Poles revive ancient timber floating trade

Greek cities eke out resources

GASSY, Pologne, July 30, (Agencies): A group of Poles have assembled tree trunks into a long raft and are streaming down the country’s longest river, the Vistula, to revive the ancient tradition of timber floating.

Their day begins at dawn with a prayer — “When dawn breaks, the earth, the sea, all of nature praises you” — which captain Zdzislaw Nikolas sings in his bass voice while the whole crew stands around an image of their patron saint.

They sing it at night too like their ancestors, says Nikolas, who sports an impressive handlebar moustache.

“Saint Barbara was the patron of those with dangerous jobs, like miners and firefighters and also raftsmen, because that too was a dangerous job: there was a strong river current in the spring,” he adds.

For centuries, timber floating brought wealth to many villages along the Vistula and its tributaries. Men sent merchandise of all kinds but especially wood from the forests of southern Poland downstream to the Baltic port of Gdansk.

“As soon as the ice melted on the Vistula and the currents of the Vistula and the (tributary) San were flowing freely, raft makers got to work and sent the wood floating down to Gdansk,” Nikolas says while steering from the back.

“The whole village of Ulanow did this job and it was often a family affair passed down from father to son. It disappeared with the beginning of the war in 1939 when the German army’s bombs destroyed the bed of the Vistula river.”

After the war, timber floating was replaced by trucks and trains.

In 1991, Nikolas revived a brotherhood of Ulanow raftsmen who organised their first descent last year.

“Ours is the most extensive timber floating today in Europe... We do it out of passion, to revive this trade. Not for financial reasons,” he said.

The crew left Ulanow, a village in the southeast of Poland, on July 2 and floated down the San. They hope to do the 724 kilometres (450 miles) between their village and the Baltic in 29 days.

Two weeks in, they were docked on a beach in Gassy, a couple of kilometres from Warsaw.

Their raft is made up of four smaller ones assembled by tying together long planks of pinewood. It weighs 50 tonnes and is 70 metres (230 feet) long. The first and last rafts are used to steer.

This year the descent is happening as Poland under the government of Andrzej Duda celebrates “The Year of the Vistula”.

It is a very wild river that has known little development and dredging. Shallow in some areas, there are tree trunks hidden underwater that can jam a raft.

Back in the day the raftsmen put a whole lot at the mercy of the river, Nikolas said.

“Wood merchants would entrust their merchandise with the raftsman, who often risked losing everything he owned, his house, his wife and children — all of which he would bond,” he said.

Duda

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“Once the wood arrived in Gdansk, it was cut in saw mills and then exported throughout the world,” he added.

“It is even said that the whole city of Amsterdam was constructed with Polish wood, all of those beautiful houses, entire neighbourhoods of the port made with pine that grew in Poland. These pines were exported to make masts for sailboats in England and Norway.”

The raftsmen sleep in traditional thatched tents and cook meals on an ever-burning fire.

“Two weeks into the descent, almost all our supplies are gone,” says Zygmunt Osip, as he added cabbage to a big cooking pot.

He did last year’s descent and joined the crew again this year.

“I did everything to get time off work and for my wife to let me leave and I succeeded, I’m here,” he told AFP.

“For me this trip is as beautiful as first love.”

Tackling rising temperatures, turning empty Greek buildings into homes and better integrating migrants could help Athens deal with future shocks and stresses, according to a city official.

Athens, like Greece’s No. 2 city Thessaloniki, was also looking at ways to fund its resilience schemes and ensure that projects help vulnerable locals as well as the thousands of migrants that call it home, said resilience officer Eleni Myrivili.

The Greek cities have both signed up to a Rockefeller Foundation-backed, $164 million, 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) programme, which is designed to help urban areas better protect their populations from stresses and shocks.

“Resilience is absolutely the best fit for a city in economic crisis,” Lina Liakou, chief resilience officer for the northern port city of Thessaloniki, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“The basic concept of resilience thinking is with one stone you can kill many birds, and have multiple benefits and make the most of your resources — in our case, limited resources,” she said at a 100RC summit in New York.

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While the Greek economy is expected to grow by 2.1 percent this year, after seven years of economic crisis, the country has seen a collapse in living standards, thousands of businesses close and Europe’s largest rise in poverty.

More than 20 percent of people remain unemployed, with youth unemployment affecting up to one in two people.

“We’re seeing deeply set-in patterns of poverty now that are more difficult to deal with as time goes on, as it’s more systemic,” said Myrivili. She said a quarter of people were experiencing “energy poverty” and were unable to afford heating or cooling.

After being overshadowed for years by economic crisis, climate change was back on the agenda.

Densely-packed Athens is experiencing growing heat for the first time, exacerbated by haphazard urban planning and poorly maintained housing, Myrivili said.

“We have an incredible urban heat island... the difference between Athens and the surrounding municipalities can reach up to 6 or 10 degrees Celsius, which is a huge difference. We also know the heat waves are going to be more frequent,” she said.