A River of Memories: What Remains of Polish Floods?
If you were to think for a second about the most significant river in your life, which one would it be?
Apart from the most conventional associations in which, well, a river simply flows through your city or town and you happen to cross it from time to time, what is the strongest memory you have of it? Did you play at the riverbank as a child, running barefoot through its shallow bed? Or throw paper boats on one side of the bridge, to see them being taken away by the current and emerge on the other?
It’s possible you have a specific river you love so much, because there was a point when your life was in shambles, and the sight of the river was the only stable element of your daily commute – always there like a steadfast guardian, its face changing only slightly, reflecting rays of sun or stormy clouds. Perhaps you found comfort in its contradictory nature, as it was always in motion and yet barely changing. Remembering what Heraclitus once said, you knew you couldn’t step in the same river twice, and that changeable nature of things really brought you solace.
But then, this constant fluctuation makes it harder for rivers to exist in the public imagination. It is difficult to find a common denominator in those water memories, since for the most part, rivers become a shared experience only in moments of crisis.
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Flood in an unknown town, 1918-1944, National Photographic Documentation Office – Upper Silesia, photo: www.audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)
If we were to look at the map of Poland from a hydrological point of view, we would see blue lines beautifully piercing the land, like a web of life-sustaining veins. The river basins of the two biggest ‘queens’, the Odra and the Wisła, divide the country into two asymmetrical chunks. For the most part, they lead a quiet existence, following their yearly patterns, taking in more water in the spring and summer and freezing in the winter. Meandering to the furthest corners of the country, these ‘queens’ and their tributaries provide a habitat for many protected and rare animals.
The rivers’ lives get a bit more complicated at the intersection with the cities – they become more regulated and harnessed by humans. Even then, they remain a rather mundane background for the lives of locals, until one day they stop being forgettable – making their presence felt, their waters overflowing and currents accelerating.
Black and white images of Wrocław’s inhabitants, passing bags of sand from hand to hand while saving their city. Other people traveling in pontoons or running down the stairs in tears, hurriedly leaving their houses. Finally, an absolutely heartbreaking shot of two men and a dog awaiting help on a roof, as the menacing river spills all around them. The Millennium Flood – as the Great Flood of 1997 came to be known – affected Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic 23 years ago, leaving a mark in collective memory in a myriad of ways.
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Flooding on the Oder, 1920-1930, probably in the vicinity of Łubowice, National Photographic Documentation Office – Upper Silesia, photo: Henryk Niestrój / www.audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)
To be quite honest, these images imprinted in my memory come from a charity music video I watched on TV over and over again as a kid, hypnotised by the images so uncanny they almost did not seem to be real. The TV fundraiser was meant to collect money to help those who faced the most disastrous flood in recent history as the damage reached almost four billion euros. In an attempt to remember something more from that July of 1997, my mind also produced an image of the ravaging River Bóbr, almost spilling over the bridge, the current so fast as if it was about to rip the bridge from its seams. But did I see it with my own eyes, or do I remember it only through the women of my family and their accounts?
My experience of implanting such memories and grappling with how to remember such an event is not unique, because flood memories are generally difficult to pin down. They resemble the flowing river itself, somewhat in flux, at times completely absent from the living memory or very painfully present. For those who lost everything or took part in actively protecting their towns from the disastrous waves, the memory lives on. For those who were not affected at all, such natural disasters tend to quickly disappear from the radar. The perturbed towns and cities, however, do not forget.
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View of the flooded Poniatówka Beach from Praga, Poniatowski Bridge visible in the background, Warsaw, 1931, photo: Adam Jankowski / www.audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)
Memories of such an event are rather itinerant and peripatetic, yet find their tangible expression in monuments and commemorative plaques. While taking a stroll through any river town, it is easy to run into a high-water mark, commemorating the most remarkable levels the water reached. The small plaques remind passersby about the cataclysmic sizes of waves that have repeatedly visited places which have eventually learned to live with flooding. But how to commemorate floods? How do we remember them? Can those mnemonic devices help us in some way to prepare for what is yet to come, for all that Mother Earth has in store…?
