The text is published as the first in a series prepared on the occasion of the Czesław Miłosz Year (2024). In subsequent papers, we will present individual objects related to Miłosz that are located outside the country.

Poet, essayist, translator, philosopher and literary historian. In the early 1950s, he made the decision to emigrate. Since then, his work in Poland has been absent and published only occasionally. The breakthrough came only after 1980, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The poet spent his childhood and youth in Lithuania. He often said that he was the last citizen of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania belonging to Polish culture and language. In his works, he repeatedly returned to the magical atmosphere of the beautiful Samogitian countryside. The most famous work devoted to children's memories is the novel "Dolina Issy"

. Szetejnie - Memories of a manor house on the Nayvėžis River
Czeslaw Milosz was born in Szetejnie on the Nevėžis River, in the very centre of Lithuania, on the border between Samogitia and Aukštaitija, on 30 June 1911, as the first-born son of Aleksander Milosz and Veronika née Kunat. Szetejnie was a manor estate that had belonged to the Syruci family since the mid-18th century - from which the poet's grandmother on his mother's side, Józefa Kunat of Syruci originated. If it was a hot summer at the time, there was probably a smell of mown meadows outside. The formerly luscious grasses and field flowers were drying, laid down with the sweeping cuts of the scythe. Here is how the poet remembered from his childhood the appearance of his grandparents' manor house, where he lived until 1913, and which he later - already during his studies in Vilnius - visited during summer holidays:

"The manor was made of brick. Or - made of wood, but walled [...]. A porch with columns [...]. First there was a vestibule [...]. Then one went inside - this was the hallway proper. To the right was the living room; or rather two so-called salons. [...] A piano stood there, there was furniture covered with covers [...]. One was a salon and the other was a drawing room, in what I think was the Empire style. [...] To the left you entered the dining room, where there was that oilcloth sofa that I wrote about in 'The Issa Valley'. [...] It was a dining room, impossible to live in during the winter, locked. [...] Further on, behind this dining room, there was a quasi-guest room [...], and then a room with a library."
[Source: Fiut A., "Rozmowy z Czesławem Miłoszem"]

The village of Szetejnie consists of only a few houses, with buildings stretching parallel to the road towards Kiejdan. Little remains of the family estate of the poet's grandparents. In the 1960s, the manor house was demolished and the area of the former estate was turned into a kolkhoz. The renovated granary, the only remaining building of the manor house, was opened in 1999. The Czesław Miłosz Cultural Centre was opened in 1999. Distinctive wooden signposts direct visitors to the former Milosz manor from the main road. A number of wooden sculptures were erected in the former manor park, referring to various places and episodes described in the novel "Dolina Issy".

Baptism in Opitołoki or in Świętobrości?
Five kilometres from Shetejn is the village of Opitołoki, once a Samogitian town with a manor, farm and church. Czeslaw Milosz believed for many years that he was baptised in this church. In his poem "Where the Sun Rises and Where it Sets", he depicted this in brief words: "I was baptised, I renounced the devil in the Opitołoki parish of the Kiejdan district". Meanwhile, when in 1992 the Nobel laureate visited his homeland for the first time in 52 years, he found out that he had been baptised in the Svitobostrada branch church belonging to the same parish. In turn, Miłosz's parents were married in the church in Opitołki. This event, which took place in 1909, is recalled in his memoirs by Aleksander Burhardt, who was a participant:

"[...] The party, of course, lasted all night, until dawn. A pretty good Jewish orchestra from Kiejdan played waltzes, contredanse, mazurkas, polkas, węgierki and krakowiakas, and we danced till we broke a sweat, changing stiff collars every hour, drinking buckets of light crumble, wonderful bread and lemon acid [...]. I remember that the wedding was officiated by the local parish priest, half-Lithuanian, speaking poor Polish. During the wedding dinner he took the floor and, in a pathetic tone, proposed a toast in honour of the bride and groom [...]."

The Baroque church of Peter and Paul was founded in 1635 by Piotr Szuksztyn, a Samogitian judge. Renovated at the beginning of the 20th century, the three-nave church is characterised by a soaring, four-storey tower with a decorative cupola. In the church cemetery there are numerous tombstones of local landowners, the oldest ones dating back to the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. A few hundred metres from the church to the east is a Neo-Renaissance palace of the last owners of the local estate, the Zabiełłoło family. It was rebuilt around 1900 as a result of a reconstruction of the previous residence, carried out by Karol Zabiełło, the last heir of Opitołek.

