Agata Tumiłowicz-Mazur

Was it Zamek Czocha? 🥲 Lower Silesia represent!
(But also, no complimentary drunkard? Something is off.)

The life cycle of a three-spined stickleback, in German, waiting for better days in a Polish high school.

A very old sea urchin in the wild.

If you’re doom scrolling, hello👋, I’m doom posting, and continuing on my journey to this uncanny, unintentional archive of old German creatures. Possibly the only time I stumbled upon the life cycle of a three-spined stickleback and a random sea urchin. They’re all circa 100 years old now.

Old and peeling visual material depicting different kinds of fish.

Amerikanischer Kopalbaum / locust tree - an old visual material depicting it.

Creepy fish and locust tree from the past, nevertheless, I appreciate the tenacity of this old visual material.

Holy smokes…☠️ Thank you for alerting me to this. See, I don’t think the school even knows exactly what they have there and weirdly continues to store it, not knowing what to do with it (some stuff is too old to even touch). That’s why it looks like frozen in time…I will let them know.

That is so strange! I am completely transfixed by the stubborn persistence of those things…

Ummm I’m pretty sure this belonged to an actual human being, but I would love to be wrong. After all, where were the educational skeletons coming from in the 1920s? This one has been progressively losing bones over time. My mom learned anatomy from the same set... They named him Stefan.

Old slides

A bio book from 1928.

The world in images - 1895

Hello old slides, books and all 👋

A bunch of archival eggs in a drawer.

How Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” started 🤣

Early 20th century sunchoke flower.

Early 20th century cherry laurel.

Among my favorite finds, for instance, these prewar dried plants, sunchoke flower and cherry laurel.

I don’t even know what’s going on here 🤷🏼‍♀️

Super old larvae & co.

Some more German samples from 80+ years ago.

So many of them are still bearing German inscriptions…and are 80 years +!

More taxidermied animals locked in school shelves.

Different stages of life as evinced by some tiny specimens.

I wasn’t quite prepared for what I found. A variety of taxidermied animals, hundreds of specimens, herbaria and science books from the 19th and early 20th centuries. As if someone had pressed pause on nature and stored it all in a small school archive for students to see and use.

A cabinet filled with taxidermied birds.

Built in 1913 as an Oberrealschule for boys, my school became a Polish high school in 1945. I returned for unrelated research and rediscovered a room untouched by time - still filled with animal and plant specimens.

An old shelf filled with animal specimens from pre-1945.

In my series “German things you didn’t know survived the war and are still in use by Poles” I want to give you a glimpse of an amazing research day I had some time ago.
Let me take you on the most unexpected journey through artefacts that survived the 1945 border change.
🧵

Petition to give this contract to České dráhy 🙏🏻

I appreciate this attitude 🤝

Precisely! 🤣 Some choices are made preventatively 😅😉

In the world of doubles and layers…make sure to check what hides underneath.
Here: a Prussian eagle under a mundane tapestry in a Polish local gov building 🫢

Żadna pani 🙂 ale dziękuję za polecajkę!

Ahaahhahaha 💙 big hugs to her!

Blue German art nouveau tiles found in one of the prewar building in Lower Silesia.

Had a dream about tiles - uncovering new sets of old tiles on floors and walls. A dream so vivid I’m now soothing myself with old photos of the Art Nouveau wall tiles I once found in a building nearby 🥲

Can we just pause and reflect on the fact PKP took Śnieżka away from Karkonosze and for whatever reason let it run to Kudowa…? What are those train names for anyway!

I already felt interpellated seeing you’re in Polanica! 🫡 amazing ads though 🫠

Talked with my grandpa on the phone and got the usual “back in my days… the winters were colder” kind of thing. The tricky part is, he was born in 1925 🥶
How can I compete with THAT?!

Horrified countenance made of stone, reminiscent of a face frozen mid-retch, stained orange.

While reading the news:

There you go. I have to go all the way to the National Library in Warsaw to consult the books from my city 🤷🏼‍♀️

In other words, it opens up another can of worms - the internal feeling of injustice (people still cannot get over the fact that our(?) regional artifacts were moved to the „safer”, central PL.)
I love the idea of shared heritage but it seems like everybody needs even more time to get there.

Thanks! I agree with the main argument, at its core, but I feel like these things get even more complicated…These books, along with other objects, were for the most part, moved to central Poland (Warsaw, Kraków, Łódź) while a lot of people feel it’s the heritage of the „Recovered Territories”.

😄 enjoy!

A surprised owl made of stone. Another remnant of German architecture in Polish Lower Silesia.

Another owl spotted, so far my favorite.

A wooden carving of a woman (?) at work (possibly/ hopefully weaving) and words: Das Alter bringt’s.

A wooden carving of a beehive and the words „sich regen”

A wooden carving of a…Snow White and the dwarfs? My loose interpretation.

A wooden carving of an elegant dude - I have no idea who he is or what he represents 🤷🏼‍♀️

As it turns out, the phrases carved into the wood are the following:
Der Jugend Klingt’s
Das Alter Bringt’s
Sich Regen Bringt Segen

(Thank you @herrackerbau.bsky.social for your research!)

Cataloguing this as: random finds + the Bluesky community = a new shade to my hometown’s story)