Kórnik and the origins of the Kornicker family name

Kingston is a kind of anglicisation of Kornicker, my grandfather's surname before he changed it when applying to become a naturalised British citizen in 1947. We're not sure why Kingston, but perhaps the choice was prompted by some association with place (more likely Kingston upon Thames than Hull). In retrospect, the choice seems carefully judged: unambiguously English, with deep Anglo-Saxon roots, socially neutral and familiar without being conspicuous.

Kornicker is easier to decipher, as the family would have lived in Kórnik when they were compelled to adopt family names by the Prussian authorities in the early nineteenth century. The name is useful in that it fixes a point on a map, though the place itself resists such economy.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that Kórnik is just a 20-minute train journey from Poznań, then disappointed when you realise the train station is an hour's walk from the town itself. The Google reviews read like a short anthology of grievance, with Polish State Railways (PKP) variously accused of dishonesty, incompetence and a lack of basic human decency. There's a good chance PKP went with Kórnik so they didn't have to call it Szczodrzykowo, the actual closest settlement to the station and a word that perhaps only people living in Szczodrzykowo can pronounce.

In any case, I wasn't disappointed. A well-maintained path led away from the busy road and through crop fields, and it was enough to follow it. Walking is a form of seeing, and by extension a form of photographing, which is largely the reason I'm here.

The weather has to be especially grim before I grow weary of these walks through what I suppose is a fairly unremarkable landscape. There's the vernacular to examine: barns patched and repatched over the years with whatever material was to hand, abandoned farm cottages with broken window panes and ragged net curtains blowing in the wind, the shallow infrastructure of ditches and farm tracks quietly governing my progress.

I find myself thinking about how my ancestors experienced this place—whether they came this way, and whether there's anything they might recognise. The ancient-looking barn perhaps, and the odd farmhouse or cottage, but not much else, at least until I arrive in Kórnik proper.

They wouldn't have found the synagogue. A modest wooden building with an octagonal pseudodome, it was built in the eighteenth century and destroyed in 1940.

An inscription, in Hebrew and German, survives above the passage that once led from the market square to the synagogue: "This is the gate of the Eternal One; the righteous enter through it". The passage now serves as a lapidarium—the Eye of the Needle—where matzevot recovered from the local Jewish cemetery are stacked. The door is opened once a year on 1 November. I visited a few days too late, on 4 November. In fact I struggled to find the lapidarium at all, and no one I asked seemed to have a clue where it was. One woman I spoke to was interested in seeing it, and we encountered it together for the first time, despite her having lived in the town her entire life.

Kórnik's town hall might have seemed familiar, but perhaps disquietingly so: the present building is a Neo-Baroque structure designed to resemble the eighteenth-century town hall that burned down in 1909.

It was claimed that the original building was struck by lightning, and its survival may not have been helped by a superstition that fires started by lightning should never be extinguished. The building burned for 24 hours; the town's fire brigade was ill-equipped to reach the flames, and assistance from Poznań never arrived. There was also speculation that the fire had been started deliberately, as the mayor had been petitioning the Prussian authorities for the building's replacement. Whatever the circumstances surrounding this event, the new town hall was completed by 1910. On 20 October 1939, one of its gable walls was used for the execution of sixteen Polish civilians; other inhabitants of Kórnik were murdered in nearby Mosina on the same day. During the occupation, a Polish resistance cell operated in the town, and the underground press was printed there.

The castle—home to one of the oldest libraries in Poland—looks much as it would have in the early nineteenth century, and the arboretum likewise.

A friend told me I should have visited earlier to see the trees at their autumn best, but I felt I'd timed my visit well enough: a thick layer of yellow lay underfoot, with plenty of oak, beech, and ash leaves still clinging on above.

The only people I encountered inside the arboretum were groups of women raking fallen leaves, something I see regularly in parks throughout Poland and other parts of Central Europe, but rarely in the UK.

This process of raking leaves into countless piles has a sort of ceremonial or ritualistic quality to it, through which I think it's possible to discern differences in how public space is conceived and maintained. The arboretum, for all its apparent naturalness, is a managed environment, its seasonal decay folded into a rhythm of labour that spoke less of efficiency than of stewardship, and which left little room for forms of ecological continuity that resist tidiness and control. It reminded me of a park near my home in Yorkshire, where volunteers have planted squat hedgerows around trees and obstructed desire lines with ornamental planting or fencing. At Christmas and Easter, cheap imported tat hangs from any available branch. There's very little intact natural environment that remains in this country, and yet these people are doing what they can to domesticate a field, to have it resemble someone's garden. In Kórnik, the only things I saw hanging from branches were red squirrels and bright orange maple leaves caught among the conifers.

Across the road from the arboretum is a ribbon lake, its long, narrow form edged by a boardwalk that traces part of the shoreline. Further along is a modest pier of concrete and steel, and on the far side of the water a beach, reached via a modern suspension bridge built with support from the European Regional Development Fund. A couple of teenagers were fishing from the pier in the low sun, but the lakeside was otherwise deserted—a far cry from its appearance in mid-summer, when the restaurants are open and the place fills with visitors. Kórnik is one of the region's main domestic tourist destinations, and I've been told it comes alive in the spring.

After a while I turned away from the lake and began the walk back towards the station, following the busy ulica Dworcowa (Station Street), passing beneath the still busier Expressway S11, before reaching the path through fields. In the evening light, the low sun flattened the land and lengthened shadows cast by ditches, fence posts, and the occasional tree. Features that had seemed incidental on the outward walk now asserted themselves more clearly. A flock of geese flew overhead in a distorted W formation, calling loudly, as if urging one another on towards a favoured wintering ground. In the distance, a train bound for Warsaw, its interior brightly lit, quietly cut the horizon in two.

At the end of the path I photographed a deteriorating, heavily graffitied building in the near-dark, before picking my way across the railway line to reach the westbound platform.

I had 20 minutes to wait, alone, as is often the case when I travel by train in Poland. To distract myself from the cold I thought about the pictures I'd made and how they might fit into the project, but without a narrative structure through which to think in terms of inclusion rather than accumulation, it was an exercise that quickly stalled. For now, I'm content to rely largely on intuition, and have been putting off any deliberate decisions around form and sequence.