Kėdainiai - the town of the Radzivills and Miłosz
. Kėdainiai is a town with a population of 30,000 today, and was the administrative and commercial centre of the region in Miłosz's time. People used to go to Jewish shops here for paraffin, soap and herrings. In one of his works, the future writer mentions that he used to look at the distant towers of the Kėdainiai parish church from the upper windows of the świrna (the old term for granary). This oldest temple of the city - the Gothic St George's Church from 1403. - rises on a high mountain on the opposite bank of the Nevėžis River. The interior contains, among other things, statues of Saints Casimir and Stanislav, relocated from the church in Opitolki. The town also boasts a magnificent 17th century Calvinist Renaissance church, where the mortal remains of the Radziwiłł princes are buried. In the crypt under the altar in tin sarcophagi lie successively: Krzysztof Piorun Radziwiłł, Janusz Radziwiłł and Janusz's siblings who died in childhood: Stefan, Jerzy, Elżbieta and Mikołaj.

The city authorities commemorated Czesław Miłosz by naming one of the streets running along the waterfront after him. The Regional Museum has an exhibition dedicated to the poet, and while he was still alive, he was awarded the title of honorary citizen of Kėdain in 1990. A metal chair - Milošofonas - commemorating Milosz was also placed by the river.

The old urban layout of the old town dating back to the 17th century is quite well preserved. Admittedly, there is virtually no trace of the Radziwiłł Castle, not even the Czapski Palace, which was built on its foundations. However, four of the city's old market squares have survived. The oldest of these is the Old Market, where the houses of the old Scottish craftsmen with their characteristic gables stand. In the centre, a monument has been erected to commemorate the conclusion of the Kėdainiai Agreement in 1655. In another of the city's squares - the Jewish Market - the buildings of two synagogues have been preserved. An architectural gem of Kėdainiai is the wooden Baroque Church of St. Joseph from the early 18th century.

Niewiaža Valley - Issa Valley
It is easy to find similarities between the mythologised literary valley of the Issa River and the real Nezvėžis Valley. The river still flows as sleepily here as it did a hundred years ago, at the time when young Czesław stayed here. One of the episodes described in the novel is the one concerning the story of the sinner Magdalena. Her prototype was the real-life figure of Barbara Rybaczewska, a young priest's housekeeper from Swietobrość (where the poet was baptised). The parishioners were convinced that the housekeeper and the priest were linked by a sinful love. It ended with the girl's suicide. The event took place in 1920. She was buried by the priest in a Catholic manner and rested at the edge of the cemetery, but after her death she gave no peace to those who slandered her. She troubled people so much in her nightly dreams that they began to think she was a ghost and decided to dig up her corpse, pierce her breast with a large aspen stake and bury her again. Apparently she never haunted again.

Near the Milosz Museum in Szetejnie, among the trees, stands a wooden sculpture of one of the most tragic characters in the Issa Valley - Magdalena alias Barbara, by Algimantas Sakalauskas.

Vilnius by Milosz
"[...] Vilnius cannot be eliminated from the history of Polish culture, and this is because of Mickiewicz, because of the Philomaths, Słowacki, Piłsudzki. [...]". This is what Czesław Miłosz wrote in one of his letters while already in exile.

The poet's Vilnius period was marked by his education at the 1st King Sigismund Augustus State Male Gymnasium (1921-1929) and studies at the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences at the Stefan Batory University (1929-1934) ( read more ). Miłosz's important Vilnius address was also Podógórna 5, where his family lived and where he himself lived during his secondary school education, as well as Arsenalska 6, where, as he recalled years later, he felt at home with his other relatives. After graduation, Czesław Miłosz took up a job at a Polish Radio station in Vilnius, but was eventually expelled from the editorial office in 1937 for his "leftist views" and soon left the city, moving to Warsaw. Descriptions of Vilnius in the poet's work are often contradictory. The fact that the city - formerly a magnificent Baroque capital - was a neglected province at the time. In 1933, as a student, Miłosz wrote an essay for the young writers' magazine Żagary - literary meetings were held in Konrad's Cell on the grounds of the Basilian monastery ( read more and a note and Konrad' s Cell ). He wrote, among other things, as follows: "Vilnius, a beautiful and bleak northern city. Through the window you can see paved roads, puddles and piles of manure. Further away - a chipped wall and wooden fences. In the city centre, dogs gnaw at each other in the middle of the street and no car can scare them away. Poor capital!" yet in another piece years later he recalls: "The city was beloved and happy, always in June peonies and late lilacs, climbing baroque towers towards the sky".

