When we talk about tradition and so on with the large "T", we usually mention to the past, even distant, but defined by circumstantial characters. We just request individual patterns, authority, without which it is impossible to have any healthy community. It's all best defined in the family. Interestingly, in Russian, the word is “rodina”, meaning Homeland. From the cognition I have gained in my life, I draw the apparent conclusion that there is neither Homeland nor household without my past, without my cemetery, that is, without this only seemingly dead origin of identity.
What is the substance erstwhile we request the Christian burial of the genocidally murdered in Volyn? What were the exhumations on the so-called. "Jogs" and solemn funerals of the Cursed Soldiers after respective decades of their shameful killings and being thrown into nameless pits? Nothing but the recovery of the Motherland Family.
Why, after years, even centuries, recalling the last will of the dead or justifying our actions the historical will of the nation, do we carry their ashes out of the country? And what are the exhumations of those with whom we have blood ties and burials in the village where destiny has cast us, where we live now? As much as the desire to unite the Family, the desire to be together besides after dying in his smaller homeland.
I am convinced that graves, cemeteries and cemeteries talk a lot about a given country or region. The attitude towards the dead is the best verification of the nation's culture. erstwhile we cross the gate of specified a place, there we will learn more than from any guide or local description. The cemetery will talk about people who live around (or erstwhile lived) and about their civilizations. Grave sentences, photos, candles, grave decorations, their architecture – what a large cognition of who we truly are. How pagan in this context, how anti-Catholic cremations are increasingly common.
I grew up in Głuchołazy, a tiny German town in the Opawskie Mountains and knew nothing about my roots. I did not know about the expulsion of my household from their borderline fatherhood and about how they survived the Volynian demolition prepared for us by the banders. It was a kind of taboo; a subject that did not appear at home (maybe only Grandma spoke a little). But there came a time erstwhile we went to the cemetery there to traditionally light a candle to those who died or were murdered. I was possibly 7 years old at the time, and abruptly I realized that this cemetery full of signs in a abroad language (swedish) that the things around me are abroad to me, that I am not at home. There was no “our” grave in the cemetery! I inactive remember that feeling of sadness I had never experienced before. Under a large white cross, in the center of the necropolis, people lit lights (there were quite a few them, there was quite a few them, there was quite a few light from them), and then, in the darkness, only single fires lit... I think that's where on All Saints Day I started my way to identity – and family, and national.
Many years later, I went to not ours, yet our Vladimir Volynski. How far is it today, although only a fewer miles from the postwar border on the Bug. We mostly say it's Kresy, and in fact it utilized to be the center of the Republic. 2 adjacent gates lead to the cemetery – to the Orthodox left, to the Catholic right. Inside, behind the fence, this formal division no longer exists. The intertwined generations of successive deaths coexist like any archeological layer. erstwhile political or cultural hatred does not enter specified sacred land, death binds forever, and old tombstones tell us their story. Uncle Joseph's grave was not easy there. And erstwhile I yet found and picked up any vines, it was the first time I saw my grandmother's brother.
In Zakopane, on the alleged Pęksowy Brzyzku, there is 1 of the smallest cemeteries in Poland. Next to the entrance gate, on the stone wall there was a wooden plaque with a sentiment carved on it with the most crucial message from those who left: “The nations, losing their memory, lose their livesIt’s okay. ” It's true. So let's not forget that only a fewer years ago, under the pretext of the alleged pandemic, people were closed to cemeteries, and this in All Saints' time, in time, which is expected to combine nation and family. Let's never let this happen again...
One could call out here, travesting Wincenty Pol's celebrated saying about the mountains, “At cemeteries, to cemeteries, good brother – there Family, there Homeland, awaits you.”
Tomasz A. Żak
