterwards I went to the mass at the Dominican Church, a great gothic heap, the only big builidng not blitzed in the liberation....a fine organ but a rather saturnine and definitely jejune congregation considering it is Poland.

Coming out of the mass the skies cleared almost biblically and again we are dealing with a sky which looks irradiated....again Magritte sans hats.

I spooked around the other good hotel, the HANZA, which rather artfully blends into the Hanseatic facades along the waterfront....and inside is a very successful blend of fake gothic and Lipschitz-like sculpture....I had a bar dinner....a vodka and local Hevelius beer (gassy but ok the beer)...then a chlodnik, a soup of veal reducation with almost hard boiled egg and smoked ham all nicely served in a lovely bread basket....then chicken somehow....and a good espresso. Again I am struck by how inately chic these people have, especially when I consider that the Gdansk guy is a sort of NEW Pole, the equivalent in the USA of someone living west of Ft Smith, with few aristocratic blood lines.

I can see why the Viennese treasure their Polish friends while the Germans, the non-Viennese-Austrians, the Russians all seem to loathe the Poles, very possibly for this natural if cositive chic. I sit by a window and the sky has turned cerulean with the pinkish clouds looking unlike our pinkish sunset clouds.

The day's malaprop on a poster involving the Polska Philharmonika Baltyka; an English transation. "The September premiere will reveal a punctuated Bartok."

So much for Gdansk today.


FRED