Staying at the Ancestral Farm

We drove most of the day Saturday from Krakow, through Warsaw and out to the last town before Lomza, called Konarzyce. The roads were better than I expected with a few stretches of freeway interspersed with 2-lane highways and towns. We stopped for lunch at a place that had a patio next to a lake. It turned out to be a pleasant break.

Chris and Cathy Moore and Jackie Demes at our lunch stop

Konarzyce is a one-road town where all of the houses have a sort of courtyard surrounded by barns in the backyard and narrow strips of fields belonging to the house behind the barns. We pulled into the Szymanski yard around suppertime, but before milking. Lydia came out to greet us and we all had to do the three kisses on the cheek thing. It was a little awkward at first but we got used to it. That's how we greeted the men too. Lydia is a short, round little woman and Jozef is a slightly stooped old man with bad knees that make you cringe when you watch him walk. His face and hair reminded me of my grandpa.

The house is two stories but the upstairs is unfinished. Jozef and Lydia stay in a tiny room off the kitchen with a couple of twin beds, and Jozef Jr, his wife Ewa and their two boys ages 3 and 2 have a bigger bedroom. The kitchen is dimly lit and cluttered with food and an assortment of old appliances. Another room has a big table set up for meals and a couple of futons against the wall. There is a small television in the corner that the kids constantly have tuned to cartoons. Upstairs is mostly bare with only some air mattresses for us guests. Stanislaw, who never married, normally sleeps up there. The bathroom is all decorated in pink and steamy hot because the water heater is just underneath it. There are always lots of flies in there, a sink, toilet that when flushed never really gets all the toilet paper down, and small tub with hand-shower and no shower curtain. It didn't feel very functional to me, and if I lived there and had to milk cows twice a day I probably would only shower once a week. I totally understand that now. The upstairs is going to be nice when finished but these people wait until they have time and money to do everything themselves and they don't believe in mortgages, so who knows when it will be finished. Young Jozef is obviously a skilled craftsman because the tile work in the new bathroom up there is spectacular.

New bathroom

Old bathroom

Dining room

Available at every meal

Kitchen

Kitchen table

All of Jozef's children look more like Lydia than Szymanskis. Young Jozef had to show us around the farm including cows, haystacks, fields in back, vegetable garden and he tried to explain to us the mix of feed he uses. Piotrek is a mechanic who lives down the street and he pulled in driving a tractor that he had fixed. Andrej lives a couple doors down and raises pigs, chickens and has an unlicensed butcher business. I probably shouldn't be saying anything about that here because he's paranoid that he will be discovered and shut down. I didn't meet Dorota, as both she and her husband travel to Germany to work for weeks at a time. Kristina and her family came to visit for the weekend from their home in Bialystok which was nice because she speaks some English. All the brothers come over at various times to help out with milking even though it was primarily Jozef's business.

Jozef and his boys, Fraciszek and Antusz

One of the barns for the cows

Jozef explaining the cattle feed

Jozef's wife Ewa

The language barrier was a challenge. I had a hard time understanding old Jozef but Lydia and the kids made a big effort to help us understand. Lydia mostly communicated about food and was constantly urging us to eat, saying "Prosze" and motioning at the food. I understood a few words and used my google translate but it's far from ideal.

Lydia is a good cook but it amazed us that nobody ever puts the food away. It just sits out until the next meal, when they re-heated the soup and put out the same bread, sausage and desserts that we had for the previous meal and had been fly bait for hours. Most days Lydia would cook something new for the main meal, like chicken cordon-bleu for example, but they staples are bread, sausage and milk.

The day we arrived was bread-making day. They have a brick oven in the basement that Jozef was proud to tell me he built himself. He kneaded the dough and I took my turn punching it up for a few minutes. Then they let it rise and get the oven just right. Old Jozef built a fire in the brick oven and when it was hot they clear out the ashes and use a paper test to find out if the temperature is right. When they stick a paper in and it doesn't turn brown it's ready. Half-way through the baking Jozef bastes the top with olive oil, then when they take the bread out they baste it with water. I guess that keeps it moist. The bread is dense, brown stuff with sesame, sunflower and flax seeds in it. It tastes great and they are clearly proud of it and wouldn't eat any other kind of bread.

Heating the brick oven for bread

Ready to baste the bread

Stanislaw helping with bread

finished product

Old Jozef can hardly get around because his knees are so bad. He spends most of his time pottering around the yard sweeping or sitting on his bench under a tree. He has a bike that he rides everywhere, even if he just wants to get to the other side of the yard. He's very religious and he goes to church early on Sunday, riding his bike, to help out. He reminds me of my grandpa Szymanski with similar facial features and the same large hands with sausage-sized fingers.

Old Jozef working in the yard

Jozef on his bench under the tree

That first night we went over to Marian Szymanski's house. It's the house that my great-grandfather helped build when he was a kid. Marian has an education and a government job advising farmers. He doesn't seem to work nearly as hard as his cousins across the street and has a much nicer house. He gutted the old house and rebuilt it into as nice and modern a house as you could ever want. He has a nice garden in the back and his property goes way back to a creek where some old trees grow that might have been there when Grandpa Ben used to sneak away to play his concertina. Marian has limited English but we still tried to have a nice visit with him. Cathy and Jackie stayed at his house, which seemed like a 5-star hotel compared to where we were staying. He has an adult son that must be somewhere on the autism spectrum.

