Bohoniki Local Customs

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Many wooden houses in the village have their corners decorated with simple patterns, as is the tradition in the area. You don't see those in any other part of Poland. I am not sure if the choice of the pattern means anything, perhaps each family has a different one?
Our house did not have such a pattern but it was a brick house not a wooden one. But if you went inside you immediately saw it was not an ordinary Polish house. To begin with, it was much more colourful than Polish country houses. The hall was stacked with children's clothes hanging on pegs and the landlady's hats, which she wore on the everyday basis, featured prominently there too. There were no photographs of family members anywhere and the only decorations were muhirs - pictures of Koranic verses and a picture of Mecca. If you add the view of the Mosque from our window, it really felt like visiting an Islamic country.

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While waiting for your meal at the Pilgrim's House look around and you will see a small exhibition of traditional Tatar attire - beautiful colourful jellabiyahs and headgear among other things. I simply loved their colours and oriental patterns. Peek into the hall leading to the kitchen and you will find more there. Chris says they could be for sale but I am not so sure. They may be used during the Tatar festivals held at Bohoniki four times a year. The ladies serving customers were too busy when we were there so I did not want to pester them with questions.

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Take a walk along the village's main and only street and enjoy the view of the old wooden houses, often with pretty little gardens, on both sides. Most of them date back to the early 20th and some even to the 19th century. In quite a few of them the lived-in part of the house adjoins the part for the farm animals and the barn. Near the old Tatar Cemetery you can see a traditional cellar dug out in the ground, typical of villages in this part of Poland and not only. In fact, I remember keeping our food in such a cellar whenever we spent our holidays on a farm in a village only 70 km east of Warsaw when I was a child. Such cellars were particularly useful when there was still no electricity in the village but even later they were still used for a long time instead of a fridge. They were really cold inside and I remember enjoying the echo in them.

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While exploring the cemetery, we noticed something that is unusual in Poland. Normally, you would find the inscriptions on the tombs on the side of the grave so that you can read them facing it. Not so in Bohoniki, not always anyway. As you walk along the cemetery paths you can often see the inscriptions on the other side of the tomb, facing the path but not the grave. In such cases, the side facing the grave will often remain blank so that the grave seems to be empty. As I found it rather strange, I asked our landlady for the explanation of this strange custom. The reason for this is prosaic - it is only a matter of convenience. In cases where the path runs behind a grave the visitor looking for it, will be able to find it more easily. I suppose it would be too expensive to place the inscription on the other side as well.
Originally, there were no inscriptions on the tombs at all, which you can see, looking at the earliest of the tombs. The first inscriptions appeared probably under the influence of Polish traditions.