As part of the series of monthly meetings, our guests, Agnieszka Szpila Pilecka and Cezary Werpachowski, will talk about two trips they took to Russia in the summer of 2017 and in the winter of 2018. During these expeditions, they traveled a total of approximately 15,000 km in a specially adapted off-road vehicle.

The first journey led from Białystok to Ostashkov, Tver Oblast. Ostashkov is a small town located between Moscow and St. Petersburg. Currently, it is a recreation center located by the picturesque Seliger Lake. For our guests, it was a sentimental journey aimed at finding family traces. Nearly 80 years ago, Cezary Werpachowski’s father, Jarosław Werpachowski (1928–2022), was arrested and, as a sixteen-year-old boy, deported to a soviet labor camp. Agnieszka Szpila Pilecka’s grandfather, Kazimierz Pilecki, and his brothers were also in the same camp. Family memories and the desire to confront historical data with reality were the direct motives of the first expedition.

The next stage of the journey was road to the north, through St. Petersburg, along the great lakes Ladoga and Onega, to the coast of the White Sea with the Solovetsky Islands and the town of Umba, and finally to the top of the Kola Peninsula to Murmansk.

During the second expedition, our guests arrived at Murmansk again, but this time in severe winter conditions. The snow reached over 2 meters and the temperature dropped to minus 30 degrees Celsius.

We invite you on November 21 at 6:00 p.m. to the Sybir Memorial Museum for the meeting with the couple of travel enthusiasts, biologists and photographers. It will be a unique opportunity to listen to stories about extraordinary journeys to distant, little-known and undiscovered places.

Regular ticket: 15 PLN

Reduced ticket: 10 PLN

Tickets available at the museum’s ticket office and on the Sybir Memorial Museum’s website. The number of places is limited.

photos by Cezary Werpachowski