| Christmas Day in Wroclaw |
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December 25th definitely did not feel like Christmas, except for the incredibly boring programs on Polish television; same every year: which town has the biggest nativity scene, a story on homeless people being fed a meal by some church group, the same Christmas carols 20 times a day, a story on the Polish soldiers in Iraq and the efforts being made to provide them with a Polish Christmas meal. And so on ad nauseum.
The weaher was decidedly non-Christmassy, everything was closed, so for non-churchgoing people like us the only realistic option was to sit at home and eat and drink. I can cope with that for a while...
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| ...but in the end, I got cabin fever and we had to get out. My sister and I went to the only Russian Orthodox church in Wroclaw to light a candle for our mother, who belonged to this particular faith. I took one picture inside the church--and only one, since immediately after taking it I was sternly informed that the confession taking place in the background was a liturgical act and as such not to be photographed. |
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Outside the Russian church, there is a neat illustration of how victors revise history. Until 1945 Wroclaw was largely a German city, and before that a mix of Poles, Germans and Czechs inhabited the place (in addition to a large Jewish community). Most of Wroclaw's older buildings are from German times. Here is one building from the early 18th century on which German inscriptions have been scratched out during the postwar period--and rather crudely, at that.
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In the meantime, the weather continued to completely uninteresting.
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