A profound sense of home
Timothy O'Grady on Toruń's ul. Słowackiego, his favourite street in the world
Nearly all my streets have been named for lords. Fitzwilliam in Dublin and Bolingbroke, Mildmay and Grafton in London. Even Claremont, where I grew up in democratic, republican Chicago, has a n ring. I lived in Miracle Street in Valencia. Now I live in ul. Słowackiego in Toruń, named for a poet. It’s my favourite street in the world.
The poet was Juliusz Słowacki, a mystic, a patriotic insurrectionist and one of the Three Bards of Polish romantic literature, the others being Adam Mickiewicz and Zygmunt Krasiński, who gave their names to the parallel streets to the south. I live in a webbing of poets. Słowacki looked like Errol Flynn, resented Mickiewicz and possibly had a love affair with Krasiński. During their lifetimes, Poland did not exist, except as an idea. It’s had the misfortune of being the innocent placed between two ravening imperialisms and Toruń was just within the German side of the border with the Russians. Słowackiego was Ohmstrasse then. Ghostly German signage can still be seen over doors. Polish poets could not yet give their names to streets.
Słowackiego runs east and west for 2.1 kilometres. At the eastern end is a small park leading to the Old Town, on the shore of the Vistula. It looks much as it did when Copernicus was born there in 1473. Summer sunsets blaze at the western end.
I’m not often to the west of where we live. It’s mostly repetitive blocks in peach, yellow and pale green and a complex where children learn gymnastics. I get my hair cut at the foot of one of the blocks. I’m the only male customer. I wait until women in plastic ponchos and curlers are attended to and then take my seat. The hairdresser and I don’t share a language. I watch her in the mirror as she smiles deprecatingly and snips, as she might at a 10-year-old.
For me, Słowackiego starts at Sienkiewicza, named for Henryk Sienkiewicz, Nobel Prize winner and author of Quo Vadis. Here is the tram depot and the beginning of the magnificent maples that run to the eastern terminus. It’s a street of residences, serene, cobbled and gently lit. You see old soldiers with walking sticks and berets, professionals, artisans, retired priests, students and their professors, boys with shaven heads and expressions like ferrets, terminal drunks, ladies with fur collars and little dogs that seem to belong to Paris, all watched over by women in cardigans who pass hours leaning on pillows and looking down at the world from their windows.
The tram depot seems frozen in time, the lathes and vices looking like they were made in the 1930s, as do their operators with their overalls and giant moustaches. In the windows are dainty white curtains. The road rises gently past a dance studio and stately old blocks with beamed ceilings in the huge rooms and the kinds of ceramic stoves slept on by uncles in Russian novels. At the crest of the hill is a row of mansions. One looks like it could be in Provence, another like the setting for a Chekhov play. The rendering of the Villa Irena is crumbling. An old man who looks like a king on a banknote tends to his tulips and roses, bare-chested in the summer. The sun lights up the facades. The grandest of all is the home for retired priests, its own park beside it where they can stay cool in the pines.
The road slopes down again into a long line of Soviet-era blocks made bearable by the maples and a few outposts of commerce – cakes, bicycle repairs, lawyers and a diving centre with oxygen tanks and an ancient globular metal diving helmet in the window. At the eastern end is the city library, with a statue of Polish lexicographer Samuel Linde amid the flowers.
I came here 18 years ago to live with my wife in a long, low building beside the tram depot that was once a stables. Now it’s like a row of cottages, each painted a different colour like in an Irish village. Prussians and Nazis and Soviet apparatchiks have had their day here, but Poles endured and now the streets are theirs. I’d walk along Słowackiego any time, to look at the buildings and the faces. It’s an entertainment. I admire the realism in the faces, the way a thought or humour breaks on them, the hominess, modesty, canniness, ease and absence of the performative. They seem to know who they are. Then I turn towards home and the anticipation rises. There’s a profound sense of home in Poland. The intimately domestic. Soft light, wood and lace and rose-hip branches. Nothing has felt quite as much like home as the one I am writing this message from in ul. Słowackiego.
Timothy O'Grady's novel Monaghan will be published by Unbound in June 2025 and is currently available to pre-order.
Timothy also joined Patrick Galbraith to talk about his creative process, deciding the rhythm of sentence length, and feeling comfortable with both fiction and non-fiction, on Tell Me How You Write — a podcast exclusive to paid Boundless subscribers