MAGAN'S WORLD: Manchán Maganon Polish free spirits
HOW MANY POLISH people are in Ireland? Tens of thousands, hundreds? I think a few of us should head over there to balance the numbers.
My advice is to skip Warsaw and Gdansk, which are impressive but a bit grim, and fly to Cracow, the cultural and intellectual capital of Poland. The city is a miracle in any terms. After the Nazis had wiped out its Jews and intelligentsia, they mined the city for total destruction. Just as they were just about to blow its great beauty to kingdom come the Red Army arrived, and they were forced to flee.
And so we're left with this gem of Gothic arcaded courtyards and wood-panelled libraries. In cool cafes and wine bars, students act as if the country had never been shunted into the lay-bys of Nazism and communism and as if it were still as central to world affairs as it was in Copernicus's time.
But don't spend too long in Cracow. The High Tatra Mountains, on the Polish-Slovakian border, are where the soul of the place lives on. If you take the train, someone will be waiting for you at the station, offering accommodation in their home. Go with them. Trust them. You've arrived in by far the most beautiful and culturally rich corner of eastern Europe - and one of the friendliest, too.
It's the home of the Gorale people, hardy and fiercely independent shepherds and mountain men who never accepted the half-baked ideologies communism tried to force on them. They kept their tradition and culture alive through the darkest times by sending their best craftspeople to the US, to wait out the worst years, so that the people of Poland and Slovakia would have something left when the nightmare ended.
These keepers of the flame (or their descendants) have returned and re-established the old ways, and we all reap the benefit, experiencing their music, dancing, horse racing and festivals as though they had never been threatened. If you get invited to one of the festivals, jump at the opportunity. They're elaborate, boisterous affairs, with a nukac whose role is to urge you to eat more and more dumplings, sausages and sweet pastries and drink more vodka. The Gorale people never skimped on hospitality.
The real attraction is their homes, sculpted from the slow-growing spruce and fir trees that blanket the mountains up to the snowline. They are works of art, with intricately decorated roof ridges, bargeboards and lintels. Although they were poor, the Gorale people wanted to surround themselves with beauty, and they spent their spare time carving and sculpting these masterpieces.
The wood is so resinous that there is never a need to varnish them - instead, every five years the women of the village gather together into scrubbing teams and clean each house with soap and water; centuries-old houses still look gleaming new.
For a sense of just how stoic the Gorale people must have been, take a bus across the border to Slovakia to see what happened to those who weren't able to hold out against the onslaught of communism. Here, in the same fairy-tale setting of rocky, wooded peaks and snow-fed streams, you find the ugly smokestacked factories of the dark era, the 15-storey concrete apartment blocks a chilling ghost of the Marxist utilitarian dream. Even the few wooden barns and buildings that survived feature megaphones that were used until 1989 for belching out propaganda, playing marching music and issuing orders to the villagers. "Block C, today you will be working in field nine."