Poland celebrates National Reading Day
PR dla Zagranicy
Paweł Kononczuk
02.09.2017 08:00
Poland celebrated National Reading Day on Saturday with public reciting of "The Wedding", considered one of the most important plays in the country's history.
President Andrzej Duda (left) and his wife Agata during National Reading Day. Photo: PAP/Jakub Kamiński
Polish poet, playwright and painter Stanisław Wyspiański’s “The Wedding”, or “Wesele” in Polish, received the highest number of votes in online polls conducted by the president’s office to select the work to be read out this year.
Presidential aide Wojciech Kolarski said: "National Reading Day is the biggest event promoting reading in Poland." The event aims to promote Polish literary classics and the beauty of the spoken word.
"Over the last few years it has become a social phenomenon," Kolarski added.
Professor Tomasz Cieślak, a literary historian from the University of Łódź in central Poland, said that although "The Wedding" might "seem distant from contemporary problems... and linguistically difficult” it is still "one of the most important works of Polish literature... a magnificent play".
"The Wedding" was first staged in 1901.
The play is set in a small village near Kraków, southern Poland, where the wedding reception of a poet and a peasant woman takes place.
It is based on a real event -- the wedding of Wyspiański’s contemporary, Lucjan Rydel, a member of the Kraków intelligentsia.
Class-blurring weddings were a fashionable trend among Wyspiański's friends from the modernist Young Poland movement.
(tf/pk)