Month: August 2025

This was it. Our last month. The plan was to spend one week in Poland and in the other three I would finish my book. Only one of those things was going to happen.

First: Poland. This was one of my wife’s must-haves. She has long been interested in the fate of Warsaw in World War II and in the atrocities that took place in Auschwitz. There was no way we were going to miss an opportunity to get to Poland before we left Europe. We arranged to spend three days in Warsaw and four in Krakow. Fortuitously, my officemate Agata Deptula was a Warsaw native and helped us with our itinerary. One thing she said we absolutely must do: get some Jagodzianki (blueberry buns, currently in season). And we did!

Warsaw was somewhat of a surprise. It has little in the way of “old town,” since much of the city was destroyed by the Nazis. What looks old is due to reconstruction; most of the city is quite modern. The main sites we took in were the POLIN Museum documenting the history of Jews in Poland, the Marie Currie Museum (it was radiant; heh…heh, mmm), and the Nubian exhibit at the National Museum. The exhibit includes wall paintings from the eighth-century Faras Cathedral, displayed in a reconstruction of the cathedral’s original structure. Only one of the paintings, however, had any connection with apocryphal traditions: an image of Mary’s mother Anna, with Mary in her arms, and flanked by two …