There’s a church in your village. It’s large enough to house thousands of people, even though no more than a hundred live in the area. No one’s ever seen the priest. The bells ring every Sunday.
There’s a church in every village. No one knows who builds them, or when. There are more churches than people. They started replacing houses. You fear that one day your house will be replaced too.
On Sundays, the church bells start ringing as soon as the sun rises. They don’t stop til midnight. Sometimes, they don’t stop at all. There’s always a church bell ringing in the distance. You cover your ears and pretend not to hear.
Your train stops in the middle of a field. Minutes turn into hours and it starts getting dark outside, but you’re too afraid to leave your compartment to see what’s wrong. You lock the door and cover the windows, hoping that the thing in the train won’t find you.
There is a statue of a forgotten god in the city center, nearly invisible between shopping malls and office buildings. It fascinates the foreign tourists; there’s always a thick crowd of them surrounding it, laughing and touching the centuries old stone. The natives know better. They duck their heads and quicken their step when they pass it.
You think you remember seeing a sparrow once, when you were little. It might have been a dream, though. Nowadays, there is nothing but thousands and thousands of crows.
Your grandmother is afraid of them. The crows are spies. They cannot be trusted.
In the summer, you visit your cousins in the countryside. Something very old lives in the forest next to their property. Your cousin tells you the sounds you heard in the night were just pine martens playing on the roof, and you try to believe him.
Educational fairs are held on old pagan holidays. The organizers claim their purpose is teaching people about their Slavic heritage. You wonder if anyone else notices that the offerings to the old gods they make are real.
Your great uncle used to own a forest. The trees started dying when the casket with his body was lowered to the ground.
Your grandfather sleeps with a loaded antique gun under his pillow. “They will come,” he says when you ask him why. “They will come and take everything from us again.”
You go to church every Sunday. The sermon has always been the same; you know the words by heart. “Soon they will come, and they will take everything from us.” You still do not know who “they” are.
An old lady lives alone in a hut in the middle of the forest. You do her grocery shopping every now and then. In exchange, she protects you from the things lurking between the trees.
Only a small percent of the old salt mine in Wieliczka is available for tourists. They come up with new excuse each season - the rest is being renovated, or uninteresting, or not adapted for sightseeing yet. Your grandfather was a miner, so you know the truth. Whatever lives in the salt mine should not be disturbed.
You drive for hours. Every small town you pass looks exactly the same. The same old man crosses the street in front of your car each time you enter a new area, and each time you look down, careful not to meet his eyes.
The weather is changing. The winters are getting colder and harsher, the summers hotter and dryer. Your parents claim that there was another season called “spring” once, but you don’t believe them. A few years ago, tornadoes started appearing. You wonder which forgotten god demands attention.
One day, the giant in the mountains will wake up.
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