For centuries, what is today Ulica Dietla was a tributary of the river Wisła, a defining feature of the city’s natural ecosystem that also served as a ready administrative divider between Kraków and Kazimierz. With the opening of Ulica Dietla in 1880, the formal division disappeared, and the two districts were joined into a single urban environment. As the river’s flow gave way to a traffic flow, Jews––who had never completely disappeared from central Kraków––began to relocate and expand their homes and businesses along and across Dietla, into the Stradom district and the Main Market Square. In contemporary Kraków, however, memory has been largely resegregated: Kazimierz is Kraków’s Jewish-designated space, and the rest is Polish. We at FestivALT believe this division is about as plausible as a boat sailing down a disappeared river — which is precisely what we will be doing as a durational performance work on Sunday, June 24th, on Dietla.
