If this sounds a little bit like the title of an overheated Mills & Boon or Harlequin potboiler, the romantic tale that follows would probably qualify as a plot synopsis for one.
Count Stanisław, an Uhlan lancer who took part in one of the only cavalry charges in World War 2 at the the battle of Krojanty, was captured by the German army as Warsaw fell. He survived the war as a POW then lost his vast family estates in South Eastern Poland under post-war Communist rule. With the balance of his fortune and his freedom threatened, he fled to London where he met and fell passionately in love with Sofia, a glamorous, hotheaded Spanish grandee’s daughter. They married, took up residence in fashionable South Kensington and lived the high life in London until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The restoration of democracy in Poland soon after raised the tantalizing prospect of them regaining confiscated family property, so they left for Warsaw to navigate the labyrinthine bureaucracy of Poland’s restoration laws.
Stanisław’s family estates proved impossible to regain, a blessing in disguise perhaps as they were completely dilapidated, having been divided into thousands of smallholdings, while the former palace was completely destroyed. However, ownership of the 14-bedroom family ski lodge in Bukovina Tatrzanska, a picturesque village in the Tatra Mountains close to the Slovakian border, was restored to them. Suddenly in their mid-seventies they found themselves setting up and running a small hotel, which is how and where we first met them.
Some British diplomat friends had just returned from a weekend at the lodge and had enthused about the ‘Zakopane style’ wooden architecture, the stunning hilltop setting with its mountain views, but most especially of the eccentric couple that ran the place more like a house party on an English country estate than an hotel.
From the moment Sofia greeted us in her gravelly voice at the front door, showed us up to our room and moaned good-naturedly that dinner would in an hour, with no thanks to her husband “Staszek”, I knew that we were going to be friends- and so it proved as we sat down at their long dining table for the first of many meals together with Staszek holding court as he uncorked yet another bottle of wine to go with the Chicken Kiev that Lola had cooked.
Chicken Kiev is a much underrated and unloved dish these days thanks to decades of frozen dinner abominations, but cooked fresh with an abundance of melted garlic butter, it is absolutely delicious.
Chicken Kiev: Serves Three
3 chicken breast halves
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1 tablespoon minced parsley
3 tbsp salted butter at room temperature
1 egg, beaten
Breadcrumbs for coating
Pound the chicken breasts flat. Mix the garlic, parsley and butter together; place one tablespoon of the butter mixture in the centre of each chicken breast, then roll it up and tie together with kitchen string. Dip the chicken in the beaten egg and coat with the breadcrumbs. Place in the fridge for 2 hours. Fry the chicken pieces in a skillet with 1/2” of oil until they done. Serve with sautéed spinach and orzo pasta.
This was the first of many pleasant weekends we spent there, in all weathers. In winter, in a scene straight out of Boris Pasternak’s ‘Dr Zhivago’ we’d glide through the forest huddled up under a bearskin rug in a horse drawn sleigh, or ski the lodge’s private downhill run where a primitive ski tow was operated by an ancient tractor. In the dog days of summer, we’d watch from the lodge’s terrace, a glass of Polish beer in hand, as that same ancient tractor was used to bring in the late summer harvest- just like a tableau from Mikhail Sholokov’s ‘And quietly flows the Don’.
Magical times in a truly magical place.
What an amazing place and a fairy tale story. X
Thank you- it really is Amelia. It's ironic that on today of all days we should be talking about a place that is just a few hours from the Ukrainian border.