Fairy Tale Castle

Artist's concept of what Tenczyn Castle in Rudno would have appeared at its peak

Tenczyn Castle is about 16 miles west of Krakow in south central Poland. Original built in the 14th century, rebuilt in the 16th and the curtain wall added in the 17th. Burned in the 18th century after a lightning strike. Wikipedia has a floor plan and several images.

Zamek Tenczyn w Rudnie today

MAD White has the story about the artist's concept. They also have several images with sliders that allow you to compare the artist's renditions with older images and the with the current building. Very cool.

Joachimstein Water Castle

Joachimstein Water Castle

(Pałac Radomierzyce)

Baroque palace in Radomierzyce, Poland. Built in 1728, one of the most beautiful in Upper Lusatia.

Baroque palace in Radomierzyce

This palace is just part of a larger compound. The building shown in the top image is at the top of this image.

Joachimstein Water Castle Map

The palace is:

• 70 miles north of Prague, Czechia
• 55 miles east of Dresden, Germany
• 125 miles southeast of Berlin, Germany
• 165 miles south of Szczecin, Poland - Terminal for doomed ferry Heweliusz
• 200 miles south of Swinoujscie, Poland - location for excellent Polish crime series The Thaw
• 35 miles west of Grodziec Castle
• 270 miles west-southwest of Warsaw, Poland

Oder-Neisse line between Germany and Poland

The palace is right on the river Neisse, which forms part of the border between Germany and Poland.

Heweliusz - Netflix Series

Heweliusz | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

MS Jan Heweliusz sank on 14 January 1993, between about 04:10 and 05:12 (UTC+1) as the ship was crossing the Baltic Sea, en route from Świnoujście, Poland, to Ystad, Sweden. Out of 65 passengers and crew, 56 died in the disaster, making it the largest peacetime maritime disaster in Polish history. - Wikipedia

The show is a big production showing us the disaster as it unfolded and the feeble rescue efforts. Then we move on to the inquiry where the court is trying to pin the blame on the captain and the crew when the blame might be better placed on the state agency running the ferry company. We get a couple of good speeches from people during the inquiry, not that it makes any difference. The state maintains their stonewall defense.

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, so I imagine many of the old state agencies were still in operation due to inertia.

Wikipedia has a good size cast listing.

Soundtrack

5 episodes, 1 hour each.

Ferry Route

Previous ferry disaster posts:

• A year later the ferry MS Estonia sunk enroute from Estonia to Stockholm.
• 20 years later a ferry capsized in South Korea.

Grodziec Castle

Grodziec Castle, Poland

Wikipedia has a page about this place.

Hound's Hill - Netflix Series

Hound's Hill - Official Trailer | Netflix
MVSRS

18 years ago Mikolai and three of his friends give LSD to Sebastian, a retarded guy. Sebastian's sister, Daria, is our guy's girlfriend. She starts walking her brother home. Mikolai's father pulls him aside and takes him home. The other guys go after Sebastian and Daria. They pull up next to them in a car. They force the girl into the car, drive to secluded plot and rape her. The third guy hits her in the head with a rock and kills her. Sebastian finds his sister's body, and the police find him there. He's arrested and convicted and sent to the local nuthouse. Nobody has a clue about the three friends involvement.

Later, Mikolai writes a book about this incident. It's not clear whether it's fact or fiction. Doesn't matter, it's a best seller. He returns home for his father's birthday. Coincidentally, dead bodies start turning up in town. Nobody has a clue who killed them.

Eventually we find out who was actually involved the girl's rape and murder, and wouldn't you know it, it's the same people who have been turning up dead. Mikolai's father becomes a suspect, but the evidence is thin.

On occasion a mysterious old woman appears wearing a black headdress and a fancy necklace. The necklace has a 3D silver tree 3 or 4 inches high and several wood rays pointing outward from it. She isn't involved in the story, she just appears to add creepy atmosphere.

Gypsies show up now and again, mostly just to raise suspicions.

The Thaw - HBO Max Series

The Thaw (Odwilż) Season 2 - Special Shoot Teaser DC (Max Original)
Peter Varsics

Police detective partners Kasia (Katarzyna) and Trepa return. Trepa continues to go out of his way to support Kasia. This time they are investigating the murder of a young man that Kasia had pressured to become an informant. The bad guys, besides the usual drug dealing and gambling, are also smuggling underage girls in and turning them into whores. Kasia is still grieving over the loss of her husband who committed suicide. His suicide may have been caused by the moral conflicts he encountered in his undercover work for the police. Her father-in-law has a stroke and his vocabulary is reduced to the f-word.

Centrum in Szczecin, Poland

This big round-about shows up in nighttime aerial shots on a regular basis. I always thought of Poland as being in eastern Europe and technically it is, but Szczecin is almost directly south of Copenhagen, Denmark:

Germany, Poland & Denmark

We watched season 1 earlier this year.

