The horizontal part was also supplemented by an elongated gutter, a kind of a grave candle that was lit during the ceremony. Fire was an element often used by Hasior in his monumental projects. Here, he also made the monument a sacrificial altar.
However, it was the vertical part of the monument, its main accent, incorporated into the panorama of the Tatra Mountains, that was remembered the best and reproduced numerous times. It is the famous iron ‘Organ’ – a disciplined and architecturally clean construction. It consists of two vertical columns supporting a protruding horizontal beam and a slightly smaller ‘canopy’, all lined with long, geometric, triangular ‘spikes’. These ‘spikes’ were supposed to imitate the pipes of a musical instrument. It was planned to install real pipes into them, on which the wind would play, but this idea was not realised. A journalist writing for Tygodnik Powszechny in 1966 apparently let his imagination run loose by writing:
The wind blows into the organ flutes. It brings out sounds specially tuned into three minor-sounding chords. Hasior’s monument – an avant-garde work of art – plays for those fighting for a new reality.
Is modern and original form enough? ‘In Memory of the Faithful Sons of the Motherland Who Have Fallen in Podhale in the Struggle to Consolidate the People’s Power – People of Kraków on the 1000th anniversary of the Polish State 1966’ – such an inscription has been visible on the Czorsztyn monument for over 40 years. Who were the ‘faithful strugglers’? They are the ones who fought against the anti-communist partisans after the end of World War II. When in 2008 the discussion on the future of the monument started, Wojciech Czuchnowski wrote in Gazeta Wyborcza:
Let’s be clear: the monument was created to commemorate the officers of the Security Office, the Civic Militia and the Internal Security Corps, who perpetuated the people’s power by murdering and imprisoning those who were not in its favour. Since it was the aforementioned officers who – at the time of the monument’s creation – emerged victorious, the work by the great sculptor Władysław Hasior honoured their memory and not the memory of their victims.
That is why, after 1989, Hasior’s Organ succumbed to rust and graffiti, such as ‘a monument to the Jewish traitors of Poland’ or ‘a monument to the enslavement of the Polish nation’. When the local authorities decided to renovate the monument as a local tourist attraction, there were voices that it should rather be destroyed, or preferably replaced by another ‘papal cross’. But that did not happen. The monument was defended not only by artists but also by residents of nearby Kluszkowce. ‘At a village meeting, we decided that the monument stays, and, if necessary, we will defend it ourselves’, the village mayor supposedly told journalists. Eventually, the municipal council decided to take the middle road: the monument was renovated, the controversial inscription was removed and the name was officially changed to the neutral ‘Organ’, as it was commonly called. Shepherd’s bells were also hung on it so that they could ‘play’ when a stronger breeze came (which happens quite often).
Was the Organ really ideologically neutralised by an administrative resolution? The already quoted Tygodnik Powszechny from 1966 reads:
The proof of how successful this work is, is its acceptance not only by connoisseurs, but by the whole society, and above all by the inhabitants of the surrounding villages – where the memory of the fallen is still alive.
Today, Czuchnowski writes about the other fallen ones in Wyborcza:
There are still people in Podhale who have experienced the ‘consolidation of the people’s power’ on their own skin.
Hasior himself asked the authorities of Czorsztyn municipality to change the inscription on the monument already in 1993. Against the winds of history, the Organ is still standing and even playing.
Originally written in Polish by Karol Sienkiewicz, January 2012, translated into English by P. Grabowski, August 2020