Long Ago Amidst the Snow: The History of Skiing in Poland
The first Polish skis? Two boards – one ash wood, the other beech – thin like a school ruler, tied onto the feet with rope. But the enthusiasm for these ‘swift boards’ and ‘travelling by ski’ soon spread like wildfire.
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The Carpathian skier waits for the snow,
He waits because he wants to go wild,
The snow has fallen and the skier’s already on his way,
He’s off, flying like an arrow through the air.
With this poem, Józef Schnaider, a forester and ethnographer from Tatarów in the Huculszczyzna region, opened the first Polish skiing textbook – published in 1898 in Kraków. He wrote it at a time when the sight of a person walking with skis under his arms still generated ‘a buzz of amazement amongst people on the street’.
The first winter sport to arrive on the banks of the River Wisła was ice skating. Trips to the city ice rinks during the last three decades of the 19th century were considered socially admirable (‘de bon ton’). In a column he wrote in 1877, Bolesław Prus mentions ice skating as the favourite winter pastime of Warsaw’s young people, save only for the city’s carnival balls. Tygodnik Powszechny (The Illustrated Weekly) reported in 1893 that:
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Today in Warsaw, anyone who believes in God ice skates. No! Even the confirmed atheists do it. Some sort of madness or mania has overtaken the male and female population of our town and it draws them to it.
Skiing still had a while to wait, but already by the early decades of the 20th century, the fashion for ‘ski’ – as it was called back then – overtook all other winter sports. Stanisław Barabasz, who is credited with the first attempts at skiing in Polish history, recalled the pioneering period:
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No one here had yet heard about skis in the sense we use the term. They had heard from those returning from Siberian exile about ‘skis’ in the sense of runners on sleighs pulled by reindeer, and about ‘skates’ on which Siberians would hunt in the snow; someone might have heard of the ‘skis’ on which the Norwegians were supposed to do amazing flying feats, it was said, like birds through the air. I was extremely interested in those instruments: what did they look like? I wanted at least to see a drawing, but it wasn’t clear enough for me to construct actual skis. I asked my friends about them, until I finally found one who had read something about them, but he didn’t remember the details – he just remembered that with ‘skis’, you could compete in flight with the birds. I couldn’t wrap my head around that, but it made me all the more eager to acquire those mysterious objects. This obsession lasted for a few years. Then I met Dr J., a Siberian returnee, who described to me skates used by the Yakut people, but I couldn’t find out anything more from him about this equipment which supposedly enabled one to travel at an extraordinary pace across frozen terrain.
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Skiers skiing with a sail attached on a frozen lake, shelter building visible in the background, Dolina Pięć Stawów, 1938, photo: audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)
In 1888, Barabasz designed his own skis, based solely on accounts he had heard. What did these probably very first Polish skis look like?
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I found two boards, one of ash wood, the other beech. […] A barrel-maker shaved them down, but he made them so thin that they looked like they could be used as a ruler on a school blackboard, and they were of an even thickness along their whole length. The sharpened tips were steamed in hot water and then bent upwards over a fire. […] Now there remained attaching them to my feet. But how and with what? Obviously, rope had to do the job for the time being.
‘Skije’ & dragons in the Tatras
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Participants in a skiing course on the slope at Kasprowy Wierch, 1937, photo: audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)
Zakopane enjoyed broad popularity amongst tourists starting in the 1870s, but in those days, people only came there for the summer. Let’s hear once again from Stanisław Barabasz, who came to Zakopane in 1901 to take up the post of director of the Lumber Industry Trade School:
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I began organising tours of the mountains; the Tatras at the time were just beginning to reveal to us their hitherto zealously guarded treasures, and participants in those outings, enchanted by the natural beauty of winter, upon their return home could not adequately express the wonders they had witnessed in the mountains. By then, the growth and future of skiing in Poland was already assured. In those days, I would teach anyone who wanted about the mountains, but only on the condition that at least one individual in the group would commit himself to the sport and actually learn to ski. In those days, the mountains were empty in the wintertime, especially when heavy snows had fallen. Sometimes you might see the tracks of a forest ranger who was patrolling his sector, but only along the edges of the forests and in the valleys. No one would actually go up into the mountains: whatever for? To die there?
In 1907, Barabasz was among the founders of the Zakopane Branch of the Tatra Ski Society. Other than him, the organisers of that enterprise included figures such as Mariusz Zaruski, who also initiated the creation of TOPR [the Tatra Volunteer Rescue Squad], or one of the most important musical composers of the era, who was also a mountaineering enthusiast: Mieczysław Karłowicz.
