A Polish Metamorphosis

Twenty years ago, Praga, the district on the right bank of the Vistula River was the stuff of bleak legend and folklore. Like Poland with its EU accession, this part of Warsaw, too, has changed dramatically.

In the spring of 2004, the first time I had money with any real purchasing power, I decide to buy my first apartment. Poland would soon join the European Union. Real estate prices are already going up like crazy, and I’m 21, my account filled with what was then the (today hardly impressive) earnings of a newly minted “star.” (Not long before I had managed to write a bestseller.) I’m deliberately writing “star” in quotation marks. My social condition, funded by my early and controversial debut, is very new, always pretty shaky and fragile. It sparks considerable opposition among critics and public alike, and I am consuming the prestige and privilege that go along with it in a chaotic and contrary way. I am contemplating them a little, but in large part I am still contesting them, now coquettishly, now in an honest, youthful fever. And you can see that grappling with forces of opposing vectors in my life activities from that time: modicums of good sense (directing my accumulated means toward accommodation and not, say, clothes made of gold) with something that could step in for its absence.Seeking my place on Earth, I turn pretty much right away toward the bad-repute-enshrouded and anti-prestigious Praga North.