In the small town of Krapkowice in southwestern Poland, in close proximity to the River Odra, but in a rather desolate place across from a gas station, stands a flood-level marker monument. A metal beam bears dates remembering the floods that plagued the city, and it is crowned with a big anchor – its chain somewhat unexpectedly hanging down and connecting the top of the monument to the level the river reached in 1997. The rather surprising anchor literally holds in place an important memory. On the big stone placed at the bottom, an inscription reads: ‘Niech przyroda będzie naszym nauczycielem’ (Let nature be our teacher). This particular teacher is currently absent, but its lesson lives on, merging the past, present and perhaps imminent future together.
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Flood in the Zaodrze district, Opole, 1997, photo: Krzysztof Miller / AG
But let’s go back even further into the past. In a similar tone, on a stone plaque in Kraków, an inscription informed passersby about the following:
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In the year of Our Lord 1813, on August 26th, an immeasurable abundance of rain, 72 hours of rainfall, the water rose to the lower line on this stone… It is an unfortunate remembrance of a terrible disaster that touched people, cattle, buildings, harvests and bridges, a disaster [so large] it was impossible to mourn. Mateusz Dubiecki, Chancellor of the Cathedral… funded [this plaque] so that the descendants could be wiser in the future.
This lasting and palpable reminder was meant to bring the image of omnipotent Wisła back to the picture of everyday life of the locals – the memory of the flood positioned as the main source of wisdom. Almost every city with a significant river can boast a similar reminder of the flood’s height. One of the most prominent in Poznań is attached to a building right on the main square, at Old Square 50. The plaque is minimalist; it simply bears the date when the River Warta, the Odra’s right-bank tributary, flooded the city in 1736. It’s easy to overlook. Similarly, on the Vistula Boulevards in Warsaw, you may pass a collection of metal masts without realizing what they are. When taking a closer look, you will see that their heights differ and that each bears a date commemorating a particular flood peak. This comparative medley gives justice to Wisła’s recurring caprices.
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Flood, Wrocław, 1997, photo: Krzysztof Rak / AG
Let’s think for a second what it means to commemorate floods and what such high-water marks or plaques are meant to evoke in those who look at them. In some sense, they are implicitly interactive. You look at the level of the flooding, compare it to where you stand, and – if your imagination is wild enough – a shiver runs down your spine as you look up to measure how deep under the dark waters you would be if that wave were to synchronise with your here and now. Thus, like a rapid rise of water, for a split second, the flood re-emerges, this time cumbered by the limits of your imagination.
Remembering floods is indeed inextricably connected with absence. The immediate lack of the object being remembered makes it hard to solidify into a palpable object which commemorates it. That is why often flood narratives ebb and flow, from the size of the disaster to people who fought against it. In the Lower Silesian town of Łany stands a veritable curiosity – a monument commemorating not the flood itself, but quite literally, its absence. In 1997, the authorities wanted to blow up the town’s embankments and effectively flood the nearby villages, in an effort to save Wrocław from the incoming wave. The locals fought back, and the Odra never engulfed their homes. The arc they erected to commemorate this event served as a local meeting place for years to come.
In Wrocław, where the River Odra forks into its two north and south arms, stands Powodzianka (The Fair Maiden of Floods), a monument paying tribute to the effort of volunteers who tirelessly built floodbanks to protect the city. Powodzianka is a woman who holds a stack of books, reminding onlookers about the unprecedented effort of the locals to save the city’s heritage during the flood. It is one of those monuments that makes the overwhelming and destructive into something quantifiable and manageable, more concrete.
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Tenement house (monument A 086), Old Square 50, Poznań, photo: Wikimedia.org
Today, however, we are facing a difficult absence, one which seems to be even harder to tackle. How to remember the rivers that disappear and dry out, droughts caused by climate change making them less and less present? Due to lower rainfalls and higher temperatures, droughts are becoming more and more frequent across Europe – but how can this emergency be made into a monument? Such widespread irregularity in river levels is much more difficult to put on a plaque.
Written by Agata Tumiłowicz, Dec 2020