Tarnow Off The Beaten Path

This is something I haven't seen in YEARS! A man tending a cow.
When I was little, whenewer I was travelling by car I used to have the same diversion: in summer I would count horses grazing along the road, there were no use to count cows, there were so many. At Christmas time when we were visiting my granny I counted illuminated Christmas trees in the gardens along the way, there were not so many in time of the communist crisis. Now the situation has changed dramatically. Horses grazing freely in the field have become an almost extinct species, cows are hard to come by, Christmas illuminations, on the other hand flourish.

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Marcinka - St Martin's hill, which is only an hour's walk from the Market Square - is a frequent destination for Tarnovians who want to escape the city buzz. I wrote about its attractions in the introduction, here's a tip about one of them. At the top of the hill there is a village called Zawada and it's centerpiece is an old wooden church, St Martin's, that's probably where the name of the hill comes from. Unfortunately it's closed to visitors, it only opens for services, so you can probably have a look inside before or after a service. It's worth it.

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I love the lash green of May and early June. Here are a few crop fields that were a pleasure to look at on one Sunday afternoon in May on Marcinka (that's how we call the hill in Tarnów).