Kaczyński as Honorary Cracovian?
Staff journalist | 12th March 2010

12th March 2010

So Lech Kaczynski is to be given honourary citizenship of Krakow. A rejection of this needs to be organised by those who have endured the recent policies of the Rada Miejska in Krakow, dominated by PiS.

They play this stupid pantomime between themselves whilst systematically and incompetantly mismanaging the City of Krakow. The whole city is being destroyed by ugly developments like the Hotel Shearaton and the Space Age Park Inn across the Wislwa in view of the Wawel.

For PiS to give an outsider from Krakow an honorary award is beyond satire.

They then give themselves awards for allowing the despoiling of the Pope's city whilst feigning support for his legacy, the Pope who claimed on the Blonia in 1979 "that every brick and stone in this city is close to my heart".

Some good renovation has occurred but so has much destruction. The unaccountable way the Treimorfa deal was stitched up and numerous violations of the UNESCO Convention make this trite self congratulatory banality.

Reports by Krakow conservation movements are being compiled and sent to UNESCO. Professor Roger Scruton of the Jagiellonian Trust which gave support against communism between 1983 and 1989 has endorsed the movement CUE. http://cracoviaurbseuropea.neostrada.pl/index.html

Professor Norman Davies has been informed of the situation and has demanded a detailed report on the Rad Mieska since 2006 when he moved back from Krakow to Oxford, where planning regulations ( the real meaning of the rule of law ) would prevent anything like the Treimorfa being touted as an "improvement" on the Skeleton.

The only improvement would be to demolish this communist era folly entirely and like all skeletons bury it. But money talks in Krakow. Not considerations of law, justice or public accountability.

Both parties are simply genuflecting before an irresponsible form of modernisation within the UNESCO Zone that contravenes limitations of developments that do not fit in with the harmonious ensemble of the city taken as a whole.

The latest "planning" blight is the positioning of a Toadstool looking bar right next to St Adelbert Church. Again this violates the UNESCO Convention as do the array of tacky and vulgar signage for kebabs and neon lit strip clubs permitted by what are supposed to be the "moral guardians" of Poland.

This craven and spinless hypocrisy is being challenged by growing numbers of Krakow's citizens. Protests against the revolting Hi-Flyer balloon, Angel Developments Apartments in Stradom and the rapacious lawyer and developer Henryk Gaertner of GDK Group is now being mobilised.

PiS is not "conservative". They are market populists espousing a shoddy view of modernity and have sold out on any principles they may have once had. Independent councillors need to be elected and rapacious financial power and the total failure to enact correct zoning and planning laws in Krakow is now going to be challenged.

The award to Kaczynski is meaningless and a insult to the people of Krakow.

The young in particular are tired of this cretinous mud slinging political pantomime, the pathetic obsession with hunting for communist scapegoats some 20 years after communism ended simply as a cheap diversionary tactic for actual policy changes.