Zakopane
After leaving Krakow in early November of 2022, I took a bus about an hour south, to the town of Zakopane, in the Tatras Mountains on the southern border of Poland. This is just about the only place in Poland which has mountains, the rest of the country being essentially pancake-shaped. Dismounting the bus, I walked about a mile up a long road lined with all sorts of shops and cafes, crowded with people who had come up to the hills to hike. In winter, Zakopane is a ski town, and already it felt like one. I stayed in the smallest Airbnb I’d seen – a room built as an annex on the side of a stone house, which, including the bathroom, was probably about ten feet long and five feet wide. But I actually found this incredibly cozy, especially since it made the place easier to heat, since it was already getting quite cold.
The next day I went for a walk. The first thing I noticed about Zakopane is the peculiar local architecture – a style which is now known as Zakopane style, pioneered by architect Stanislaw Witkiewicz, who inspired the region to shift away from Swiss- and Austrian-style chalets and toward a style of architecture inspired by the more local traditions of the Goral people and the Carpathian Mountains, of which the Tatras are an extension. As a result, Zakopane today is a wonderful collection of tiered-roofed wooden houses that don’t quite look like anywhere else.
As I headed uphill into the wooded foothills of the mountains, and saw the rotting bracken and the dripping moss, the dark firs spattered here and there with bursts of rain, breathing out fog, and everywhere the drip of water on every surface, I realized that if I were dropped in this place with no context for where I was, I would absolutely believe I was back in Washington. It had exactly the same character and climate, and immediately I began to feel a hospitable comfort, a kindred warmth brought on by the gloom and the rain.
As I proceeded, I passed the old habitations of people who once lived in the forested hills, before it became a national park. Amid the dark firs were blanched larches, gold fading into the fog. The trail quickly climbed into the clouds, up a long stair of stone that made me feel like a hobbit on the way to Mordor. Then as I clambered up a slope, there was a sudden break in the fog, and sunlight revealed an immense and craggy escarpment on the other side of the defile.
From there, it was only a short walk through the woods until I suddenly popped above the clouds and into winter. I rounded a corner and without warning was in a world of white mountains and snow-capped Christmas trees, as far as the eye could see. The trail became a gentle stroll through this garden of snow, until I came to a high valley dotted with tiny cabins, ringed with an amphitheater of proud peaks. There I rested and stared, until I finally became too cold and retraced my steps to the town below.
The next day I had thought to get a local train or bus into northern Slovakia, assuming that would be feasible because the distances involved were small – but I soon discovered the transit system was not oriented toward getting people into the middle of the Slovakian hills. After a tiresome morning lugging my gear from one bus station to another and back again, I finally caved and decided to return to Krakow for the night, and catch the bus to Budapest the next day. But I’m glad I went back to Krakow after all, because that night I took a stroll around the great market square in the darkness, and found it transformed into a study in contrast, inky sky above, warm lights below, and everywhere the gentle babble of relaxed voices from the cafes, like ripples on the strand.
