A Taste of Europe

Chrumky!  Horalky!  Maggi!  Kofola!  Banany!

If you want Central European food, it helps to be somewhere Central European immigrants have congregated.  California and South Carolina are not those places; New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania are.  Between the Taste of Europe in Norwalk and the Czestochowa gift shop in Doylestown, we were able to stock up on some old favorites.

Above is most of what we brought back (I'd already eaten my Banany, and I've since finished the other bottle of Kofola that was in the fridge at the time of this picture).  The two gold-wrapped Prince Polo wafers and the bags of herbal drops are from Czestochowa, while everything else is from Taste of Europe.

Prince Polo (in the gold wrappers at the front) is a brand of wafers made in Cieszyn, Poland.  European wafers are like the sugar wafers you get here in the States, but much better; they're wider, often covered with chocolate, and filled with things like hazelnut or peanut.

Verbena brand herbal drops (right) are made in Slovakia.  They're a hard drop with a soft center, as you can kind of see on the package's illustration.  We got two flavors: pinia and lipa.  The former really does taste like a pine tree, while lipa, which means linden, is harder to explain.  It's almost floral and a little citrusy. 

Horalky (front) is a Slovak wafer; this one has peanut filling, and the chocolate only coats the edges of the wafer.

I've discussed chrumky (back, left) before.  This isn't my preferred Slovak brand, but I'm sure they'll be quite satisfactory.

Maggi (the dark glass bottles with red-and-yellow labels) is a sodium-rich condiment that complements things like stews well.  I think we just got these two bottles because they're so much bigger than any others we've seen before.

Banany (not pictured) is a sweet that consists of a banana-flavored and -shaped jelly covered in chocolate.  Normally I'm not a fan of banana-flavored anything, and the jelly is a little gritty, but for some reason I really like it.

And Studentska bars (left) are the best chocolate bars in existence.  They're most similar to Cadbury Fruit & Nut bars, in that they are a slab of chocolate studded with nuts, in this case peanuts, and dried fruit.  Studentska adds little bits of jelly, almost like Turkish delight, to the mix.  They're available in many fruit flavors, including pear, raspberry, and cherry, though the original is raisin, and dark, milk, or white chocolate.  They're also one of the easiest things to mail from Slovakia, so I've gotten them as presents from my kids before.

Just as it's always a delight to find Slovak food in North America, it's always a bit of a shock to see how expensive things are here in comparison to there.  But I think every once in a while a special treat is worth the cost.

Smoke on the Water

The Hagley Museum in Wilmington, Delaware, is on the site of the DuPont corporation's early powderworks.  I don't know if I ever knew that DuPont started off making explosives, but they sure did.  Today the museum includes a visitors' center, the remains of the powderworks, the village where workers lived, the house where the owners lived, and a research center.

In the visitors' center the history of industrialization along the Brandywine River is introduced, as are different kinds of mills and the materials that could be processed in them, from cotton to paper to wheat.  The second floor of the center was closed so that a recently-closed exhibit could be taken down; the third was dedicated to DuPont's technical innovations.  There's a race car, and a space suit that visitors can take pictures in, and hands-on science exhibits to delight visitors of all ages.

Outside, buses shuttle visitors around the property; some sites, like the research center, are only accessible via bus, but the drivers will generally take you wherever you want to go on the loop.  To see everything on the site would take pretty much all day; we spent about three hours there and didn't even visit the house.  Our first stop was the machine shop, and we were lucky to have it and the docent to ourselves.

The powderworks made use of the Brandywine  to power their machinery.  This was demonstrated to great effect when a docent showed us how opening a sluice gate from the millrace that runs parallel to the river powered a turbine, which could then be used to run all kinds of machinery in the tool shop.  The millrace and machine shop are pictured above; the gear on the wall is connected to the turbine via the rope belt.  The turbine's power turns a central crank that runs the length of the shop, to which every machine is connected; a worker could start a machine up by simply pulling a lever that transferred the central crank's movement to the subsidiary machines.  It was an ingenious use of both the natural resource and the technology of the time.

The powder was ground in roll mills in huts on the banks of the river.  Unlike grains, powder had to be milled using implements with no metal parts to avoid sparking.  The huts themselves were built with three solid walls of thick stone, while the fourth wall, the one facing the river, and the roof were of much flimsier construction.  This was so that when the powder exploded, as it was wont to do, it would blow the front wall and roof off into the river, while the thicker walls at the back and sides protected the rest of the works from the blast.  Another docent demonstrated how powder was tested—basically by blowing up a small amount.

The shuttle bus also takes visitors to see the workers' village.  As at most company towns, workers lived, shopped, and learned in a town built and owned by the company.  The village as it exists now isn't extensive, but we also didn't get out there to walk around.

Since we had a bit of a time limit on our visit we couldn't examine everything in detail.  What we did get to see was unusual and informative, and I'd recommend a visit to Hagley when you're in the Wilmington area.

American Czestochowa

I am not actually Catholic and probably not any Polish, so why did I want to visit a Polish Catholic shrine?  Well, many years ago, when my dad used to drive a charter bus, one of his routes was to shuttle groups to the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa is in Doylestown, PA.  For whatever reason, this is something that I distinctly remember hearing about when I was younger.  When we were in Poland I'd hoped to visit the monastery of Jasna Góra in original Częstochowa, not too far from Kraków; though I didn't make it there, I still hope to some day, and now I'll have something to compare it to.

According to tradition, the icon of the Black Madonna was made by St. Luke himself.  At some point the icon made its way to Poland, and has been there since the 14th century.  One of the most noticeable aspects of the icon is the damage to Mary's face; the slashes were likely inflicted by a Hussite during a raid of the monastery in 1430.  The Black Madonna also protected Jasna Góra during a Swedish invasion in 1655, and since then she has been known as the Queen and Protector of Poland.

It should come as no surprise that there's a big statue of the Pope (JPII, that is) out front, and of course there are lots and lots of statues and pictures of Mary.  Many of the signs are in both English and Polish.  One building houses the gift shop, where you can buy everything from pisanki to Polish snacks to house slippers, the deli, and meeting spaces, while the other holds the sacred spaces.  Between them is a small votive chapel and an outdoor grotto, featuring plaques naming donors to the shrine. 

The chapel on the ground floor of the church is modeled after the one at Jasna Góra, while upstairs there is a larger sanctuary.  In the narthex are memorials to Polish patriots and martyrs throughout history, from Casimir Pulaski, an ally during the Revolution lauded as the "father of the American cavalry," to Father Maximilian Kolbe, who took another prisoner's place to die in Auschwitz, to victims of the Katyn massacre. 

Inside the sanctuary is decorated with heavily-embroidered banners, soil from other Marian shrines set into the floor, and yet another rendition of the Black Madonna above the altar.  For me the standout feature was the two stained glass windows, both nearly the full height of the sanctuary.  The window on the wall to the left as you face the altar depicts important people and events in Polish history, while the wall on the right highlights American history, with special attention paid to Polish-Americans and Catholics.  It's fun trying to see what you can recognize; some of the people are named and some years are given, but others aren't.  If you can't make out all of the details, don't worry: the gift shop has a full-color bilingual booklet that identifies all of the people and events set in glass.

Kościuszko

I don't know that this is a must-see destination for all travelers; if you happen to be a Marian Catholic Polish-American, then of course you ought to go, and if belong to even one of those groups, or are a stained glass aficionado, it would be good to keep it on your radar.  Otherwise, unless you're in Doylestown for some other reason, it mightn't be necessary for you to make a special trip there.  I thoroughly enjoyed visiting, though, and I'm grateful to my dad for making the drive there once again.