Carkanian Circle (eBook)

A South East European Travel Diary

Carlo Reltas (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 2. Auflage
425 Seiten
epubli (Verlag)
978-3-7584-8346-2 (ISBN)

For Carlo Reltas, Carkania means the countries on the edge of the Carpathians and in the Balkans. On his round trips, he visits fascinating cities such as pre-war Kiev and Odessa, Istanbul, Tirana, Sarajevo and Ljubljana. He also makes a detour to the supposedly 'queasy Minsk'. Carlo Reltas invites his readers to accompany him on his journeys and walks through the main cities and other important towns in south-eastern Europe. He shares his impressions, his experiences and interweaves them with historical and political-social background, sometimes with commentary. At the end, he even proclaims a new capital for Europe. The author was a journalist and manager of the international news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) for decades. Since leaving the news business, he has been living on the edge of the Odenwald and travelling.

Carlo Reltas wurde 1950 in Rheine geboren. Nach dem Studium der Politikwissenschaft und der Romanistik war der Diplom-Politologe drei Jahre als Lehrer tätig, bevor er 1976 eine journalistische Karriere begann. Reltas arbeitete als Politik- und Nachrichtenredakteur für zwei Regionalzeitungen und eine deutsche Nachrichtenagentur. Ab 1987 baute er in Bonn, später in Berlin die deutsche Filiale einer internationalen Nachrichtenagentur mit auf, ab 1990 als Geschäftsführender Redakteur. 2015 nahm er Abschied vom Nachrichtengeschäft. Reltas hat bis in die 90er Jahre systematisch alle EU-Länder und ab der Jahrtausendwende ganz Osteuropa und die Karibik bereist. Seit dem Ausstieg aus dem News-Business lebte er am Odenwald-Rand. 2017/2018 verbrachte er in Abu Dhabi. Seit 2020 wohnt er in Seoul.

Visiting Ladies and the Daughter

"Dzien dobry, Polska!" As on the north-east course around the Baltic Sea, which Karl had set off on four years earlier, his route to the south-east on the Carkanian Circle along the Carpathians and across the Balkan Peninsula first led to Poland. He sleepily got off the Berlin night train to Krakow. The obwarzanki seller was already waiting at the station with his freshly baked sesame and poppy seed curls. Karl will come across these curls many more times on his journey, obwarzanki here, similar names at the stations on the journey all the way to Istanbul, where a related and equally popular pastry is called simit. The curls smell warm. He takes two of them. "Dzien dobry, Polska! Good morning, Poland!"

The old royal city of Krakow is still damp from the morning summer rain. Karl and his Berlin girlfriend walk along the leafy city ring road, which begins just a few hundred metres south of the train station. Nora accompanies him on his south-east European tour as far as the old Polish royal city and will return to the German capital the following day from this first stop on the Carkanian Circle. Their common destination is the guest house of the Jagiellonian University. Who hasn't studied there, for example the incomparable visionary Stanislaw Lem, the world's most famous science fiction author, who preferred to call himself, with subtle irony, a "do-it-yourself philosopher" of the modern age. Or Wislawa Szymborska, the grand old lady of Polish poetry and winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature. During the days of his visit with Nora, both were still living in the city where the heart of Polish literature is still said to beat. So it was only logical that the European Union should also designate Krakow as the European Capital of Culture in the millennium year 2000. However, the two did not meet them, not in the university guest house and not in the garden of the House of Literature, where they were said to come and go.

In Florian's Alley, which was once used by Polish rulers to enter the city on the Vistula, they climb to the second floor of their academic hostel and look out of the wide windows onto this pedestrianised street, with shops of all kinds below and McDonald's, which has also become ubiquitous in Eastern Europe. To the right, the view falls once again on the mighty Barbakan (Barbican), the massive bastion with metre-thick brick walls that the late medieval city lords erected outside the Florian Gate to protect their wealth. To the left, the Florianska leads into the main market square, where the city's riches, which were to be protected, are gathered in the Cloth Hall, the magnificent, elongated building in the middle of this main trading centre.

After the two Berliners have tried out the university beds and otherwise had a good rest, they are keen to pay their respects to another lady or - to be more precise - to look at and admire her: the Lady with the Ermine, a masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, which was acquired by Prince Adam Jerzy Czatoryski in 1800 and is now normally on display in the Czatoryski Museum. But alas, just as they visit, Cecilia Gallerani is travelling again. However, Karl would see the beautiful mistress of Milanese Prince Ludovico Sforza a few years later. The young Italian woman with the dreamy sideways glance and the strange pet on her arm came to Berlin in 2011 as one of the "Faces of the Renaissance". He brought home a poster from this exhibition at the Bode Museum and hung it up at home, so that every day since then he could enjoy the sight of the beauty, who had been sorely missed in Krakow.