Wikipedia page about the show has a list of characters.

Wikipedia page about Szczecin.

Justice - Netflix Movie

Justice | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Set in Poland in the mid 1990's, it's the story of a nasty multiple murder & bank robbery by three good, but not too bright, friends. One of them is some kind of math whiz, but he lacks real-world skills. Supposedly based on an actual crime, but I didn't find any more than that. 

Old retired cop is brought back to solve the case. He used to be on the police back when the commies ran the place and there are some old resentments hanging around. Some of those resentments work against him, and some work for him. Halfway through we already know who the culprits are, but the cops are looking for evidence and so far it's pretty thin.

There is one scene, it's just a few seconds long, where the old cop is watching TV and a news broadcast comes on telling us the Marek Kamiński has reached the South Pole. Marek is a real person and he actually reached the South Pole on December 27, 1995. It's got nothing to do with the story, it's just a little gem that got dropped into the script. Also tells us the date.

I've been seeing a bunch of gun misfires recently in TV shows. (A misfire is when gun fails to fire when the trigger is pulled.) Sometimes it's a flintlock, which is par for the course, but there's really no excuse if it's a modern weapon. What this tells me is that the characters with the malfunctioning guns have not been properly indoctrinated in the care and feeding of firearms. Or they are infected with group-think that doesn't value such behavior, i.e. 'It's a modern firearm. Just because it's been dragged around in the bottom of a bag full of junk for six months is no reason for concern." Occasionally a guy will find himself in a desperate situation and the only weapon he has is of unknown provenance. In that case a misfire is at least plausible, but when six out of seven thugs all have misfires you know that they have been infected with stupidity.

Colors of Evil: Red - Netflix Movie

Colors of Evil: Red - Official Teaser Trailer | Netflix
MVSRS

Wikipedia: Colors of Evil: Red is a 2024 Polish mystery crime thriller film directed by Adrian Panek and based on the 2019 novel of the same name by Malgorzata Oliwia Sobczak. The film stars Jakub Gierszał, Maja Ostaszewska and Zofia Jastrzebska. It follows the murder of a young woman in Tricity, Poland and the rookie prosecutor Leopold Bilski who teams up with the victim's mother, Judge Helena Bogucka.

We watched it, like we do all movies, in the original language with the subtitles turned on. I've never seen a dubbed movie that was convincing. Doesn't mean there aren't any, but I like the funny noises furriners make. 

The rookie prosecutor notes some troubling similarities between this current murder and another one that happened 15 years ago. He becomes convinced that they got the wrong guy then and they got the wrong guy now, so wants to overturn the old case, the case that made his boss's bones. Naturally the boss isn't too happy about it. Not happy at all until the dead girl's father, who has been the kingpin's lawyer for many years, turns over a thumbdrive containing all of the kingpin's illicit business dealings. The kingpin has been responsible for many murders over the years, but he won't own up to this one. While he is a very evil man, would he really want to kill his lawyer's daughter? Something doesn't quite add up here.

Tricity (Gdynia, Sopot & Gdansk) in Poland on the left and Kaliningrad Russia on the right.

In the movie, fatso gets in trouble with the king pin for selling drugs on the side, drugs he got from Russsians in Kaliningrad.

Seems I remember hearing something about the Poles wanting to cut through the barrier island the crosses the border so they wouldn't have to go into Russian waters to get to the Baltic. 

I've posted about five other Polish crime shows.

1983 | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix

The atmosphere of this show seems so real, it's spooky or maybe it's so spooky it seems real. Whatever, it's just wow! Our guy, once a rising star in the police department has been shunted off to doing run of the mill investigations. One such case is an apparent suicide of guy that was publishing subversive literature. Our detective notices a few little details that  mean it might not be suicide and he starts looking into it and now people start dropping like flies. There are at least two organization bent on taking down the Security Bureau (SB), one internal and one external and things are about to get hot.

The external organization gives one of their operatives a briefcase containing poison gas that he takes on board a private jet with the minister of the SB. Not too much later we hear that the plane has crashed and all occupants are dead. Trojon, who was second in command at SB was supposed to be on that plane as well, but he wasn't, so now he's the head of SB. Was it just his luck that he wasn't on that plane, or was he tipped off, or was the external organization working for him? Enquiring minds want to know, but don't dig too deep, you might be digging your own grave.

Coincidentally, the same thing happened to a business jet flying over the US east coast yesterday. This one doesn't sound like an assassination, more like simple equipment failure, but that's what they would say, wouldn't they?

Nazis Versus Commies

Richard Wagner: Prelude to «Lohengrin», Simon Rattle
Иван Шариков

I'm still reading Alan Furst, this time The Polish Officer. I think it might be time to pick up some new books, I've had enough of Europe for a while. Meanwhile I'm neck deep in this story. 