In Vilnius, Miłosz lived for a time in a house at 1 Ludwisarska Street. The Nobel Prize winner is commemorated in the southern part of the Old Town near the reconstructed city walls. A descent of 60 stone steps between the two Vilnius streets of Maironio (formerly St Anne's Street) and Bokšto (Polish: Baszta) was named Milosz Stairs, which was unveiled in autumn 2016. Quotes, in Polish and Lithuanian, from the poet's work were carved on some of the steps. In 1936, Czesław Miłosz rented a room in a house on Literary Alley. One entered the house through a heavy oak gate studded with metal buttons (which no longer exists) and continued to the right through a staircase to the first floor. On the wall is a kind of graffiti gallery of artists associated with Vilnius - the so-called Writers' Wall. Among the many plaques (from the Poles there are also Mickiewicz, Słowacki, Kraszewski and Gałczyński), there is also the one dedicated to Miłosz.

A granite plaque commemorating the famous alumnus is also located at Stefan Batory University (now Vilnius University). Miłosz took up studies in Polish philology, but after two weeks he transferred to law, from which he received his degree. Asked many times later why he changed his field of study, he never gave a clear answer. His biographers speculate that it may have been because of his youthful love for a certain Jadwiga (a law student)... During his studies, he lived in a dormitory designed by Aleksander Kodelski ( read more ), located vis-à-vis the secondary school he had attended. In his "Dictionary of the Vilnius Streets", Czesław Miłosz also mentions other places that were important to him: Portowa Street, which he used to go to the gymnasium, St George's Church, the editorial office of "Słowo" at the junction of Zamkowa and Królewska Streets, Rudnicki's café, Sora Kłok's shop on Niemiecka Street, as well as the Vilnia River meandering along Antokol, his place of Sunday rest, St George's Church. In the poem "City without a Name", he evokes the churches of St Peter and St Paul and St Casimir, and in another poem, published in Paris in 1985, also the bells of other Vilnius churches:

" And then the bells. At St John's,
At St. Bernardine's, at St. Casimir's,
And at the Cathedral and at the Missionaries,
At St George's, at the Dominicans,
At St. Nicholas', at St. James'.
Lots of bells. As if hands pulling the strings
A solemn edifice over the city built"

There are more places in Vilnius recalled by Miłosz, but it is not the place, but the figure of the dragon of Vilnius that needs to be recalled, just as Miłosz recalled him - the basilisk from under Bakszta, followed by a great procession through the city.

Druja and Przydrujsk - Miłosz family in Polish Inflants
We will end the story of the Polish Nobel laureate in the Latvian-Belarusian borderland, in the former Polish Inflants. The Miłosz family had strong ties to this area. The poet's father Aleksander was born in Riga and graduated as an engineer in road and bridge construction from the local polytechnic. And according to a family account, one of his distant ancestors, a certain Artur Miłosz, was said to have taken part in the Battle of Kircholm in 1605. It is certain that the Miłosz family owned extensive estates on the Dvina River in the Druja region and on the opposite bank of the Dvina River in Przydruisk. Czeslaw used to visit his cousins here during his holidays. The writer mentions his relatives and the acquisition of local landed estates in his book Searching for the Homeland:

"[...] Jozef Milosz, born somewhere before 1790, went to the East and entered the service of the Sapieha princes. Here, he served in the administration and, thanks to his hard work, reliability and other additional qualities, he earned Prince Sapieha's trust and boundless faith.[...] According to a tsarist decree, Sapieha, unwilling to accept Russian serfdom, was forced to sell off his estates. Miłosz, whom Sapieha had no reason to distrust, offered to sell off his estates according to an agreed key, for which he received a donation in the form of a deed of purchase [...]"

. From 1824 until the October Revolution, the Milosz family owned a great fortune, numerous estates on both sides of the Dvina River, which had been held by the Sapiehs for centuries. Today, Przydrujsk is a Latvian border settlement, located on the right bank of the Dvina. Originally, it was a suburb of Druja, a town now on the Belarusian side. During the Second Polish Republic, the Polish-Latvian border ran along the Dvina. Already from afar, the wooden buildings of the village are dominated by the shape of the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary from the mid-18th century ( read more ). At the entrance road to the settlement, there is another church of the Sapiehs' foundation - the Nikolayevskaya Cathedral, built in the 1870s as a Uniate temple. And Druja, with a population of less than 1,500, is a Belarusian village, which was a border town in the Second Polish Republic until 1939. Due to its location, according to some pre-war politicians and economists, it was to become "a second Gdynia" for Poland. The project was doomed to failure in advance and was mainly propaganda in nature. The most impressive building in the town is the 17th century former Bernardian monastery complex with the Holy Trinity Church founded by Kazimierz Lew Sapieha.