Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  Most museologists would recognize here the clutch of problems that centre on the near-universal idea of the ‘excluded past’. They struggle to find ways of reintroducing topics that for one reason or another have been neglected or actively suppressed.108 In the United States, for example, the Native American heritage and the history of slavery long suffered from official denial, and it is only recently that the omissions have been rectified.109 In Australia, it was the appalling history of the near-extermination of the Aborigines. In Russia, despite the efforts of the Memorial Association, the crimes of the Soviet regime largely escape attention; there is certainly no museum recording the history of its victims. In most countries, including Britain, the histories of women, of children, of the poor, have not been expounded with enthusiasm. In Poland and Ukraine, the successor states to Galicia, a great deal remains to be done if Galicia’s memory is not to fall into oblivion.

  A step in the right direction was taken in 1995 when a new Muzeum Galicja opened in the Kazimierz district of Kraków. It has won many plaudits for its innovatory methods of recovering ‘The Traces of Memory’. Its basic collection has been assembled round photographs by the late Chris Schwarz, who travelled far and wide to record ‘what could still be recorded of a lost civilisation’. Yet, as its English name indicates, the Galicia Jewish Museum was conceived as a tribute to Jewish life in the former Galicia, not to Galician life as a whole. There are five sections:

  • Jewish Life in Ruins.

  • Jewish Culture as it once was.

  • Sites of Massacre and Destruction.

  • How the Past is being remembered.

  • People Making Memory.

  In 2008, three additional exhibitions were on view: ‘Fighting with Dignity: Jewish Resistance in Kraków, 1939–45’, ‘March ‘68 in the Kraków Press’, and ‘Polish Heroes: those who rescued Jews’. Muzeum Galicja is an admirable antidote both to the effects of the Holocaust and to the lamentable tendency to bypass the age-old Jewish presence, yet it too presents something short of the full story.110 The fact remains that the sum total of current memory-making leaves much to be desired. The rich, multi-layered legacy of Galicia stays in the shadows. The kingdom ‘as it really was’ remains at best half-forgotten or half-remembered.

  One ray of hope in this regard may well be found beyond the territory of the former Galicia, in Silesia. Contacts between the Ossolineum Institute, relocated to Wrocław in 1946, and its sister institution in L’viv, were all but eliminated. After 1991, however, it reorganized itself as a private foundation, and secured legal ownership of its most important possessions,111 and now has an explicit mission to bridge the gap between Poland and Ukraine. Rehoused in the former German Gymnasium of St Matthias, and magnificently refurbished, it operates in an environment where international reconciliation is an everyday issue, and where knowledge of Polish-German issues may assist in the handling of Polish-Ukrainian issues. Since German Breslau, like Austrian Galicia, possessed a strong Jewish presence, it may help to reintegrate Jewish memory, too. The Stefanyk Library in L’viv, less accustomed to the new opportunities and more strapped for cash, adapted more slowly,112 but practical co-operation and a measure of trust are being re-established. New vistas are opening up in the new era of digitization and of exhibition-sharing. In the twenty-first century this L’viv–Wrocław axis offers one of the best prospects for resuscitating Galician heritage.

  Another positive development of a completely different type is located in the town of Nowy Sa˛cz, not far from Krynica, where an open-air ethnographic museum admirably illustrates the difficulties of adapting to a new political environment and of recovering comprehensive memories. The exhibits consist mainly of rural buildings, transported from their original sites and carefully reassembled. The most interesting aspect, though, is that in Galician times the surrounding district straddled the divide between predominantly Polish and predominantly Ukrainian settlement; the adjoining township of Stary Sa˛cz was home to a vibrant Jewish community.

  When the museum was first conceived in the 1960s, the cultural authorities of the Polish People’s Republic were eager to promote a strange mixture of Marxist historical materialism and old-fashioned ‘Blood and Soil’ nationalism. It was judged essential to pretend that the territory of the Republic coincided exactly with Poland’s immemorial ‘historic lands’. Talk of ‘ethnic minorities’ was suppressed; all museums were subject to rigorous state censorship; and any deviation risked punishment. It was not possible, for example, to let it be known that the area south-east of Nowy Sa˛cz had been inhabited until recently by people of Ruthenian/Ukrainian descent. And any hint of the ethnic cleansing undertaken by the Communist regime during ‘Operation Vistula’ would have been construed as a criminal offence.