Marian Szymanski's house

Sunday we went to church in Konarzyce with everyone else in town. The service lasted a little more than an hour. At catholic mass there is a lot of standing up, and sitting back down. The congregation joined in a few hymns and they had some big TV monitors displaying the words. A couple of priests blessed the wine and wafers and then they walked around the chapel putting a wafer in the mouth of anyone who wanted it. It seemed to me like the priest dipped a wafer in wine and then ate it, so he took the wine on behalf of everyone there. Not everyone takes communion every sunday, there might be some requirement to go to confession and prepare properly for it. It might be better if Mormons took the sacrament as seriously.

Lydia braiding Leah's hair before church

After church we had a nice sunday dinner. Lydia made chicken cordon-bleu. Brita and Leah weren't feeling well so they napped a lot. I wish they would have been a little more social with the cousins because some of Andrzej and Piotr's kids came over. I played soccer and volleyball with them in the yard.

Andrzej suggested we go see a guy's dairy farm that had a bunch of robots to do the work, so we drove a few miles to check it out. Agricultural methods must be the most interesting thing in that town. It was cool to see a milking machine that the cows go into when they are ready, and a robot that cruises around the barn cleaning up manure. There was even a motorized back-scratcher for those cows. Jozef Jr. didn't come because he was either jealous or too busy milking his cows.

We found time to go to the cemetary in Lomza and see some family graves. The cemeteries are crowded but it's a family pride thing to take care of the graves.

Although Dorota was gone to Germany, her sown Pawel is a WWII history buff and he took us to some monuments out in the woods where the Nazis killed disobedient Poles in order to terrorize the population. There were three of these places, not far from the Szymanski farm and supposedly 12,000 people were killed there. He also finds relics, and has quite a collection of weapons from bayonets and unexploded hand grenades to an assortment of bullets.

In the evening we went over to Andrzej's house to see his operation. He raises lots of pigs, but the place is much cleaner and not nearly as pungent as a normal pig farm. He showed us his butcher shop and trailer that he takes to do the jobs on site for his under-the-table clients. After the tour we had to go in the house, which was small but a little more modern than Jozef's. We had the obligatory treats and food, and then he pulled out the wedding album. Everyone wants to show us their wedding albums.

Andrzej and his trailer

Butcher tools

Rachelle and her piggy in her Sunday best

On Monday we did a few tourist things around Lomza. There was an open air museum of old farmhouses and beekeeping methods. We walked around the town square and saw the cathedral that had been miraculously spared destruction at the hands of the Red Army after the priest prayed all night and refused to leave it. There was also a statue of a Polish actress. We did a little amber shopping because it's a lot cheaper in small-town Poland than the tourist areas.

Brita and Leah at open air farm museum

Lomza cathedral where Great-grandfather Ben was baptized

Famous Polish actress in Lomza main square

We made it home for dinner and everyone wanted to know if they could talk to Lon. He's kind of famous around here becasue he corresponded with them when the kids were all little back in the '80s. I called him and we were lucky enough that both he and Eric were home working in their shop. Everyone was thrilled to hear his voice and see his face. Jozef Sr. said it was like looking in a mirror.

Skyping with Lon and Jozef after dinner

Jozef and Piotr greeting Lon on Skype

After dinner we went over to Andrzej's house to watch him slaughter a pig. He was remarkably efficient. He had his son hold a pig down, then he hit it on the head with a sledge hammer as hard as he could. The stunned porker just lay there twitching and squealing while Andrzej cut it's throat and he bled out into a basin in a little over a minute. In the next half-hour they had the pig gutted, shaved and cut in half with a hatched right down its spine. It looked like hard work. Even though we had just eaten, we had to go back for a homemade keilbasa roast. It was kind of a farewell dinner, or second dinner. The kielbasa was excellent but the blood sausage was nasty. It's soft and seems to be made of congealed blood and ground up kidneys, pancreas, liver and other stuff that you wouldn't want to ever eat. It was fun but I felt like we were kind of party-pooper guests because we didn't partake of any home-brew vodka or wine and we wanted to go to bed just as they were getting started. I did connect with Marian's son because apparently he likes to watch NBA basketball so after asking him if he liked LeBron James he spent the rest of the night watching and imitating me.

Cathy and Jackie at the kielbasa roast

Staying with our cousins on the ancestral farm was definitely the highlight of the trip. It was great to see how real Poles live and connect with our heritage. I wonder how long their way of life will stay like this. It was like going back in time 50 years except for the wifi. If I go back in 10 years will they still be making bread like this? Will the next generation still be farming or will they move to the city like Kristina and her family? I wouldn't blame them for leaving because it's a hard life and technology and the global marketplace is changing everything even in a small town like Lomza. Will people keep their faith or will Poland turn secular like the rest of Europe? I'd like to go back someday and learn the answers.