A Visit to Bochnia

"Good morning, Marcia. Um, do you know what time it is?"
"Yea, its 11:15. we both slept till 11:15!"

Our current theory is that we had been woken up during the week by the kids upstairs doing gymnastics or jumping-jacks and they had gone home yesterday. Our plan for today was to go to Bochnia, the city cited on the copy of my father's mother's father's father's baptismal certificate, under the name Bugajski (boogaiskee). It had been over 100 years since this document was created, but Bochnia was our biggest lead on our ancestry in Poland. It was worth a shot. Marcia went to a local travel agent and asked the friendly woman there if there was anyone who could show us around Bochnia. Sure enough, she recommended her father, Stanislaw Klimczak otherwise known as Leszek.

We had a light breakfast of pastries and coffee and Marcia ordered two large poppyseed rolls (which may, or may not last the ride home). Promptly at 1:00 Leszek arrived. He was a tall, middle-aged man with a severe face but a friendly smile. The trip was a short 30km from Cracow. No sooner did we leave the hotel did we encounter the Cracow weekend traffic. The bridge and roads leading out of the city were blocked and it took us just over an hour to go the 30 km. But like all of our other car rides, the scenery was gorgeous and we enjoyed the ride.

The traffic gave us an opportunity to talk to Leszek a bit. His English was not great, but by mixing in some hand signals and some Russian nouns I knew, we had a pleasant conversation. Pope John Paul II had been a prominent figure in our visit, so we asked what the Polish people thought about him. According to Leszek, he is their biggest hero, just above Ronald Regan. Because the Pope played such a huge part in uniting the country against communism, they now hold him as a Polish idol. Because of the strong feelings about communism, there is a bitter distaste for Russians and Russian Culture. It has become clear to me that there is a very large distinction between the Poles and Russians. I ignorantly thought I would be able to communicate with the poles with my amateur knowledge of Russian. They have different alphabets, but surely they sound similar enough, right?

We finally reached Bochnia and were kindly directed to the katolik cmentarz (Catholic Cemetary). We made sure to look up necessary Polish terms we would need for our trip in order to avoid... mis-communication. We weren't really sure of what we were looking for, other than the name 'Bugajski'. The cemetary was impressive, expansive and beautiful. Located on the top of a great hill overlooking Bochnia, these gravesites had a great view. The graves, themselves, were not the typical American gravestone. There were great marble slabs encompassing the entirety of the coffin(I imagined). The graves were all well-kept and we saw many matrons and mourners cleaning and polishing gravestones.


After twenty minutes of looking at all sorts of different polish names, we eventually came upon the grave of Stanislav Bugajski and Anna Bugajska. The 'a' ending is a feminine surname ending. We aren't sure if these are great great cousins or aunts and uncles... or if they are even related. But hopefully these names can lead us more in the direction of tracing our ancestry.

We also found a grave of Orlowskis. However, the Orlowskis are more widely know to have inhabited the Warsaw region of Poland. But know knows? Maybe our families are dually tied to Bochnia.

We asked leszek to take us to the town center and spent a few minutes taking pictures and walking around. We went to the St. Mikoloja Basilica, but there was a service in progress so we steered clear. The following are a few of the many views of Bochnia we brought back with us.