  In the museum’s early days, therefore, nothing was said directly about Poles, Ukrainians or Jews. Instead, the exhibition space was divided into four sectors, each devoted to one of four ‘ethnographic groups’ – Pogórzanie (Hill People), Górale (Highlanders) Lemkos and Lachy. Each of the groups, it was explained, enjoyed their own dress, customs, dialects and socio-economic organization. The use of the term Lachy is particularly curious. It is the standard Ukrainian word for Poles, and it was presumably chosen to avoid explaining that the neighbouring Lemkos were a branch of the Ukrainians. In all probability it referred to the Polish peasants of the mid-Galician plain, who practised arable farming as opposed to the pastoral economy of the hill and mountain groups.

  To be fair, the museum’s initial raison d’être was to provide a record of traditional rural life, which was fast disappearing under the pressures of industrialization. Care was taken, in good Marxist style, to distinguish between the primitive cabins of landless labourers and the more substantial dwellings of richer owners. Even so, there were glaring omissions. There was no church, no manor house, and not a single reminder of the Jewish presence.113

  Since 1989 the contents of the museum have evolved in several directions. First, the updated guidebook now speaks of three ‘ethnic minorities’ – Germans, Jews and Roma – alongside the four ‘ethnographic groups’, and exhibits have been added relating to each of them. Secondly, a number of rural churches and chapels have been introduced. There are fine examples of wooden sacral architecture, Roman Catholic, Uniate, Orthodox and Lutheran, but as yet no sign of a synagogue. Thirdly, with assistance from European Union funds, a separate area has been set aside to reconstruct a typical miasteczko galicyjskie or ‘Galician townlet’. As of 2009, when building works were still incomplete, the Yiddish word of shtetl was not being used, but it would be very surprising if the overall Jewish accent were not considerably strengthened. For the time being, visitors are greeted with a photographic exhibition of Jewish sites and cemeteries in Galicia, and also with a klezmer concert and an introduction to Jewish cooking.114

  A stroll round the museum takes two or three hours, or more if the richly furnished interiors are properly inspected. Over sixty buildings offer great variety, from a poor peasant’s cabin from Lipnica Wielka (c. 1850), to an early nineteenth-century linseed oil-mill from Słopnice; from a thatched cottage of a country labourer from Podegrod (1846), to a wooden Greek Catholic church of St Demetrius from Czarne (1786); from a Roma complex of two dwellings and a forge from Czarna, to an early eighteenth-century manor house from Rdzawa near Bochnia. For all its dilemmas, this collection of Galician rural architecture and folklore is more typical of the former Galicia, and is more inclusive, than are the art galleries and highbrow museums.115 Yet it can never be complete. The ‘real’, the authentic, the ‘total Galicia’ remains tantalizingly out of reach.

  The present challenge facing local historians and museologists would have been well understood by Galicians. In the wake of the latest political shift in 1989, the bearers of the Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish heritages are confronted, like their ancestors, by the need to find paths towards compromise and cohabitation. They have somehow to shelve their selfish interests, and to seek out themes o
f common concern. It is to be hoped that something can be achieved before the centenary of Galicia’s demise in 2018. A touch of Galician humour would help. So, too, would the old Habsburg motto: ‘Viribus Unitis’.

  * The Warthegau, i.e. the District of the River Warthe, was the Nazi name for Great Poland.

  10

  Etruria

  French Snake in the Tuscan Grass

  (1801–1814)

  I

  Florence – Firenze – the chief city of Tuscany and cradle of the Renaissance – is the Mecca of all art-seekers. They come in their millions from all over the world, gazing at the buildings, the paintings and the sculpture, walking the streets that were walked by Dante, Fra Angelico and Michelangelo, breathing the air inhaled by Giotto, by Leonardo and by Galileo. I myself was one of them, taken at a tender age to see the great masterpieces, and shortly afterwards to the gates of Paradise Lost at nearby Vall’Ombrosa, where John Milton imagined Satan’s legions as ‘Angel Forms’

  who lay intrans’t,

  Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks

  In Vallombrosa, where th’Etrurian shades

  High overarch’t imbowr;1

  Milton was consciously writing in the epic tradition of Homer, Virgil and Dante. James Joyce, another literary pilgrim to Italy, described Paradise Lost as ‘a Puritan transcript of the Divine Comedy’.2