It's 1940 and Germany and Russia have divided Poland, but they haven't started fighting each other yet. De Milja, the officer in the title, has joined a resistance group and on page 69 he is having a meeting with a couple of the other leaders. They come to realize that while the operations against the Germans haven't gone too badly, they have not yet learned how to operate against the Russians. Now they are wondering why that might be and Agata turns philosophical:

Agata tapped a pencil eraser against the open page of a notebook. "There is a difference," she said slowly, "that interests me. Say that it is the difference between nationalism and, ah, what we might call social theory. For the Germans, nationalism is an issue of race, ethnicity. For example, they accept as their own the Volksdeutsch - descendents of German colonists, many of whom do not even speak German. But their blood is German blood - these Teutonic philosophers really believe in such things. Cut a vein, listen closely, you can hear the overture to Lohengrin - why, that's a German you've got there! The Bolsheviks are just the opposite - they recruit the mind, or so they like to pretend. And all the world is invited to join them; you can be a communist any time you like - 'Good heavens! I just realized it's all in the dictatorship of the working class.'

The Green Glove Gang - Netflix Series

The Green Glove Gang | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Three old women are going around stealing stuff, mostly from scumbags. The police get a clue so our crew heads to an old folks home to hideout. Hijinks ensue. Very entertaining. Decider sums it up aptly:

Sure, we love shows where seniors are doing very un-senior-like things, but The Green Glove Gang is more about the longtime friendship of the three thieves and how they shake up a stodgy nursing home than about the thievery itself.

 8 half hour episodes.

Update January 2026 replaced missing video.

Steinhaus Longimeter

Steinhaus Longimeter Review / HowTo
Chris Staecker

Reminds me of the old mechanical gun computers and their techniques for measuring the lengths of curves.

YouTube blurb: "The Steinhaus Longimeter, invented in the 1930s by Hugo Steinhaus."

Wikipedia has a page about The Scottish Book, and copies are available from a variety of shops.

Update April 2024 fixed video embed code

The Mire '97

The Mire '97 - Trailer (Official) | Season 2 | Netflix
MVSRS

Polish murder mystery. We have some of the same characters that were in season 1 along with some new ones, the principle one being the lead detective, a tough chick lesbian from the big city (Krakow or Warsaw, I'm not sure which). Like most of these European cop shows, nobody is telling the truth, they're all lying through their teeth. We get some flashbacks to the end of WW2 when the Russians are coming in. They're running out the Germans, but they are also trampling on the Poles and being pretty brutal about it. Back in the present day, which was 24 years ago (2021 minus 1997), there is a pretty spectacular escape stunt along towards the end, one part skill and ten parts desperation. The guy ends up in the hospital but that's better than the morgue. 

I don't think there were any male homosexuals in this series, which was a plus. They've shown up in just about every other show we've watched recently. I guess it's a fact of life, and probably more common on the fringes of society where most of these crime stories take place. I can tolerate it, but I would just as soon they weren't part of the show. For some reason, the lesbians don't bother me, probably because they were good looking women.

6 Episodes, 50 minutes each, Netflix

MiG-29

Polish Air Force MiG-29s by Krzysztof Kocierz

Found this image on Defence Blog. I am not sure whether it is a painting or a photograph. Krzysztof is a photographer, but the shadows and the rainbow are fantastic.

Ultraviolet

Ultraviolet Netflix HD Trailer
ERiKC3000
A cops worst nightmare: a bunch of amateur sleuths investigating crimes and crossing up the police investigation. The lead girl keeps running into one of the local cops and you can tell right from the start that there is going to be a romance between these two, but it's going to take a while because we're busy solving crimes.

Ultraviolet is a network of people who use their internet skills and social media to track down information about people, crowd sourced crime investigation if you will. The shows brings in all kind kinds of technology, much like Unit 42, like tracking people using the their cell phones. The people involved in this all have jobs, after a fashion, but nothing that enlivens them like ferreting out clues to a crime.

Pretty lightweight, very entertaining. 

On Netflix in Polish with English subtitles, even though the preview above doesn't.

Gdańsk, Poland

Gdansk, Poland via Google 3D Maps

Gdańsk, Poland via daily timewaster

I don't know whether it was instinct or pure dumb luck, but I managed to locate the neighborhood in just a few clicks. Total elapsed time: 15 minutes.

The Plagues of Breslau

The Plagues of Breslau - Trailer
Tu Brother TV
It's 8:15PM, we've finished watching our movie for the night and it's still light out. Tonight's movie is a Polish Crime Thriller. We listened to it in the original language, presumably Polish, and read the English subtitles. There was a scene at a horse race and another at a motorcycle race, which was pretty cool. There were a couple of scenes that involved people jumping out of the way of a runaway thing and they were pretty bad. Or maybe people are just really bad at detecting approaching danger. They get bowled over left and right. Maybe they got a discount for the large number of falls.

