Madonna Rocks Young Pilgrims
By Nora FitzGerald
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, August 14, 1999; Page C01
ZUZOWY—On his 12th day of walking
through aggressive sunshine and dramatic
rain, Marcin Karolczuk stares at the road
ahead. The 17-year-old high school student
from Bialystok is dressed like a typical
teenager in oversize shorts and a red
bandanna.
He says he is thinking of the Virgin Mother.
"There is something that attracts me to her,"
he says wistfully, still staring at the horizon.
"Something I cannot describe. All I can say is
my heart beats faster when I am near her."
Marcin is an August pilgrim, one of perhaps
250,000 people, about half of them youths,
who are walking from all over the country
and who will converge on an ancient
monastery in Czestochowa this weekend.
There they will drop to their knees before the
Black Madonna, a Byzantine painting of
Mary and the Christ child, a work of art so
sacred to many Poles that they speak of it as
an incarnation of Mary.
The pilgrimage to Czestochowa is the height
of the formal pilgrimage season, which runs
from April to October here, and an event that
has become increasing youthful. This country
is 90 percent Catholic and interest is
particularly high this year because of Pope
John Paul II's visit to his homeland last April.
If the old stereotype of the Polish pilgrim is a
world-weary prayerful grandmother, with her
boiled eggs, stale bread, rosary beads and
clucky demeanor, the new one might be a
ponytailed university student with a buoyant
step and a lollipop in her mouth. Young
people began participating in the pilgrimage
in large numbers during the early 1980s,
when the march became a form of resistance
against the Communist government (which
collapsed in 1989). More recently, teens
have joined for personal reasons. Several
teens interviewed this week said they
enjoyed the encouraging, warm atmosphere,
which differs markedly, they say, from the
rest of their life.
"There was a time when the pilgrimage was a
contrast to the controlling atmosphere of
communism," says Tomasz Wiscicki, a
Catholic journalist with the monthly Wiez
based in Warsaw. "Today, the contrast is the
competitive rat race. Everything has changed
here, nothing is stable. We are all learning
and parents are lost, too. Kids don't always
feel that feeling of safety that the pilgrimage
provides."
"This is my second march," says Kasia
Albowicz, a confident 17-year-old whose
tie-dyed T-shirt states "Coolest in the World"
in English. She speaks above the singing,
which translates, "It's so strange in the world/
Sometimes I don't know where I am."
"So many young people come here and I
heard from friends that it is a terrific time,"
she says. "We come because we want an
adventure and an answer to religious
questions."
Even in newly capitalist Poland, the
pilgrimage is a powerfully simple, penitential
and intimate happening. It begins for many at
4 a.m., and the day is grueling with
infrequent, short breaks.
But as the country has been transformed
over the centuries, from independent country
to occupied territory and back again, the
symbolism and nature of the tradition have
also changed. The largest of the pilgrimages
to the Jasna Gora monastery, where the
Black Madonna resides, commences in
Warsaw's Old Town. The first Warsaw
pilgrimage was in 1711 when a group of 20
men walked to thank the Madonna for the
end of the plague. (Her stock had already
risen when she was credited with the defeat
of the Swedish Army at Jasna Gora in the
mid-1600s.) Poles walked to her when there
was no Poland. They walked to her when
Germans turned their soil into the killing
stations of the Holocaust and when all other
public expressions of demonstration and
hope were banned by the Soviet system.
During communist times, the pilgrimage was
a showcase of religious devotion that was
outside the party's purview. The easy
intimacy of the pilgrims provided a stark
contrast to the fear and suspicion people
lived with every day.
"In 1963, the Communists warned about a
contagious disease being spread by the
pilgrims but people went anyway," recalls
Henryk Skibinski, 60, who is on his 38th
pilgrimage. "Villages were banned from
giving us water, bread or tea." Retired now,
the Warsaw resident looks forward all year
to the event, when he locks arms with old
friends and sings resistance songs from the
days of the Solidarity union.
As more and more people join along the way,
there are competing rumors as to who is
youngest or oldest, and who has walked the
most. Reliable numbers are also hard to come
by as people drop out and join the pilgrimage
along the way. Four-month-old Sebastian
Giera was carried or pushed in a stroller the
243 kilometers from Warsaw to
Czestochowa, but some said he was not the
youngest. One of the eldest marchers,
85-year-old Monika Karbowska, is on her
54th trek from Warsaw. "I had a heart attack
one year ago," she says, almost running at
the head of the Warsaw pack. "But the Holy
Mother has given me the strength to walk."
When the pilgrims reach Czestochowa, they
will walk down the center of the main street
that empties in front of Jasna Gora. Many
will get down on their knees inside the chapel
and slide awkwardly toward the painting.
The work itself, which is thought to date
from 14th-century Italy, is approximately 48
by 32 inches. They leave presents for the
Madonna--silver amulets, amber necklaces,
wooden crutches, rosary beads, so many that
the walls of the chapel are covered with the
gifts.
On some days, the standard 30 kilometers
can prove too much for some pilgrims.
Tuesday, one group of marchers, overcome
by heat exhaustion and pummeling rain, sat
dejected in tarp-covered trucks by the side of
the road. All planned to return to the march.
Others, like Anna Przewlodowa, a
19-year-old University of Warsaw student,
her thick hair pinned up against the humidity,
kept on. Trekking with the 12,000 or more
Warsaw pilgrims headed toward the small
village of Kolonia Stara earlier this week, she
spoke passionately of this, her second
pilgrimage: "It [can be] horrible, you're so
tired you can't feel the next step, maybe you
can't go on. Your ambition is to move beyond
these feelings. . . . And when you get to
Czestochowa and stand in front of this
special painting of Mother you know she's
not only a painting but much more. Later,
when they cover her [the painting is veiled
each evening], you feel something has been
covered for you as well. . . . But you take
something of her with you."
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