The first-ever skiing course organised by the Zakopane Branch of the Ski Society was held in late December 1907 and early January 1908, and it drew 67 participants: 55 men and 12 women. Famous mountain guides, such as Klimek Bachleda, were quick to hop onto skis as well.
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The mountain folks called skis ‘skije’ from the word ‘ski’, and they called us ‘spuscoce’, meaning those who descend from above. Skiers are mulling over how to translate skiing terms into Polish. Other than popularising the word ‘narty’ for skis, they are also suggesting other words, e.g. proposing Polish alternatives for the Norwegian word ‘slalom’ such as ‘wąż’ [snake] or ‘smok’ [dragon].
A similar organisation, the Carpathian Ski Society, was established in 1907 in Lwów [Lviv today]. One of its organisers, Roman Kordys, wrote that, in contrast to Zakopane – which already held a secure position on the tourist map – skiing actually led to the ‘discovery’ of the Eastern Carpathians in the wintertime:
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The beginning of winter tourism in all of the Polish mountains other than the Tatras corresponds to the beginning of skiing in Poland. Maybe – sometime before people had been taught to ride the ‘swift boards’ – someone might have ventured out as the first light cover of snowflakes dusted the summits of the Carpathians and tried to climb some peak in ‘summer fashion’. Maybe someone even did it in actual wintertime, when the snow after a thaw had become coated with frost, forming a hard shell – but any such cases – certainly entirely exceptional if they occurred at all – have not been recorded by any chronicler, and we know nothing of them, even from word of mouth.
Meanwhile, the enthusiasm for the ‘swift boards’ spread rapidly. In 1913, when Polish skiing was only a dozen or so years old, Barabasz wrote:
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Winter sports these days are highly developed and quite fashionable, and anyone who doesn’t take part in them or at least pretend to be a winter sportsman is seen as somehow being behind the curve. I see people who don’t ski or ride sleighs and who are nonetheless dressed in ski apparel, gloves, a cap with a ski club logo, and a sweater, and they’re wandering around Zakopane or sitting around for hours in ski cafés.
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A skier during a jump, photo: Biblioteka Narodowa / Polona.pl
This phenomenon was described by Rafał Malczewski, one of the most ‘Zakopanesque’ of Zakopane’s cultural figures (and, of course, a skier), in his memoirs entitled Pępek Świata (Centre of the Universe):
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At a certain moment, there was an epiphany: the Zakopane winter was discovered. There began a ski mania with people rolling about in snowdrifts, freezing themselves to the bone in the chalets and on the peaks and warming themselves up any way they could – whether with an oven, a shot of hooch, a warm, naked body or two, or by dancing.
According to Malczewski, skis would be seen on ‘anyone who could stand on two feet: flabby women, old men, young people, military men, literati, publishers of dailies and weeklies’.
After the First World War in new Poland, the fad of skiing kept growing rapidly. Other than amateur skiing, skiing also went professional as a sporting discipline. In 1919, the Polish Ski Union was formed. At the outset, the Lwów [now Lviv] club was paramount above all others. The Czarni Lwów (Lwów Blacks) had organised their first skiing competition as early as 1907. Ski jumps were erected in Sławsk in the Eastern Bieszczady Mountains, in Zakopane at Kalatówki, and in Worochta. There was also Zakopane’s Wielka Krokiew slope, designed by the artist Karol Stryjeński.
Ski jumping excited a lot of strong emotions even more than 70 years prior to the phenomenon known as ‘Małyszomania’ [Adam Małysz being Poland’s wonderfully popular star ski jumper in the years 1995-2011]. That much is clear from this vivid description of Bronisław Czech’s jump during the 1928 competition in Zakopane, published in the magazine Świat (The World):
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The birdmen fly through the air, floating over the treetops as if made weightless by the touch of a magic wand. Down below, crowds of ant-sized people move about in waves; there is shouting and applause. Then, utter silence. Bronek Czech is about to jump! A tiny, dark dot breaks away high above and rushes downward with dizzying speed along the snow slope. He approaches the edge, crouching, and suddenly bounces up high like a ball and takes off into space! The air is electric. He leans nearly flat onto his skis and, with his arms outstretched behind him like the wings of an eagle, he swoops downward! The announcement rings out: Sixty-one metres, a new Polish record!!!
The breakthrough moment in the history of sport in the Tatras was the World Classical Skiing Championships, which took place in Zakopane in 1929. This event would return to the Giewont Mountain once again 10 years later, just seven months before the outbreak of World War II.
