Weekend Getaways
Kuchary – Poland
The Buddhists came to Kuchary, little town situated 30 km from Plock, in 1986. Lama Ole Nydahl, the Norwegian pupil of the greatest masters of Buddhist meditation, was delighted.
We’ll work here. It is a perfect place for a meeting of West and East – he concluded.
He took 620 of German marks out of his wallet and paid it to the communal clerks, buying this way a ruined classical manor house from the beginnings of nineteenth century which used to belong to Helena Mniszkowna, famous Polish writer, known mainly as an author of a romance called "Tredowata".
The Buddhists worked hard to renovate the building. They patched up holes in roof, removed trees from balconies and a jungle of stinging nettles from the park. They cleaned ponds and fished two of them. In the ground floor they created a gompa – meditation room but also a kitchen with a big dinning room and a fireplace as well as an office. On the first floor they furnished nine bedrooms for several tens of people – there is a phone and an internet connection in each of them.
We don’t disconnect ourselves from the world – says Leszek Nadolski, one of three people supervising the community – We aim to bring the Tibetan culture to the Europeans; we rather build a Western type of Buddhism.
The venue keeps developing. A couple of years ago it was extended by an old milk shop and a delicatessen. The concrete buildings were painted in giant giraffes on a blue background so that the visitors are not scared by their greyness.
People come to Kuchary to meditate and to cut out from the hustle. At the weekends there are courses of meditation organized here but most of the people come in summer, the community hosts usually over a thousand of visitors.
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