In the neighbourhood near the Czatoryski Museum, many a café tempts him to stop for a bite to eat. He likes to stop off there with Jolanda, Karl's daughter, who some years later is spending nine month in Krakow as an Erasmus student from autumn 2005. They sip hot chocolate in a romantic parlour with old sewing machines and other ornaments from the old days. The atmosphere in "Once upon a time in Kazimierz" (Dawno temu na Kazimierzu) is even more nostalgic. The restaurant in the old Jewish quarter of Kazimierz with this elegiac name takes visitors on a journey through time. On the long side of the building facing the street, there appear to be entrances to five different shops from the first half of the last century. However, if you enter the building from the narrow side facing Szeroka Square, you are immersed in an eatery from a bygone world. Here, too, the inevitable Singer sewing machine, a richly decorated iron stove, old wooden tables, seven-armed candlesticks, traditional handicraft tools on the shelves - the whole room bears witness to Krakow's Jewish culture before the Holocaust. Karl and his daughter savour a potato soup that tastes wonderful, but is so strongly flavoured with garlic that they harbour the worst fears for the rest of the evening. But Jolanda's fellow students and friends don't let on when daughter and father arrive at the concert in the Jewish cultural centre after their nostalgic evening meal.

Krakow's most famous klezmer band called Kroké, which is nothing other than the Yiddish word for Krakow, is finally playing in their home town again. With viola, flute, accordion, bass and drums, the line-up is somewhat different from that of a traditional klezmer combo. Above all, Tomasz Kukurba and his comrades-in-arms do not shy away from electronic amplification and even distortion in their modernisation of klezmer. Klezmer is already very dynamic anyway. But Kroké's temperament and music sometimes become downright wild, returning to the tender and accelerating again - and all with breathtaking virtuosity in sometimes fast, sometimes slow playing. Is that still klezmer? Is it jazz now? It's KROKÉ! The young audience in the newly glazed foyer of the cultural centre is entranced with enthusiasm.

After the concert, the music enthusiasts disperse to the pubs around plac Nowy (New Place) with its circular market building in the centre. When Karl and his son Fabian travelled to Krakow again seven months later to bring Jolanda back to Berlin after her Erasmus year, along with her newly acquired Polish household, they returned to the pub scene on plac Nowy. It's World Cup time 2006. The big screens are flickering in the back rooms or upstairs in the pubs. Germany versus Argentina, Italy versus Ukraine - emotions are running high among the Erasmus students from all over Europe and their Polish hosts. Football conflicts are the most beautiful, because after frustration or joy, after victory or defeat, reconciliation and peace are quickly restored over a beer afterwards.

But back to the Carkania tour: Kazimierz with its synagogues, the Jewish cemetery and the sunny street cafés on Szeroka Square are of course also part of Nora and Karl's programme. They also join the stream of tourists going uphill to the Wawel Castle. Situated above the Vistula on the southern edge of the city ring road, it offers a beautiful view of the river landscape and the industrial suburbs on the south side. There in the former enamelware factory of Oskar Schindler, a state history museum has now been established there, which focuses on the period of German occupation from 1939 to 1945 and, of course, the fate of the Jews in the Krakow ghetto.

The interior of the castle exudes monarchical splendour, both in the cathedral with its famous tombs and in the castle itself with its many state rooms. Karl remembers the Audience Hall, with which Polish rulers were able to impress the envoys of foreign countries centuries ago, not because of the tapestries, not because of the coffered ceiling with the wood-carved character heads, but because historical ambience is filled with life here. A string quartet performs in historical costumes, but full of life and with the vigour of youth and the grace of the Polish violonist, who, dressed as a damsel of the castle, brings to mind the dreamy lady with the ermine with her devoted playing.

St Mary's Basilica on the Rynek Glowny (Main Market)

In the evening, Nora and Karl stop off at one of the most renowned restaurants on the Rynek Glowny (Main Market), the Restauracja Wierzynek. 1364 is written above the entrance. The origins of this gourmet temple are said to go back to a gigantic feast on Krakow's Main Market Square, which King Casimir the Great had organised the previous year to celebrate the wedding of his granddaughter Elisabeth to Emperor Charles IV. Knedliki, dumplings with roast venison, a speciality of Czech origin, is the choice of the visitors from Berlin. Nora and Karl savour this traditional evening meal in the dignified ambience of the first floor, accompanied by a heavy Hungarian red wine. Brocade curtains, ornate chairs, crisp white serviettes and heavy cutlery give the dinner a quasi-bourgeois feel. Or even a royal and imperial one? Either way, the long city walk and the delicious meal give them a deep sleep in the university guest house.

The morning in Krakow begins for Karl that day with a run around the green park ring, which now surrounds the old city centre instead of the city wall. The run is an opportunity to say goodbye to the Barbican, the castle, the Slowacki Theatre and various church towers along the route. One more shower, one more pack - and they are back on the platform after a day and a half. Nora stays a little longer before travelling back to Berlin in the afternoon, Karl boards the fast train...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	5.3.2024
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber
ISBN-10	3-7584-8346-8 / 3758483468
ISBN-13	978-3-7584-8346-2 / 9783758483462

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