Up to a year ago, the thing I knew most about Poland was its poppy seed cake, Makowiec.
My grandmother had a Polish neighbour who used to bring her homemade poppy seed cake when she knew we were coming to visit. It was my favourite thing at tea. The friendship between my grandmother and her neighbour wasn’t a close one I don’t think, but they updated each other on life’s happenings over the fence, and my grandmother would sometimes share plums or green beans from the garden, in return for the cake. Maybe the relationship was purely transactional. But still, when my grandpa died the cake came tied with a purple ribbon as a sign of respect, matching one tied to the neighbour’s door. I read recently that due to the amount of poppy seeds used in the cake, people have tested positive for morphine after eating it. I like the idea of my family sitting around the table, sipping tea out of flowered china teacups, high on morphine. Now that all of these characters have passed, I haven’t had poppy seed cake in a long time.
When I told people I was visiting Warsaw with work, nobody told me it would be a beautiful or exciting place to visit. Almost everyone told me Krakow was nicer. But childhood memory is a powerful thing, and in my brain any Poland = poppy seed cake = good (possibly illegal) times.
Warsaw rewarded my faith with long promenades of elegant mansions set back from the roads behind ivy-ied cast iron railings and tree-filled gardens. It showed me gothic cobbled streets leading into surprising little squares, calm and empty, and large, grand squares surrounded by tall baroque golden and white churches. That first visit it had snowed, it was quiet and I felt I had the city all to myself.
It’s an old place, but an old place that had to rebuilt after the war, from scratch, brick by brick, and so the old is infused with the spirit of the new, and Warsaw is modern as well as historic. Walk 10 minutes one way out of the old town and you’ll find glass-fronted tower blocks. Take a wrong turn and you’re back on a 1900s street. The Soviets constructed a 778ft Palace of Culture and Science south of the old town. A lot of people don’t want a memory of communism towering over the city, and a lot of people want it to stay. But it’s been nicknamed Stalin’s Schlong, and has hosted both the Rolling Stones and a Miss World contest, and that sounds like a good use of a building to me. And that’s Warsaw – a city that’s alive rather than preserved in a moment in time, moving on and taking some of the old with it.
When I returned in the summer, the squares were filled with a low hum of late night bar chatter. Warsaw gave me shots of good vodka, and morsels of bacony potato goodness wrapped up in fried perogi. Cabbage stewed and studded with morsels of rich gammon. And finally, in a high ceilinged, glass fronted coffee-house, Warsaw rewarded me with a slice of Makowiec densely packed with poppy seeds, and perhaps, laced with morphine.