Text by Jerzy Janicki
by Adam Bujak

A photo collection of 36 Polish castles, now part of Ukraine. Nostalgic views of the River Dnieper and the steppes, with vestiges of their erstwhile Polish culture.

What does this album mean? Is it just an album? Merely the outcome of its author's peregrinations, in an attempt to perpetuate the extant walls of the once proud castles guarding the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania? Perhaps, under the spell of the surrounding countryside, he suddenly felt the urge to preserve, in an instant flash of his camera - over and above its metaphorical sense and its split-second of rapture - a testimony to the utter reality of the poet's ancient sigh that "there is no land like Podolia"?
I think this album may be read in may different ways, according to the reader's age, knowledge, and place of birth. For people of my own generation, who despite the forty-year official imposition of silence about this land, never suppressed their memories, it will be a revival of those memories. To all those whose personal documents bear place-names like Zloczow, or Brzezany, Buczacz, Trembowla, or Czrtkow, the beauty of Adam Bujak's photographs will many a time be blurred by a misty film of tears, as they inspect them more by the exercise of their nostalgia and emotions than of their reason. Finally, to those for whom all that names like Zbaraz will mean is no more than what their teachers of Polish told them to remember of Sienkiewicz's epic adventures of Pan Skrzetuski riding through the Marchland Steppes of the Old Republic, this album will bring pictorial proof of the history lesson's reality.