Warsaw April 16-19

After my three day stay in Riga, in the morning of Saturday April 16 I went to the airport for my 11:30 flight to Warsaw, which arrived at 12:15. Tomasz Walisewski and his wife Ewa met me. Tomasz had arranged for me to come to give some lectures about archaeology at the University of Warsaw. They had been at ACOR in Amman in the fall of 2010.

That first afternoon, they drove me around the city, before dropping me off at a university-run hotel.  The hotel was fine, except the building did not have internet available. Finding an internet place was to prove a challenge during my stay in Warsaw. That evening I walked around the city center.

The next day Sunday April 17 I walked around some more. I went to a sequence of shopping malls with the mission of finding a new pair of shoes. The glitzy Zlote Tarasy mall near the train station and the Arkadia mall to the north, and the others, were indistinguishable from shopping malls anywhere else in the world.

On Monday April 18 Tomasz took me to the historic royal castle where Anna, an archaeology student gave us a great tour. Tomasz and I then walked around, before going to the university.

The area around the royal palace and the university is especially attractive. It is an extended pedestrian area flanked by lovely buildings, so well rebuilt since the destruction of the Second World War that it is now a UNESCO world heritage site.

The Royal Castle

At the University I gave the first of my two public lectures at the Institute of Archaeology about The Christians in Palestine after the Muslim Conquest. Afterwards I had dinner with the head of the Near Eastern Archaeology program at the Institute, Jolanta Mlynarczyk, who has been working at the Byzantine site of Susita in Israel, Tomasz and other guests.

In Poland I several times had the drink known as Kvas, made from bread, which I had first come across in Latvia. The menu of the restaurant we went to translated Kvas as ‘bread acid’.

 The restaurant menu offering Bread Acid

The next day, Tuesday April 19, I went to the university, where a university archaeology student showed me around the campus.

The University of Warsaw campus

 Then Anna, the student from yesterday, took me to the National Museum, where Jolanta’s husband, who works in the Museum, showed me around the galleries devoted to the Polish excavations of the medieval Christian site of Faras in Sudan. Then I gave my second public lecture at the National Museum about The Archaeology of Early Christianity, The Jordanian Contribution. As a friendly gesture, the people in attendance signed a copy of my lecture announcement. I find Polish handwriting difficult to read, so I am unable to decipher many of the names. 

The names of the people who attended my public lecture