During the Interwar period, Zakopane’s rival for the title of winter sport capital of Poland was Worochta (now in Ukraine). Alongside Jaremcza, Worochta was the most popular winter vacation site in the Eastern Carpathians during the Second Republic. In 1922, a ski jump was erected in Worochta’s spa community, located on the boundary between Gorgany and Czarnohora, and the Polish ski championships were held there a number of times. In the first of the competitions held that year, Elżbieta Michalewska-Ziętkiewiczowa competed alongside the men: she was one of the world’s first women ski jumpers. She earned her way onto the podium, taking third place.
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Bronisław Czech (at left) & Stanisław Marusarz during training, 1935, photo: audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)
While some were great fans of the sport, others were less enthusiastic. The writer Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, or Wikacy – himself an enthusiastic skier – viewed this craze of excitement over other people’s sport achievements as yet another proof of the ‘general state of mental decline’ of his contemporaries. He expressed this view in his novel Farewell to Autumn:
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Nowadays, sport kills everything and replaces even art, which is ever more in decay. I like skis myself, but I can’t tolerate it when you athletes are made into the greatest heroes of our nations, and when your idiotic records take up so much space in the papers, when there’s no space to be had for serious artistic criticism [...]
Witkacy had been bitten by the ski bug early on, as we see his father writing to him in a 1906 letter: ‘The snow is perfect for skiing; a shame you’re not here’.
Further testimony to the popularity of skiing at the time can be found in some of the autobiographical passages of Magdalena Samozwaniec’s tale ‘Maria and Magdalena’. She remembers the heroic times of her joyful amateur skiing on the slopes: ‘There weren’t any [skiing] courses yet back then, and everyone skied as he or she pleased: some crouched into a ball, others leaned to one side, braking their descent with a tall pole or later with two poles held in one hand. There was a fashion for strength.‘
Another writer associated with Zakopane, Kornel Makuszyński, set up a fundraising campaign to buy skis for children of poor families living in the mountains. He managed to purchase 1,000 sets, and surely more than one future athlete used those skis to master the sport. In 1930, the first Kornel Makuszyński Cup competition was held in Zakopane.
Ski trains … & ‘a cure for your spleen’?
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Participants in the Wisła-Worochta ski rally, 1937, photo: audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)
At the start of the 1930s, the Polish State Railways, together with the Kraków Society for the Promotion of Skiing, initiated special ski trains. They contained restaurant cars, dancing cars and a cinema car. They have become an integral element of the lore of the Second Polish Republic, the Interwar period.
The train travelled at night, and it stopped each day in one of the popular ski-resort towns. Over 10 days and nights, it would cover 1,200 kilometres. Along the route, there were 10 towns: Lwów-Worochta-Sławsko-Truskawiec-Sianki-Krynica-Rabka-Zakopane-Zwardoń-Wisła. This attraction was available once a year. A ticket cost the princely sum of 200zł. It wasn’t cheap fun: that amount was equivalent to the average monthly salary of a schoolteacher or a skilled labourer. For the sake of comparison, other than the monthly support of a family, the same sum could buy you a brand-new, top-of-the-line radio receiver or four airplane flights between Warsaw and Lwów [today’s Lviv]. In the ‘Cyrulik Warszawski’ theatre, the Dana Choir would sing: ‘This is quite a sensation/A cure for your spleen/An epochal innovation/Express, bridge, skiing!‘
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Skiing competition in Zakopane, 1933, photo: audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)
Ski motifs were not lacking in the pop culture of that period. Mieczysław Fogg sang a foxtrot called Narty, Narty (Skis, Skis) to lyrics by Władysław Szlengel, and the Juranda Choir performed the perky hit March of the Skiers. This latter song was written for the film Spring of the Skiers (1934), a short film about a band of skiers combing through the mountains in search of a runaway ski. A galaxy of sport stars appeared in the film: Stanisław Marusarz, Bronisław Czech and Zdzisław Motyka. The film was directed by Adam Krzeptowski, a director who loved the Tatras. In the 1930s, he also directed other films featuring skiers: Biały Śład (A Trace of White; 1932) and Zamarłe Echa (Dead Echoes, 1934).
Polish history has seen more than one president or author – or even a pope – take to skis, and ski jumping is the second more beloved national sport in Poland (after football). Still, Polish culture has not yet seen a major work dedicated to skiing themes. We don’t have our own Ota Pavel [a Czech journalist and author], who took his ski reporting – originally produced for sport journals – and turned it into literature of the highest order. Let us conclude on a cheerier note, with a verse from one of the first ski songs from the turn of the century:
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This world is worth much after all
Because it has skis in it...
Originally written in Polish, translated by Yale Reisner
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