Cellar Under the Rams – Leszek Długosz and Krystyna Zachwatowicz

Leszek Długosz and Krystyna Zachwatowicz performing in the Cellar Under the Rams, the most famous literary cabaret in the mid-to-late 20th-century Poland.
After WWII, Poland found itself behind the Iron Curtain, becoming part of the Eastern Bloc, and joined the states under Soviet control. Until 1989, communism was the order of the day and it decreed a unified, top-down template that applied to all activities, including arts and culture. Back then, the primary function of cultural institutions was to sing the praises of the communist state. But even during these hard times there were places, organisations, movements that provided enclaves of limited freedom, of respite from the oppressive and bleak reality of the Polish People’s Republic. The Cellar under the Rams, a literary cabaret housed in the basement of Potocki Palace in the Old Town’s Main Square in Kraków, was one of such distinctive phenomena. Founded in 1956 by the then students, among others its artistic director Piotr Skrzynecki, visual artist Bronisław Chromy, and composer Krzysztof Penderecki, it soon skyrocketed to fame.
This unassuming basement became the stamping ground for Kraków intellectual and artistic circles: physicians, lawyers, painters, photographers, writers, musicians, sculptors, actors, film and theatre directors. It was a magnet both for celebrity scientists and for bohemians. Performances staged in The Cellar, song lyrics, outdoor events, and zany jubilee bashes laid bare the absurdities of the system. To artists and audiences alike, they served as a counteraction to the complex and hypocritical lived experience of communist Poland. In the 1960s, jazz music, which the state authorities did not endorse, also found a safe haven there. Soon, Piotr Skrzynecki (1930–1997) became the driving force of The Cellar. A living legend in his lifetime, Skrzynecki was an eccentric compere, an unparalleled improvisor, an all-round artist, and a mover and shaker behind events organised on-site. In 1989, artists associated with The Cellar – not unlike the majority of Polish society – rejoiced at the fall of communism in Central Europe.
Skrzynecki died in 1997, closing behind the original chapter in the history of the most notable late twentieth-century Polish cabaret. Countless esteemed artists graced The Cellar’s stage, including pianist Krzysztof Komeda, trumpeter Tomasz Stańko, singer Ewa Demarczyk, and film score composer Zbigniew Preisner. In its heyday, the club enjoyed a wide network of high-profile friends and well-wishers, such as film director Andrzej Wajda, writer and Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz, playwright Sławomir Mrożek, and journalist Jerzy Turowicz. The cabaret remains active to this day: some of the old-time artists are still around, just as they were thirty or forty years ago; seasoned audience members still frequent the club, introducing new generations to the legendary haunt.
Leszek Długosz (b. 1941) – poet, composer, singer-songwriter, pianist, and actor. Core member of The Cellar under the Rams (1964–1978) as one of the most recognisable practitioners of sung poetry (Pol. poezja śpiewana). In cooperation with Zygmunt Konieczny, the cabaret’s in-house composer, he created unforgettable, unusually emotive interpretations of poems by widely-known and significant Polish poets, such as Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, Julian Tuwim, and Andrzej Bursa. Długosz also performed his own poetry as well as chansons, touring solo all over Poland and internationally, among others in Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Canada, Switzerland, Sweden, USA, and Italy. Author of several collections of poetry, music albums, and memoirs about his Cellar days. Graduate of Polish Studies from the Jagiellonian University; for two years studied acting at the AST National Academy of Theatre Arts in Kraków. Starred among others in films directed by Andrzej Żuławski, The Third Part of the Night (Trzecia część nocy, 1971) and On the Silver Globe (Na srebrnym globie, 1988). In the 2000s, he entered Polish political life, running in the 2007 parliamentary elections on the Law and Justice (Pol. Prawo i Sprawiedliwość) ballot, a right-wing party that is currently (July 2022) in power.