Nuremberg and Kłodzko

Over the last three years, for various reasons, I've not done as much travelling as I would have liked. But this month I went a little way to catching up by "popping over the border" to Germany and Poland, on the first and second weekend of May respectively.


I really appreciate that 1 and 8 of May are both public holidays in the Czech Republic, so if they fall on Thursdays, you can take of the 2 and 9 May and create two long weekends or a week-long holiday. So I used this opportunity to visit Nuremberg, after numerous postponements, and Kłodzko, in the Lower Silesian region of Poland and very close to the Czech border

The towns are quite disparate. Kłodzko is a small historic settlement in a part of rural Poland that digs deep into Czech territory, although it was once part of Bohemia. The shabby but likeable town is a fairly sleepy place, close to impressive, pine-clad mountain ridges. Nuremberg is much larger, with a bustling, big city atmosphere. It's located in Franconia, a part of Germany I must confess I knew little about, which prompted me to find out more about it and its history.

Comparing and contrasting these two visits was an enjoyable exercise because I'm fascinated by connections between regions of Europe. I've finally got round to reading Europe by the historian Norman Davies, and as I leafed through it, I was struck by the links between parts of Central Europe across the centuries. And in Nuremberg I came across an outstanding example of the craftmanship of medieval sculptor Veit Stoss. Perhaps his most outstanding work can be found in St Mary's church in Kraków, not too far from Kłodzko.  A good reminder, in this era of intense globalisation, that connections and links between places, people and ideas are nothing new.

Thoughts on Ukraine

Ukraine has been much in my mind recently. When I started this post, several weeks ago, anarchic scenes from Kyiv were flashing on our TV or PC screens almost daily, and the level of violence compared to that of the Orange Revolution of 2004 was striking and alarming. Things have developed rapidly in a very short period, Crimea has been annexed, and as I write this Russian and American foreign ministers are due to meet to discuss the Ukrainian crisis.

I’m finding it hard to process the contrast of the images of the last few weeks and the Ukraine I visited back in 2007. I started in the western city of Lviv and then travelled east to Kyiv, on an overnight train that was ridiculously cheap for a Westerner, and surprisingly comfortable too.

Lviv was a thoroughly Central European city and wants to be so again. Tellingly, many of those who were killed in the recent violence were from the Lviv region. The elegant and slightly melancholy heart of Lviv is utterly beguiling, and uncannily similar to the Old Town of Kraków, another of my favourite European cities. And of course Lviv was part of Poland; Poles know it as Lwów. I spotted Polish street signed carved into facades, and on several occasions Polish tourists approached me, asking for directions. I wondered if they were the sons and daughters of that great post-war migration of Lvovians westwards to what is now Wrocław. Until 1945 the city was German and called Bresslau; then its German population was expelled from the new Poland.

Although I had some knowledge of Ukraine before visiting, my trip up-ended many of my – embarrassingly clichéd – images of the country. Lviv felt so instantly familiar, as if I had never left Central Europe; it was hard to believe that it was part of the Soviet Union for 40 years, and seeing Cyrillic everywhere seemed disorientating. Kyiv on the other hand conformed much more readily to my image of an “Eastern” city: the profusion of golden onion-domed churches rising up like a thicket of mushrooms, the great chunks of Social Realist architecture so absent from Lviv, or at least its historic centre, and the mix of Ukrainian and Russian languages. I had to keep reminding myself that Western Ukrainians, most of whom are firmly pro-EU and look West, regard a city like Lviv, rather than the Russian-speaking regions of the East, as quintessentially Ukrainian.

Such tensions of identity, and the wider issue of ordinary freedoms, ordinary people versus oligarchs, corruption, and Ukraine’s role in the world are being played out right now, across the country. It was strange, sad and disturbing to see Hrushevskoho street, which I strolled up and down, on balmy summer days, now the scene of violence and pent-up frustration.

Ukraine fascinated me then and is beckoning me back. Ironically, just when the violence escalated in the centre of Kyiv, I had been thinking about another visit, and I want to go back very much. I can only hope that when I do, Ukraine will have turned the corner.