Torun

In the country of too many churches and John Paul the Pope, I took a three hour train from Warsaw to Torun to make one pilgrimage only: to the home of Mikolaj Kopernik.  A middle-aged lady was sitting across from me in the train, reading the paper over a cup of tea.  After a while, she took out her laptop and started working on it.  A scene I had not seen very often here.  She was entering some data from the daily paper into her computer.  When I needed a translator to talk with the conductor, she came to my rescue and we started talking after that.  Her English was very well.  I could tell she was highly educated and not an average Polish woman.  I learned that she worked in European Union and her job was to coach and consult entrepreneurs and businesses so that their businesses flourish and succeed.  She showed me a chart in the newspaper that had plotted PKBs of different countries.  "Do you know what it is (PKB)?", she asked.  "No", I responded.  It was the Polish abbreviation for Gross Domestic Product or GDP.  Poland was listed towards the end of that table and U.S. was ranked third.  "We are like a sleeping country", she said.  I nodded.  Maybe that is what the silence was, they were a sleeping country.  "At least you have made it to the list, there are many countries that are not in that table", I commented.  She mentioned that now EU is working hard so that Poland's economy booms because their economic condition affects that of the Europe.  She was being paid 600 zeloty per hour for her coaching classes, that is a little less than $200!  "That is a lot of money in Poland", she told me.  "That is a lot of money in the U.S. too", I responded surprisingly.

"Why Torun?", she asked me.  "Because of Nicholas Copernicus", I said.  "Then we take the taxi together, it is close to my office", she offered and I agreed.*  We had to cross the Vistula river.  The view of Torun from the other side of the river was breathtaking. "It is the most beautiful view in Poland", my new friend claimed. We soon arrived in the downtown area.  She did not let me pay.  We came out and she showed me her office.  It was called "Excellence Counseling".  "I am in the second floor", she said.  She gave me her phone number and asked me to call her if I had any problems.  She regretted that she had to teach a class otherwise she would show Torun to me.  She led the way to take me to my destination.  "I do not want to take your time, thanks for all your help thus far", I told her. "No, no", she laughed.  Literally two doors down the alley, we stopped.  She faced the house and presented to me "this is Copernicus house". 

Wow! I could not believe it, "You are neighbors with Nicholas Copernicus!".  How nice and odd it was to sit in front of her in the train who not only spoke good English but was so kind and was also going exactly to where I wanted to go.  I thanked her and we departed.  I could not wait to enter the Kopernika Dom. Kopernika's Dom was large by today's standards.  He was from a well-off family.  He was not just an astronomer.  He had studied medicine, bought and sold properties, and wrote on economics as well.  He had translated poems from Greek to Latin.  There were hand-written recipes of different dishes written on pages of some of his books.  He was a well-rounded man, living a good life.  There were tools by which he had measured the distance of the moon from earth and its position, tools for determining sun's position, etc.  I did not learn about his personal life.  Did he ever marry and had kids? I have to find out.  Rumor has it that he also was a priest and for this reason he did not marry.  Being a priest did not mean just being religious in ancient Poland, rather belonging to a highly educated class of people and having access to more opportunities.  Some disagree with this claim that he was a priest and say the mistake initiated when Galileo first referred to him as such in a letter.  I did not see anything approving this claim in his Dom, and honestly I find it hard to believe, or rather prefer to think he was not a priest.  There was a letter signed by Chopin framed on a wall.  It was in Polish.  I pleaded to one of the guides to tell me what it was about.  With his broken English he told me it was a letter Chopin had written to his friends about his visit to Torun, about Kopernika, and about the ginger bread that is famous in Torun.  It has a secret recipe that has been passed through generations.

There were thick copies of Kopernika's book there, including his famous De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) that changed our view of the solar system and our position in it.  There was Galileo's dissertation proving Copernicus observations and claims.  There were records of the houses Kopernika had bought and sold.  His admission letter to a university in Krakow.  There was also his doctorate degree, and the surprising part was that it was smaller than any other document there.  Family trees and records, property records, etc were all written on long nice papers with a sense of formality.  The doctorate diploma was on a very small piece of paper that seemed to have been cut from a larger paper. Did it mean ownership of properties and family heritage were considered more significant than having a high degree?   That would not surprise me as there are many who belong to this school of thought even in our era.

Torun was happy and lively, yet calm and peaceful.  Music was being played in down town area around Kopernika's statue, where different groups of school students would come and go to take pictures with.  There were many pigeons being fed by tourists.  Small kids would run after them and play with them.

There was another famous ancient building with nice design in Torun called the Star building.  I knew there was a museum inside it.  I assumed it had to do something with astronomy, Kopernika, or Torun.  I went inside and to my surprise it was an oriental museum with ancient things from China and Mongolia.  I was surprised to see things from that part of the world there.  An old world traveler/dealer had apparently brought them to Torun.  I made a quick round and as I was leaving, the lady who worked there pointed to me that there is also a basement.  Trying to be polite, I went down.  Then, I saw battle tools from Persia, helmets,  axes, and shields were titled with their Persian names "Kolachood", "Tabar", and "Separ".  That was the last thing I expected to see there, who would have thought?  Behind every door a world of mysteries and surprises is hidden, and one won't know about them until s/he opens the doors and step in. 

Finally, I found myself at the bank of the Vistula river with beautiful flowers.  A perfect place to sit and reflect on my journey and to relax.

* Later I was blamed for being so naive and sharing a ride with a stranger, and that I could have been kidnapped by my daring Iranian family.  The fact that it was an official 'Taxi' did not convince them either, it could have all been a set up.  I was quickly shut up before I could start to tell the story of who I met and how nice she was and what she did for a living.  They never heard my story, and probably many more ones.  How easy it is to close our eyes and hearts and miss out on so many things because we let fear take over.  Funny part is I always considered myself too cautious and never bold. Is it that no matter how capable we Iranian women become, our compatriats rather think of us as naive and gullible ones rather than worldy, capable, and sociable ones?