Overcoming Otherness: Polish Accounts from Nineteenth-Century Travels to Portugal

Portugal was regarded by an average Pole in the nineteenth century as “legendary Oceanid” (as Adolf Pawiński described it). The country located at the far edge of Europe, far from popular travel routes of the epoch was seldom visited and the knowledge about its cultural and geographical phenomena was limited. It might have caused the feeling of otherness among those who decided to go to Portugal in the nineteenth century. The aim of the text is to analyze different strategies applied by Polish travelers in order to overcome the feeling of strangeness and otherness of the experienced phenomena. The following general typology can be suggested: 1. Ironic strategy (e.g., Adolf Pawiński); 2. Comparative strategy (e.g., Teodor Tripplin); 3. Transgressive strategy (e.g., Wincenty Lutosławski). The analysis aims at revealing such elements of culture, topography, or aesthetics that could have been regarded as especially strange to the nineteenth-century Poles.