The murders are bizarre and grisly, but nothing worse than what we saw in Game of Thrones.

The movie trots out a bit of history to fit in with current events, but it's fake history, as Diksha Sundriyal at Cinemaholic explains:

Is The Plagues of Breslau Based on a True Story? 

No, ‘The Plagues of Breslau’ is not based on a true story. It is a crime drama, written by Patryk Vega and Sylwia Koperska-Mrozinska. In the film, Magda uses the Week of Plague as the historical reference for the serial killings happening in Wroclaw. She tells the story of Frederick the Great. After taking over Breslau in 1941, he wanted it to become a great city. For this, he needed to weed out all the bad things that would hold back its peace and prosperity. He considered six human fallacies to be the plagues that would never let them grow. 

They were degeneracy, pillaging, corruption, slandering, oppression, and treachery. To show everyone how serious he was considering his plans, he devised the Week of Plagues. Every day, apart from Sunday, one person, who had committed any of these crimes, would be publically executed. Apparently, Magda reads about it in a book of local history. In reality, there is no account of any such practice in the reign of Frederick the Great.

I think Diksha means 1741, not 1941. Frederick the Great died in 1786. He went to war against Austria in 1741. Nine months later they signed the Treaty of Breslau. Breslau is the German name for Wroclaw.

Update May 2023 replaced missing video.

The Innocents

The Innocents Official Trailer 1 (2016) - Drama HD
Rotten Tomatoes Indie
A pretty good, low key movie about some Polish nuns. WW2 ended in Europe in May of 1945. This movie is set in December 1945, 9 months after the Russians came through Poland and pushed the Germans out. Some Russian soldiers broke into this convent and had their way with the nuns. I always kind of thought that nuns were off limits, but I guess that only applies if you are a Christian. Being as those dirty commies had no God but Stalin, such prohibitions didn't apply.

The movie is based on the experiences of Madeleine Pauliac, a French Red Cross doctor who worked in Poland after World War II, dealing with the aftermath of mass rapes by Soviet soldiers.

Roger Ebert has a review, as does AnOther.

Update September 2023 replaced missing trailer.

Syrena

Fiat 126P

Syafolee got a postcard from Poland with a picture of a car on it (above). The card is from Centrum Promocji Motoryzacji, a Polish outfit that deals with cars. They have a website. They have several makes and models listed, including the infamous Trabant and something called the Syrena, that looks kind of cool. The Syrena they have pictured is a prototype sports model from 1960. It never made it to production, but there is also a more utilitarian model that was the standard Polish car for decades. Two stroke engines, two or three cylinders, much like an old Saab. Looking on YouTube I found this clip:


Funter , Arrinera Hussarya , Syrena , Syrenka , Car Project's from Poland
Looks like car culture is flourishing in Poland. The tune is Heart Afire by Defqwop featuring Strix.

How do you spell Faro?

Faro is some kind of card game, in my mind it is used by card sharps to fleece the unsuspecting. It's also what we call leaders of ancient Egypt, though we spell it 'Pharaoh', or is it 'Pharoah'? Google likes the -aoh version. Amazon isn't so particular. We have

FARAON (PHAROAH) by Boleslaw Prus

and then we have

Pharaoh by Boleslaw Prus

I think the first one is in Polish, the second one might be in English. Prices range from $3 to $3,000. Not sure if I am going to order a copy (the $3 version) or not. Looks like there might be other versions as well.

It's kind of a famous book. Wikipedia has an article about it:

Pharaoh (Polish: Faraon) is the fourth and last major novel by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus (1847–1912). Composed over a year's time in 1894–95, serialized in 1895–96, and published in book form in 1897, it was the sole historical novel by an author who had earlier disapproved of historical novels on the ground that they inevitably distort history.

Pharaoh has been described by Czesław Miłosz as a "novel on... mechanism[s] of state power and, as such, ... probably unique in world literature of the nineteenth century.... Prus, [in] selecting the reign of 'Pharaoh Ramses XIII'^[1] in the eleventh century BCE, sought a perspective that was detached from... pressures of [topicality] and censorship. Through his analysis of the dynamics of an ancient Egyptian society, he... suggest[s] an archetype of the struggle for power that goes on within any state."^[2]

Makes it sound kind of interesting.

St. Kinga's Chapel, deep in the Wieliczka salt mine

I'm looking at this because it gets mentioned in Wikipedia's article about the Wieliczka Salt Mine, which is kind of an old, old place. Reminds me of the mines of Moria from Lord of the Rings, except the dwarves were digging for gold and the Poles were digging up salt.