“So what’s new in Lipnica?” I asked as we bounced and bumped along the rough roads of southern Poland. It was June 2000, and I’d been gone from Poland for a year. A number of unexpected developments led me back much sooner than I expected, and I was in the car with two of the first guys I met in Lipnica, two guys I’d consider my best friends of my time in Poland, K and J.

What could have possibly changed in a year, I wondered. Lipnica is the end of the trail: it is on a road that literally led to the base of a mountain and nowhere else. No one passes through Lipnica; one can only go to Lipnica.

“So what’s new in Lipnica?” I’d only meant it metaphorically. What could be new in a village that sustains itself through a bit of logging and a lot of working abroad? One could pass by house after shuttered house in the village, its occupants in Germany, Austria, or even America, working to earn money to finish the house, to improve the house, perhaps even to forget about the house. Lipnica is not a village on the rise, I thought.

All images via Google Street View in anticipation.

“So what’s new in Lipnica?” Perhaps I was asking about gossip, for everything I saw out the car window as we neared the village looked essentially the same. Fields and forests, forests and fields. Probably the same view for generations.

“So what’s new in Lipnica?” I asked as we came out of the last forested area before the village.

“You’re about to see,” came the reply.

I probably cursed at the surprise of seeing a gas station in the pristine fields leading to the village of my dreams and often frustrating reality for three years. A travesty; a sacrilege; a profanation.

I’m told the changes in Jabłonka are even more shocking. “You won’t recognize it,” I’m told. “You won’t believe it,” I hear.

And Lipnica?