Sydonia. Słowo się rzekło

Elżbieta Cherezińska is Poland’s most popular writer of historical fiction today and Sidonia is her most recent novel.

Born into an old Pomeranian noble family, Sidonia von Borcke was accused of being a witch and beheaded in 1620. According to legend, she cast a curse that led to the sudden demise of the Griffin dynasty that ruled Western Pomerania.

Cherezińska weaves a multi-stranded narrative about Sidonia’s extraordinary and tragic life, covering events in the lives of her relatives and the Griffins as well. She paints a wonderful fresco of the Duchy of Pomerania, which enjoyed its golden age in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, shortly before disappearing from the political map of northern Europe.

Sidonia is a homage to the eponymous “witch” and to defiant women in general. This is confirmed by the book’s solemn motto and afterword, in which Cherezińska underscores the novel’s continued relevance: the world still rejects women like Sidonia

– sometimes by killing them, sometimes by mocking and excluding them.

From this perspective, Sidonia is a historical novel with a clear ideological argument. But in the nearly six hundreed pages of the book, readers will also find beautiful descriptions of Renaissance clothes and customs, a shocking reconstruction of a witch trial (which is narrated by Sidonia), a tragic love story, and plenty of food for thought as regards history and the fate of great dynasties. Are they destined to fall? Or is their fall caused by “something” irrational, or perhaps rather by their betrayal of some fundamental value? Sidonia’s subtitle – “One’s word is one’s bond” – refers to an old Polish saying about the need to keep promises. On two occasions, the Griffins broke their commitments to the Von Borckes. They did so to boost their own power, but it led to disaster. This is also part of Sidonia’s political relevance, with its numerous mentions of the threat faced by the West from Moscow.