By Ella Roerden, Syracuse University
Hello! My name is Ella Roerden, and I am a junior at Syracuse University, pursuing majors in Anthropology and International Relations. I have lived in Syracuse my whole life, but I have always loved to travel. This fall, I am spending the semester in Wroclaw, Poland, and it is the third semester abroad I have been lucky enough to participate in. I spent my freshman fall in Florence, Italy, and this past semester (my sophomore spring), in Santiago, Chile. Aside from these semesters, I have also had the pleasure of traveling a lot with my parents. As I have grown up, I have fallen in love with travel, and it has shaped me as an anthropologist. When one travels, they encounter all kinds of stories, and that is something that has guided me for years. I believe stories are at the core of life, and every story deserves to be told and listened to. I love reading, thus I consume a great number of fictional stories, but I also am passionate about real human stories. Anywhere I go, I can collect all sorts of stories—from people, places, and even things like meals and buildings. I think of anthropologists as story collectors, and I’m so excited to add myself to their number.
Me loving life in a massive bookstore in Buenos Aires!
A stunning view of Florence!
This anthropological-inspired love for stories is what drove me towards my research idea. This semester as I’m gallivanting across Poland, I’ll be visiting a selection of the hundreds of castles nestled into the Polish landscape. Of the five castles I’ve chosen, most were built between 1200 and 1400, but they are all in various stages of repair and preservation. One is completely in ruins. Others have been fully reconstructed. Others have been subject to various renovations across centuries. These different degrees of preservation all have an impact on the historical memory of the castles, and what stories they tell. As museums and historic sites in the twenty-first century, I’m eager to investigate whose stories are present and represented, and to gauge what may have been different if each castle was preserved differently. Does a castle that’s been completely gutted and redone tell its story the same way as one that hasn’t seen fresh cement in hundreds of years? Would both castles tell the stories of peasants and servants the same way they’d tell of royals and nobility? These are just some of the questions I’m setting out to answer.
Wroclaw is situated in the south-western section of Poland, in a region called Lower Silesia. From there, the five castles I’ll be visiting are scattered across the country, so I’ll be taking a combination of trains and buses to get to them. Excitingly, a couple of the castles include overnight lodgings inside them, so I am hoping to be able to take advantage of that—who wouldn’t want to spend the night in a castle? I have not yet booked specific dates to go visit each castle. That is something that I am a bit nervous about, because my study abroad program has asked us not to solidify any personal travel until we arrive, but I am worried that by then some of the castles may be sold out for any dates I would be able to go. I am hoping for the best, and will also have some “backup” castles just in case. But if all goes according to plan, I am going to have a “movie moment” of a semester. As a lover and mass-consumer of stories, I have always been fond of fantasy when it comes to books, so I am eager to immerse myself in some real-life castles. From what I’ve heard, one of the castles I plan to visit even has its own fire-breathing dragon! Wherever the semester takes me, I’m excited to see what I make of it!
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