  Like all medieval cities, Florence has an ancient heart that covers just a couple of square miles. The only good way to see it is on foot. A stroll from the Ponte Vecchio, the ‘Old Bridge’, across the River Arno to the central Piazza della Signoria takes only a few minutes, and one can walk round the line of the medieval walls in a morning or an afternoon. On arriving in Florence, therefore, one is faced by a mass of adverts and agencies which offer the services of private guides and of guided tours. A typical enterprise offers six alternative tours: ‘Introduction to Florence’, ‘The Golden Age’, ‘The Medici Dynasty’, ‘Life in Medieval Florence’, ‘Unusual Florence’ and ‘Florence for Children’. The last of these options, it is promised, can be enjoyed no less by accompanying adults. The attractions include ‘climbing the Duomo tower’, ‘visiting a castle’, ‘how children lived’, ‘trying on period clothing’ and ‘watching artists at work.’3

  Most guidebooks recommend a one- or two-day tour in the company of an interpreter, followed by a lifetime of individual exploration. After all, one is entering a city that claims to possess one-fifth of all the world’s ‘Old Masters’:

  Day 1

  The Accademia Gallery, starring Michelangelo’s David.

  The Monastery of San Marco: Fra Angelico murals.

  The Medici Chapels.

  The Cathedral Baptistery and Ghiberti’s Bronze Doors.

  Giotto’s Tower.

  Dinner near the Piazza della Signoria.

  Day 2

  The Bargello Museum.

  The Duomo Museum, including Donatello.

  The Church of Santa Maria Novella, Masaccio.

  The Uffizi Galleries: reserve a month in advance.

  Dinner in the Oltrarno district.4

  Why do they say Oltrarno in Florence, but Trastevere in Rome?*

  The literary cognoscenti choose the Dante Trail. Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) not only pioneered vernacular literature in Europe, he preceded all the other geniuses that Florence produced, and set the Renaissance in motion. The trail always begins at the Sasso di Dante, ‘Dante’s Stone’, from which the poet is said to have watched the laying of the cathedral’s foundations in 1296. Next, inside the cathedral, one gazes at Domenico di Michelino’s astonishing depiction of Dante and his Poem (1465), which portrays the garlanded and red-robed poet holding up a copy of his Divine Comedy. On the right of the picture rise the walls and turrets of Florence, with the Duomo behind; on the left, the pit of Hell, the mountain of Purgatory and the heaven of Paradise.

  From the cathedral, the guide leads his party along the trail to the houses of the Portinari family. Dante’s Beatrice, the idealized woman who leads the poet from Purgatorio to Paradiso, was a Portinari who died young. The group passes thence in a couple of minutes to Dante’s own home, La Casa di Dante. Nearby stands the Palazzo de Bargello, a glowering structure that was once the seat of the podestà or ‘governor’. It was here, in 1301, that Dante’s banishment from Florence was proclaimed; a sentence that flowed from some obscure factional feud, it was a cruel prelude to a lifetime’s exile and to the endless moods of simmering anger and gnawing nostalgia that drove his pen through a hundred cantos. Outside the church of Santa Croce, one sees Pezzi’s over-life-size statue of Dante (1865) and inside, Ricci’s cenotaph to the Altissimo Poetà (1829). Santa Croce contains the tombs of Michelangelo and of Galileo, but not, of course, of Dante. Florence’s greatest son was not allowed home even to die.

  Passing along the Via dei Neri, the ‘Street of the Blacks’, one is reminded of the rival factions whose feuds ruined Florentine politics. The Guelphs drove out the Ghibellines, before the victorious Guelphs themselves split into Blacks and Whites. Dante had belonged to the Whites, who lost out. At the former Palazzo dei Priori, one can still see the rooms where Dante participated in municipal meetings before his banishment.

  In Dante’s time, the great open space of the Signoria was filled by the palaces of the powerful Uberti clan. Earlier in the thirteenth century the Uberti had championed the pro-imperial Ghibelline party. After the triumph of their anti-imperial Guelph enemies, their palaces were razed, leaving a void that can be seen and felt to this day.

