REW010

Harvest crown in Kadlub Wolny, a small village in Opolskie County.
In many regions of Poland, harvest celebration begins with the weaving of a wreath in the form of a crown from the grain left on the field and decorated with bunches of rowan berries, nuts, flowers and ribbons. The festivals traditions are several centuries old and little has changed. It is a celebration of the farmers’ work and at the same time it has also become a religious festival, a thanksgiving to God and the Blessed Virgin Mary for the successful harvest of the crops.
The culminating point of the harvest festival is a harvest crowns competition. The main goal of the competition is to cultivate and document the tradition of regional ritual art related to the harvest season, as well as to increase the activity of cultural life in the countryside.

The photograph is part of the „How to Rejuvenate an Eagle” project appreciated by Aperture Foundation and Paris Photo in the Photo Book of the Year 2020 competition.

“We wanted to find out what people’s lives really look like, what they believe in, what unites them. In 2017, as a writer-photographer reporting team, with my wife Dyba Lach we set out to explore and understand our country, its complexity and ambiguity. We traveled 16 000 km in three years. In our journey we were looking for an answer to a question of what shapes Polish identity today. We faced Polish stereotypes rooted in the culture and everyday life. We talked to people, asked about what being a Pole means to them, what is the meaning of community, belonging and strangeness. We have observed that reality is much more complex than TV stories, Facebook feeds and common beliefs. We have also been trying to understand the concept of border, searching for the meaning of the term and trying to find out if it even truly matters in the joined-up world of today, in a member country of the European Union. Because of Polish history, we are very familiar with this term. Borders were changed throughout the ages, the most acute changes appeared in 19th and 20th centuries, because of international agreements, wars, partitions. Today, to the borders we have already known, a new one, tangible, has been added – 1.5 meter sanitary rigor. It appeared just when our journey was coming to an end. Over the three years of our work we found out that borders are quite easy to determine, but very hard to get rid of. They last for many years, remain even after such tragic events as II World War, Holocaust, resettlement, Communism. We realised Poland is a patchwork of societies, religions, nationalities, views, a collection of tribes. For hundreds of years, Poland was an open, diverse, multi-faith country, a mixture of cultures. This has not changed.It is something we need to be reminded of. Yet it seems quite difficult with the society trapped in time.’’

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