There’s something distinct about the 100+ year-old houses in the Lower Silesian region of southwest Poland. This certain distinctness isn’t immediate in the way these houses look, even though they do have similar characteristics – weathering gray stone facades whose rough edges warm and smooth with distance; even windows with thick, crocheted lace curtains; pointed roofs. It’s more the distinct feeling that these houses suggest; an evocation of warmth and coziness inside, wrapped in a hard shell of an exterior that weathers for the sake of keeping the comfy interior safe.
The thick stone walls don’t need to do much to prove the merit of the strength they evoke. History justifies enough. Many of these German-built houses outlasted WWII and have been standing since. (Lower Silesia was a German region for centuries prior to the war.)
“Our house was built in the 1850s. It’s a German one.” The woman gently touched my forearm with her fingertips, as if she expected me to lose my balance in disbelief that a house could be so old. “That one across the street – that one is even older. From the 1830s.”
All the houses on the main street in the small Lower Silesian town of Kliczkow looked like they could have been as old. Two-storey structures tucked lower than street level, the graduated hues of their stone facades shifted in varying shades of gray. Natural, decades-deep processes of weathering.
When I asked her if she knew anything about the house’s history or its previous owners, she could only go a few years back. An older Polish couple had been living there, and when they died, their children no longer wanted the house. She knew nothing about the previous German owners who would have lived there before the war. (After WWII,Central Europe underwent one of the largest mass relocation programs in European history. The German residents of Lower Silesia were moved further west, and Polish refugees from other shifting borders further east were moved in. Town signs were rewritten from German to Polish, and the old German stone houses become Polish ones.)
“We’ve been renovating it for about 5 years now,” she continued, proudly leading me through the landscaped backyard.
I suspect that most of Lower Silesia’s thick stone houses have similar stories.
One of my favorite authors – also a Lower Silesian native – has penned poignant words regarding the continued lives of these houses.
One evening, as we were clearing the empty teacups and plates from the terrace, Marta said that the most important human duty is to save things that are falling into decay, rather than create new things.
If I were to buy a house in Europe, I would choose one in Lower Silesia.