  Beside the Ponte Vecchio, the Tower of the Amidei is associated with the murder in 1215 of a young nobleman, Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti, who had spurned a daughter of one of the oldest Florentine families, the Amidei. The murder is alluded to in Dante’s Paradiso, and was said to have sparked the original feud between Guelphs and Ghibellines. The nearby church of Santa Trinità used to house Cimabue’s Madonna (c.1280), which would have been known to Dante but which now hangs in the Uffizi. In Santa Maria Maggiore lies the tomb of Brunetto Latini, the Florentine philosopher to whom Dante was intellectually indebted. Despite placing him in the Inferno in the Ring of the Sodomites, Dante says to him: ‘m’insegnavate come l’uom s’etterna’, ‘you taught me how man makes himself eternal’.5 The tour ends at the church of Santa Maria Novella, where one admires the frescoes of the Strozzi chapel painted by Filippino Lippi, and the great crucifix painted by Giotto, Cimabue’s pupil and Dante’s contemporary.6

  The poet, torn between admiration of his native city and disgust at its vices, railed bitterly in the Inferno against the ingratitude of his compatriots, who appeared to forget him:

  Godi, Fiorenza, poi che se’ sì grande,

  che per mare e per terra batti l’ali,

  e per lo ‘nferno tuo nome si spande!

  Rejoice, O Florence, you are so great

  That your wings beat over land and sea,

  And your name resounds through Hell!7

  Or again:

  Florence mine, you might well be content…

  You are rich, you’re at peace, and you’re wise…

  [Yet], if you recall your past, and think clearly,

  You will see yourself like a woman fallen sick

  Who cannot find repose on the softest down,

  Twisting, turning and seeking to ease her pain.8

  Dante called her Fiorenza – half-way between the Latin Florentia and the modern Firenze – but he need not have worried about his reputation in his native city. As we can see in a second set of frescoes in Santa Maria Novella, painted by Nardo di Cenio in the 1350s, Dante became a celebrity within a generation of his death.

  Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) is another towering genius whose presence in Florence can sometimes be overshadowed by his contemporaries. His tomb in Santa Croce bears the inscription ‘TANTO nomini nullum par elogium’: ‘No praise is sufficient for so great a man.’ Machiavelli was a man after Dante’s own heart: mordant, searingly honest, frequen
tly funny, sardonic, and breathtaking in every other line he wrote. They would have got on famously. Machiavelli was an accomplished historian. His History of Florence (1520–25) is sometimes regarded as the pioneering work of modern European history; yet he is best known for his scintillating political commentary, Il Principe, The Prince. His no-nonsense advice to ruling princes made him famous. ‘A prince must learn not to be always good,’ he wrote, ‘but to be good or not as needs require.’ In the future, several of the world’s greatest statesmen were to keep a copy of Machiavelli in their pocket or at their bedside.9

  Such is the force of the Renaissance, however, that many visitors to Florence fail to realize that the city’s history cannot fairly be confined to one brilliant age. The city’s website lists thirteen main periods:

  Foundation of the Roman colony, Florentia (59 BC).

  Byzantine and Lombard periods.

  The Carolingians.

  Florence of the Communes.

  13th Century: Guelphs and Ghibellines.

  From the 14th Century to the Renaissance.

  The Renaissance.

  Great names of the 16th Century.

  Decline of the Medici to 1737.

  The Lorraine Period.

  Risorgimento.

  Florence as the capital of the Kingdom of Italy.

  Florence of the Novecento (20th Century).10

  Two or three more periods may safely be added, especially if Florence’s surroundings are included. One of them, prior to Florentia’s founding, was that of the Etruscans, when present-day Tuscany lay at the centre of Italy’s most prominent prehistoric civilization. Another, in our own day, sees Florence at the heart of a huge influx of migrants and foreigners, who come to savour the ‘simple life’ that has been drowned elsewhere by modern living.11 The world of Dante and Machiavelli forms a suitable backdrop to a countryside where medieval villages and ancient farmhouses snuggle among the olive groves, and where the rich bask in the sun, sip Chianti, lament the modern rat race, and idealize vigorously: