Poland Buries Nobel Poet Milosz Amid Controversy

Friday, August 27, 2004 3:01:45 PM ET

By Wojciech Zurawski

KRAKOW, Poland (Reuters) - Thousands of Poles turned out to mourn Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz Friday, ignoring protests from a small group of conservatives who opposed his burial alongside national heroes.

Earlier this week, a handful of right-wingers demonstrated against plans to bury Milosz, who died on Aug. 14 at age 93, in the Crypt of Honor at a monastery in Krakow, saying he had betrayed Poland with his liberal views and a brief flirtation with communism.

The protests, supported by fringe nationalist media, embarrassed Polish authorities and delayed the decision on where the poet would be buried.

The protests were muzzled hours before the ceremony, when newspapers published a letter from Polish-born Pope John Paul II saying he shared the same spiritual goals as the poet.

About 10,000 people from across Poland walked the cobbled streets of Krakow's medieval old town in a funeral procession led by a military guard of honor and including members of the country's political, religious and cultural elite.

"Today we bid farewell to a poet but not to his poetry, which will certainly outlive us all -- those present here today and those not present," Wislawa Szymborska, a fellow Polish poet and Nobel Prize-winner, said.

Plainclothes security officers surrounded the casket during its journey amid concern the procession could be disrupted by protesters. But they were nowhere to be seen.

Leading intellectuals, Catholic bishops and prominent Poles, such as Solidarity hero Lech Walesa, spoke out in favor of giving Milosz a state funeral at the monastery, where some of the greatest Polish poets, writers and scientists are buried.

Milosz received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980 after three decades in exile in the West, where he was hailed for his spirited criticism of the communist system he served during the first five years after the war.

After he moved back to a free Poland in the 1990s, he became a leading moral authority, although he earned the wrath of the extreme right with his liberal social views and criticism of what he saw as flaws in Polish national character.











Polish Nobel poet Czeslaw Milosz buried in Poland

August 27, 2004 11:07 AM EDT


Warsaw/Krakow (dpa) - Thousands of mourners marched through the southern Polish city of Krakow Friday in a funeral procession for the country's Nobel poet laureate Czeslaw Milosz who died two weeks ago aged 93.

"We bid farewell to a poet, but not to his poetry - it will certainly survive all of those present and not present here," Milosz's fellow Polish Nobel poet laureate Wislawa Szymborska said later at lavish ceremonies in Krakow's historic Skalka church, the final resting place of several acclaimed Polish artists.

Milosz was known and widely respected for his emotionally and intellectually charged writing focussed on some of the greatest tragedies of the 20th Century.

He died August 14 at his home in Krakow.

Best known for his 1950's novel "The Captive Mind" detailing the ordeals suffered by the intelligentsia under communist rule, Milosz won the Nobel prize for literature in 1980 just as the foundations of the communist regime in Poland were being shaken by the emerging Solidarity free trade union movement.

Milosz spent nearly 30 years abroad, returning to Poland to live in Krakow after the 1989 fall of communism there.



and one more: -http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/opinion/26pinsky.html