There was a very cheerful holiday feeling in Krakow on Holy Saturday as everyone was hurrying to church in their best clothes with Easter baskets of food to be blessed. While Sarah went to do a bit of necessary shopping, I did a tour of the churches in Krakow in an att
empt to find confession in English. This was ultimately unsuccessful thanks in part to the huge queues at confessionals which meant you couldn't really pop in quickly to see if the priest spoke English. However, it meant I could join hundreds of Polish people in paying a number of visits to the beautifully decorated Easter gardens set up in churches with the Host on display inside the tomb surrounded by spring flowers. In one tiny church: St Giles, near the castle, the Host was being watched over by boy scouts who were evidently very proud of their responsibility and were determinedly standing to attention with eyes front.
Meeting up back at the hostel, Sarah and I bought a bunch of daffodils to bring some spring cheer to our dorm, and had a big lunch of pizza and tea in the kitchen before spending the afternoon doing washing, blogging and generally sorting things out. Later, we rewarded ourselves by a coffee on the main square, watching the horses and carts drive tourists around at extortionate prices. Learning from our mistake on Maundy Thursday, as we thought, we arrived at the Dominican church an hour early for the Easter Vigil, which was scheduled to begin at 9pm. There was still standing room only. In fact, we were lucky to get a place inside the church at all. As the darkened church got fuller and fuller, with every aisle packed full, including the central one, we didn't know how on earth the procession was going to get down. But somehow they managed it with the flames of the Easter fire flickering in the background, and the Paschal candle making its way down the church with people pressed to either side around it clutching little candles which were gradually all lit too until the whole place was illuminated.
It was an even longer Mass than before, lasting nearly five hours, and again, obviously, entirely in Polish. We managed to follow the first couple of readings thanks to the give-away repetitions of Old Testament names like Abraham and Moses, but after that we were pretty lost. Again, the atmosphere was just incredible with the whole congregation seemingly intent and enthusiastic, even those having to stand for the whole thing. We managed to nab a kneeler which helped, serving as a useful seat during the long Polish sermon. At the end of Mass there was a procession in which the Host was brought from the tomb back to the tabernacle with lots of singing and ringing of bells. As it passed by, somehow everyone managed to kneel down, despite the fact that even standing up you had your nose pressed into the small of someone else's back. The whole thing ended with lots of cheerful hymns. We decided it was time to lose all reserve and threw ourselves into singing along with the Polish, much to the amusement of the guy standing next to us, who helped us out from time to time with pronunciation. I defy anyone to sing "Zmartwychwstania pryzklad" with success. Luckily, pretty much every line ended with "alleluia" which we sang with gusto, feeling a bit like Mr Bean on his one foray into church....
empt to find confession in English. This was ultimately unsuccessful thanks in part to the huge queues at confessionals which meant you couldn't really pop in quickly to see if the priest spoke English. However, it meant I could join hundreds of Polish people in paying a number of visits to the beautifully decorated Easter gardens set up in churches with the Host on display inside the tomb surrounded by spring flowers. In one tiny church: St Giles, near the castle, the Host was being watched over by boy scouts who were evidently very proud of their responsibility and were determinedly standing to attention with eyes front.Meeting up back at the hostel, Sarah and I bought a bunch of daffodils to bring some spring cheer to our dorm, and had a big lunch of pizza and tea in the kitchen before spending the afternoon doing washing, blogging and generally sorting things out. Later, we rewarded ourselves by a coffee on the main square, watching the horses and carts drive tourists around at extortionate prices. Learning from our mistake on Maundy Thursday, as we thought, we arrived at the Dominican church an hour early for the Easter Vigil, which was scheduled to begin at 9pm. There was still standing room only. In fact, we were lucky to get a place inside the church at all. As the darkened church got fuller and fuller, with every aisle packed full, including the central one, we didn't know how on earth the procession was going to get down. But somehow they managed it with the flames of the Easter fire flickering in the background, and the Paschal candle making its way down the church with people pressed to either side around it clutching little candles which were gradually all lit too until the whole place was illuminated.
It was an even longer Mass than before, lasting nearly five hours, and again, obviously, entirely in Polish. We managed to follow the first couple of readings thanks to the give-away repetitions of Old Testament names like Abraham and Moses, but after that we were pretty lost. Again, the atmosphere was just incredible with the whole congregation seemingly intent and enthusiastic, even those having to stand for the whole thing. We managed to nab a kneeler which helped, serving as a useful seat during the long Polish sermon. At the end of Mass there was a procession in which the Host was brought from the tomb back to the tabernacle with lots of singing and ringing of bells. As it passed by, somehow everyone managed to kneel down, despite the fact that even standing up you had your nose pressed into the small of someone else's back. The whole thing ended with lots of cheerful hymns. We decided it was time to lose all reserve and threw ourselves into singing along with the Polish, much to the amusement of the guy standing next to us, who helped us out from time to time with pronunciation. I defy anyone to sing "Zmartwychwstania pryzklad" with success. Luckily, pretty much every line ended with "alleluia" which we sang with gusto, feeling a bit like Mr Bean on his one foray into church....
We finally got back to the hostel at around 2am and found the gates locked and no one answering the doorbell. Time for Sarah's rock climbing skills to prove their worth. Her elegant scaling of the gate was most impressive and we managed to get inside with no bones broken and dignity pretty much intact. As we were by now very hungry, we celebrated Easter in the hostel kitchen with hot chocolate and bananas before creeping into the dorm full of sleeping bodies to our beds. An amazing way to see in Easter 2009.
Easter Sunday itself was a day of sheer pleasure. On getting up we exchanged Easter presents, had boiled eggs for breakfast courtesy of the hostel, and wandered round the main square in the sunshine singing English Easter hymns to ourselves and getting some rather odd looks. We then had a coffee sitting on the main square, followed by a gin and tonic, which was in turn followed by a lunch of hot sausages and ketchup from a market stall. By now we had eaten and drunk the day away sufficiently that it was time to meet Dr Kloczowski again, who had offered to give us a walking tour of the city. He showed us the old university buildings, a couple of churches built in a range of architectural styles from baroque to Art Nouveau, Kafka's house and the Jewish
quarter of Kazimierz where we visited a tiny synagogue and an ancient Jewish cemetry lined with wall plaques from survivors of the Holocaust remembering family members who had died. We finished off with another cup of tea and a long talk about European history during which Sarah and I both felt rather as if we were in a tutorial for which we hadn't prepared - absolutely fascinating but a tad scary! We then said goodbye to our friend, who had given up so much of his Easter weekend to us, and walked back along the Vistula in the evening light to meet up with two other friends: Jason and Kylie, the Australian couple who we first met in Bulgaria, who were following a similar route to us and had just arrived in Krakow. We all went out together for an Easter meal in which I had lamb pierogi which were gorgeous, and Sarah had a simply enormous knuckle of pork which was the size of her head. We finished off the evening eating chocolate and playing Scrabble with a mixed Polish/French set, which made scoring rather interesting. Around midnight we said goodnight and turned in, as we were planning an early start for the Czech Republic the next morning. 
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