Other people's local history
By Alan Crosby
Jurgów does not appear on most road
maps. It is a small village in a landscape of remarkable beauty on the edge
of the Tatra mountains 100 km south of Kraków. In a field near the centre
of the village a cast-iron pillar about two feet high, shaped like an old-fashioned
fire hydrant with the number 21 on its face, sticks up in the long grass. This
oddity was erected about 120 years ago in the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
and it marks the old border between the kingdom of Hungary and the kingdom of
Galicia (which was then an Austrian possession). Jurgów was part of Hungary,
though ethnically it was (and still is) a mixture of Slovak, Polish and górale,
the Polish name for the mountain people whose dialect and culture are distinct
from those of all their neighbours. For centuries before that time Jurgów
was part of Spiœ, a much fought-over, much disputed mountain duchy of uncertain
status and allegiance. After 1918 the border, now separating the nation states
of Poland and Czechoslovakia, shifted as the Poles pushed the frontier two kilometres
further south. Henceforth the whole of Jurgów village lay in their territory
and today if you go to the other end of the village, past the wooden huts which
were until recently the summer dwellings of the shepherds, you find the border
snaking through the woods, marked not by elegant cast iron pillars but by lumpy
blocks of concrete.
What significance does the frontier have in such a place as this? Other people’s local history is often so very different from ours. In Jurgów the ebbing and flowing of the tide of European history is everywhere apparent. Much of its local history must be ascertained not in the equivalent of county record offices but in the papers of foreign ministries and interior ministries in Warsaw, Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Moscow, Bratislava and Prague. Today you can have your picnic in Slovakia: only ten years ago it was Czechoslovak soil on which you ate your sheep’s cheese and sausage. It makes the history of an English village seem somehow very simple, because there the framework is clear even if details need to be teased out. In Jurgów the framework itself - frontiers and national states – is evanescent and nebulous.
For the people of Jurgów, did these borders ever mean anything? Do they now? At the beautiful wooden church each Sunday the 9 o’clock mass is in Polish, the 11 o’clock in Slovak. Polish families have Slovak relatives. Slovak families live in Poland. They look both ways and they also look outwards to Warsaw, Germany and America. Boundaries are, to a considerable extent, no more than recently-drawn lines on a map, cutting across much older and deep-rooted patterns and identities.
Jurgów has a small and excellent folk museum and lovely wooden houses. People are very conscious of their heritage and proud of their identity. The little library has a display of old photographs of people seventy years ago, for whom the brilliantly-embroidered traditional costume was everyday wear. Pinned up, too, is a photocopy of a manuscript map of about 1900, written in Hungarian and showing the territory of Jurgów (in France it would be the pays) extending deep into what is now Slovakia. So the local history of this place is ambivalent. Remarkably, there are two published histories of the village (but is it remarkable? education and learning matter hugely here and twelve of the sons and daughters of Jurgów have academic doctorates). But one history is in Polish and written from a Polish perspective, the other in Slovak and written from the view of south of the border. The books might as well be about completely different places, so divergent are the stories they tell. In them a political and linguistic agenda is foremost. It was suggested to me that Jurgów really needs a local history written from the perspective of the community itself - not one which tries to pretend that the political and ethnic differences do not exist, for everybody knows they are there, but rather one which identifies and emphasises the common experience. Would that my command of either language was sufficient to embark upon that project, for the fieldwork would be truly delightful!