One of our curiosities in coming to Poland was my ancestry. My great-grandparents (mother’s mother) both immigrated to Chicago from Poland met each other there and married. Sadly, much of our link to the past is now gone. My grandmother and her siblings have all passed away with the exception of one sister. Unfortunately, stricken with Alzheimers, she no longer can tell us of the family we may still have in Poland. What remains is the record of my great-grandfather’s arrival at Ellis Island in 1903. The entry tells us that Adam Golen sailed from Antwerp to New York and his hometown is listed as Vrzysieki in Poland. A little sleuthing convinced us the actual place is Przysieki, not far from Krakow. We decided to head to that area and at least see where a piece of my family came from, and if we got lucky, maybe even a long lost relative.
To get to this area of southeast Poland, we decided to rent a car. We could have made the trip without one, but our ability to see the sparsely populated region would have been limited. The two hour drive from Krakow took us through village after village, most of which looked the same as the last. We finally arrived in Jaslo, the closest town to Przysieki, to find a place to stay. We settled into a nice, cheap hotel and set off to explore the area.
Independent of the search for distant relatives, southeast Poland struck us as an unknown jewel for travel. We stopped a number of times through the town of Krosno, recommended to us by a friend of Deenaree’s who lived there for a year. We were rewarded with a cute, small old town with medieval architecture to rival Krakow, albeit on a much smaller scale. Another town near Jaslo, Biecz, boasted a similar old town with gorgeous cathedrals, houses and city walls around the main square.
As we continued to drive from place to place, we started to realize we were seeing big, brown road signs and unpainted wooden steeples everywhere. As we drove out of Biecz, we decided to follow one of those brown signs a few kilometers off the main road and see what we found. What luck, we happened to stumble across one of a handful of wooden churches in Poland that is on the UNESCO World Heritage List. We arrived just as they were ready to close and were glad we did. The inside walls of the church treated us to a collection of awe-inspiring paintings from the 13th century that rival anything we have seen across the world over the past 10 months. What’s more, the kind woman in the office provided us with awesome maps and brochures about the region, detailing the countless wooden churches in the area. We spent half a day driving around, taking in the majesty of the traditional houses of worship.
Finally, we spent some time in Przysieki. We soon realized it was not the kind of place where it would be easy to show up unannounced and find a third cousin. The village lacked any center to speak of and had no more than a single small church, convenience store, train station and restaurant. The town was much closer to a collection of houses in the countryside than an actual village. Nonetheless, we ate dinner at the restaurant and talked to the owner. Plenty of Golens can be found in Poland, he seemed to suggest and it was probably impossible to find anything with our only clue.
We drove through the place, took photos and paid special attention to the oldest looking houses, wondering if my great-grandfather may have played with a friend in that place, or fetched some sugar from a neighbor or maybe even lived there. We stopped at the train station and wondered whether he left from that spot for the faraway city of Antwerp, just a step on his great journey to the far off promise land of America. Whether or not we saw places that Adam Golen lived or played or departed from, we saw his country. It is a beautiful area with rolling countryside and ornate churches, thick forests and charming old towns. We weren’t able to fill in all of those missing links, but now we know where the whole chain began.