Galicia Roots Trip Part III, in which we visit Lancut Castle -- like regular tourists

On our second day in Poland we ventured beyond the town we'd landed in, Rzeszow, and beyond my immediate roots-seeking agenda. Like regular tourists, we went to see the Lubomirski castle in Lancut, an official historic site of Poland.  With the help of the hotel desk and map, we made our way to the Dworzec Autobusy and found the right platform.  A young woman waiting with us spoke some English. The driver, over 50, did not, but helped us figure out the fare and showed us where to get off.  We were very proud of ourselves, using my 100 words of Polish, and pantomime, to make ourselves understood.

At Lancut's bus station the platforms were all marked with the names of towns that were thrillingly familiar to the Jewish culturally educated: Chelm, Tarnow, Przemysl, and Przeworsk, too.  Just standing there, mythical places in big letters, like Summit, South Orange, Montclair, just bus rides of a few zlotys and an hour or less.

Towns famous to Chasidic and Yiddish folklore and literature, all short bus rides away -- the traces of their people sought by indirect survivors from later times and distant places

The entrance to the huge grounds of the castle was across the street.

We walked for about ten minutes through that park, past the greenhouses, the tennis court, the carriage house, to the fortified castle and its gardens, surrounded by an open tunnel that was once was a moat.  A young woman happened to be walking in our direction; she said something and I caught the almost-Russian word for weather.  Since the sun was shining and the temperature and humidity better than anyone could rightly expect for June in subCarpathia, I agreed. Grandmother... born nearby... I think I managed to say, in near-Polish.  She smiled.

We made it ahead of a school group. 

Lancut Castle, Lancut, near Rzeszow

While the castle compared favorably in grandeur with the ultimate  field trip of our youth -- to the American Museum of Natural History -- I can't imagine that the posh furnishings of the Lubomirski's castle compared in these kids' interest with dioramas of gazelles and eskimos in kayaks, not to mention the whale.  We geezers, however, enjoyed the displays of aristocratic wealth (the last owners, the Potockis, were among the richest people in Poland in the 20th century) the fabulous furnishings, portraits of noble ancestors, swords, china, brocaded wallpaper, rococo statuary and moldings, fireplaces, ceramic heating stoves that servants emptied through invisible openings to inner corridors, private theater, ballroom.  Comparable to any of your better Newport mansions, plus long aristocratic lineages and marital alliances all doomed to be forgotten within the hour.

You're not supposed to take photos in the Castle.
So this was early in the tour...

The man who took our tickets motioned us to a room off the entry lobby, with shelves of big shoes.  I figured, like bowling, I had to put these on. But someone stopped me from taking mine off and showed me that these went over shoes, to protect the flooring from our gummy, gritty soles. 

"One Grecian Urn"

Displays detailing the restoration effort -- especially interesting is the remake
of Potocki's Roman hallway, complete with painted shafts of sunlight. 

Attendants  in each room turned on the English-language narration for us. Stanislavs, Isabellas -- it's all in Wikipedia somewhere.  One name I do remember is Count Potocki; I think I did hear one of my grandmothers invoke that name on occasion, the way we Americans say rich as Rockefeller. 

Gardens, fountains, an orangerie where we met up with the school kids looking at rabbits and turtles.  

And right next to the park, very easy to find, was Lancut's synagogue, built in 1761. 

That's where we met Miroslaw, a curious Pole who was just finishing a tour with a Polish couple.  We'd been told about him by the guide we were set up to meet the following day. Miroslaw had left a sign on the door in Polish and Hebrew, with a phone number to call.  We called it and he opened the door.  Fiftyish, in appearance a tossup between Pole and Jew; blue eyes, a shy smile, a cap.  The anteroom we met him in had lots of Jewish gravestones in one corner of the floor, in pieces.

The clipboard hanging from the Lancut Synagogue's
door says "I'm in the building."
The Hebrew part says "Please call."

The plaque on the building's exterior 

Miroslaw  almost apologetically asked for the tour fee. He then asked, equally apologetic, if he could give us the tour in Hebrew; he said it was better than his English. 

Miroslaw was not Jewish himself, but he'd made a career of tending this place in recent years. His little anteroom displayed pictures of the droves of Hasidim who descend on Lancut by the thousands on the yahrtseits (death anniversaries) of beloved rabbis long gone, and daven in this space.  He showed us the Hebrew-Polish dictionary he was studying from, and some Jewish ritual objects.  He said that to townspeople, he was Jewish, although he also had a post-Catholic appreciation for Jesus. 

He said, almost apologetically, that "in a place where there are no Jews, you must be a Jew,"  paraphrasing Hillel's proverb,   "Where there are no (decent) men, you must be a man."  It also came out that the stone with the plaque we'd seen in Rzeszow had been erected by him and his circle of curious, Jew-bereft Poles.

Then he led us into the sanctuary itself, which was a beautiful restored example of the kind of primitive painting that used to cover the interior of many Eastern European synagogues: Hebrew scripture, animals, plants, signs of the zodiac... and all kinds of reliefs decorating bimah and ark.  There was a traditional velvet curtain covering the ark, and a Torah inside.  

We later saw the "surviving" bima in Tarnow; a sad ghost of this four-pillar artwork

 There was a bima, orthodox-style in the center, on which stood four fabulously decorated pillars supporting an inner dome.  There was a two-story women's gallery. And most of it had all been repainted in fresh color.  To get some idea, you can visit the Bialystocker Synagogue in Manhattan; it's become a regular stop on Lower East Side walking tours.

What there wasn't, was anything made of wood.  No pews; just a concrete floor, if I remember correctly.  The story goes (see plaque) that when the Nazis set fire to the synagogue, Count Alfred Potocki, in residence next door, appealed to the conquering thugs and got permission to let the fire brigade put it out.  So the building itself was saved.  From the outside, it's a quite nondescript yellow building, except for the signs and plaques on the door and the exterior staircase for women. 

I wondered if my grandmother had ever seen the inside of this shul; Lancut had been over 40% Jewish once and Przeworsk was a stop or at most two down the train line. Today we were clearly visiting a pilgrimage site; a place where the nearest living Jews were hours away, in Krakow, except for a Chasidic Brigadoon I didn't want to visit. Here in Lancut too, the Jewish cemeteries were walls and weeds. New pews might bring in destination bar mitzvahs. A start? 

When we were done we had some ice cream in the store across the street.  There was a cross on the wall behind the counter and a semi-scowl on the face of the woman who made the cones.  Maybe I imagined the scowl.  We walked back through the edge of the park, and picked up the bus back to Rzeszow.

The view from the ice cream place.