The Polish Balcony
I’m a big fan of balconies. In England balconies are seen as something exotic and excitingly Mediterranean, in Poland everybody has one. Even houses with gardens have balconies, which seems positively Sybaritic to a balcony-starved Englishman like myself. When I moved into my first Polish flat with a balcony I refused to leave it; why would I want to spend time at home surrounded by walls when I could be at home and suspended 10 metres above the street surrounded by nothing but air? The novelty wore off around the middle of November when I found myself re-evaluating the benefits of enclosed spaces.
Over the years I have come to appreciate the central role that the balcony plays in Polish life. If an Englishman’s home is his castle, a Pole’s balcony is his wild outdoors. These tiny patches of real estate suspended in thin air are the birthright of all Poles. No matter where you are, you can see the mountains and the lakes from a Polish balcony.
The most basic and satisfying function of the balcony is as an observation platform. Poles like nothing better than indulging in a good bout of staring. The higher up you are, the more things there are to stare at. From the average balcony there are an almost infinite number of potential staring subjects: neighbours, suspicious foreign neighbours, people going to the shops, people coming back from the shops, dogs up to no good, leaves, the list goes on. I saw an ad for a flat the other day that included the line: “sixth-floor balcony, comfortable railing, plenty of things to stare at.”
The second-most basic function of the balcony is as an underwear display area. It is a legal requirement in Poland to display at least 50 percent of your underwear to your neighbours every seven days. People over 60 usually do this by sitting on their balconies in their smalls, everybody else merely hangs it out to dry on notoriously insecure washing lines. This practice is the cause of the well-known phenomenon known as ‘fairy’s panties,’ which occurs when you wake up after a blustery night to find your balcony strewn with g-strings and boxer shorts that formerly belonged to your neighbours. It was months before I had to buy any new underwear.
Poles like dogs, and they especially like big noisy dogs well suited to bringing down wild boar. Unfortunately, most Poles live in small flats in cities—it’s not a good combination. Sometimes the incessant and voluminous barking of even the best-loved 60-kilo Alsatian becomes too much to bear in a 40-square-metre flat. The procedure under these circumstances is simply to eject Rover onto the balcony and close the door. Suddenly the dog has an infinite number of new and exciting things to bark at and is able to more directly communicate its frustration at not being able to gnash boar throats to the entire neighbourhood.
Balconies bring a lot of joy to a lot of Poles, but they also satisfy the darker side of the Polish character: the appetite for imminent disaster and being let down by the authorities. Balcony collapse is a constant fear. Barely a month passes without somebody somewhere announcing that all Communist era balconies are about as structurally sound as wet cardboard and highly likely to pitch their unwitting users into space, along with their dogs and underwear. I lived through the Great Balcony Panic of ’97. Public confidence was only restored after the local authorities sent sweaty men with large bellies round to give all balconies a hearty whack with a big hammer. This made everybody feel better for a while.
The real reason this year’s presidential election campaign has been so boring is that it hasn’t featured enough balconies. Those three-minute election broadcasts showing the candidates planting trees, sitting behind impressive desks signing things or shaking hands with Obama are completely missing the point—Polish voters can‘t identify with them. Komorowski sunbathing on a seventeenth-floor balcony in his underpants as he outlines his fiscal policy would guarantee a landslide.
Jamie Stokes