For the Love of a Real Village: an Interview with Marcin Wójcik, Whose “Gęsiego. Z miasta na wieś” is about Moving to the Countryside 

You strip many people of their delusions about how it’s great to leave the city, head to the country, and finally live – in harmony with nature, with yourself. It turns out it’s no idyll. It takes hard work, plenty of knowledge, and consistency.

Well, “He sold everything, quit his job, moved to the countryside” – I still read reportage like that. I didn’t give up everything and I think you shouldn’t give up everything at once, but do it gradually and reasonably. You need to prepare for such a decision. Taking such an important step while ill-prepared often ends with a return to the city. This is seen in parts of the Masuria region [north of Warsaw], where after a wave of house buying came a flood of ads to sell them. Once, for a while, those moving to the countryside then lived there. Suddenly, though, it turned out they couldn’t live there and couldn’t cope with simple things like a clogged gutter. They just go limp and head back to town.

I wrote the book, at least in part, to warn idealists who think there’s some stress-free life in the country.

But that wasn’t the only reason.

I wrote it above all to recall those irrecoverable times we lived in not long ago, which lasted continuously until about the 1990s. By which I mean the countryside where animals, vegetable gardens, and fruit trees were next to every house. Now there are no beds, no rabbits, no chickens, and instead of fruit trees, thujas [white cedar as hedges] are planted and the grass is neatly mowed.

So you wrote in part from longing for the good old days?

I grew up in the country, in the mountains, where in the 1990s there were animals and a garden. I also wanted to show that living in the countryside, you can feed yourself. And to remind readers that food doesn’t just come from the supermarket. Now, even rural kids think meat is simply bought at the store. They know nothing about the animal from which that meat comes.

People fled the village because they associated it only with hard work. They no longer wanted to get up at dawn to work the land and with the animals. 

I come from the countryside, so I know. I remember times when the telephone was only at the post office and in the sołtys’ house [mayor]. Now the city-village differential is smaller. After all, everyone has the internet, everyone can watch the same series on Netflix.

Remote work has also reached the countryside and former farmers or their descendants work remotely – they don’t have to go to the city, though they broke free of the village as I remember it. In short: they just live differently.

My moving to the countryside and my farm is also a choice motivated by the desire to live an ecological life. 

Tell me about your ecological motivation.

Once, everyone engaged in cultivation for their own use took care that vegetables weren’t sprayed with chemicals and that ducks, chickens, rabbits, and geese got healthy feed. The current large-scale concentration of agriculture has made it so when you drive through, for example, the Żuromiński district, you’re passing poultry barn after poultry barn, pig farm after pig farm. All this is a powerful ecological bomb – it’s generating gigantic amounts of waste that pollute the groundwater and air. And add to that the need to mass-produce feed.

Small single-family farms at some point stopped being self-sufficient. It was really tough to live from them. You had to work hard and you couldn’t support the family. Why do that when you can earn money in the city and buy food on the way at the store? In almost every larger village now there’s a supermarket, where you buy even the parsley for broth.

You decided to have your own parsley, but also your own meat. Where’s the consistency?

I’ll start with the fact that people in the past didn’t eat so much meat – only on special occasions, once a week. And it wasn’t the unhealthy, processed meat that’s drowning us now. I feel the human needs meat to live, but we should eat it much less and definitely not in the canned-food form, sausages, Vienna sausages. After moving to the countryside, I eat decidedly less meat.

How is it less?

I don’t buy it in supermarkets because I have my rabbits, guinea fowl, turkeys, and geese. I get milk from neighbors who raise cows. I have a large piece of meadow, so I’ll feed my animals with grass. I don’t have ducks, because they mainly need grain and potatoes, which is more nutritious feed, like pigs.

Of course, I go to the store, for example, because I don’t have flour. But lard I already have from geese. Sometimes I buy rapeseed oil. 

How does your day in the country look?

Getting up before 6 am is no challenge for me, that’s when I woke up in the city. It takes 45 minutes to feed and water animals. I eat breakfast and go to work, that is, to the office. I work until 4 or 5 in the afternoon. In the meantime, I go to the animals, see that they have everything, collect eggs in the chicken house, and walk the vegetable rows. After all, in corporate work, you go for lunch and coffee, too. I go to the meadow, to the poultry, and I scare off meadow mice that love my vegetables.

I once noticed a mural near Warszawa Wschodnia station [Warsaw East] that I liked: “From the Milky Way’s viewpoint, we’re all from the countryside.”

Interviewed by Waldemar Kumór

Marcin Wójcik was born in 1981; graduate of the Polish School of Reportage, Warsaw University of Life Sciences, and others; a reporter for Duży Format; author of W rodzinie ojca mego (In the Family of My Father), Celibat. Opowieści o miłości i pożądaniu (Celibacy: Stories of Love and Desire), Gęsiego. Z miasta na wieś (In Single File: From Thy City to the Countryside).