The air was still and cool when I stepped out of my guesthouse, the kind of quiet that makes you check if the world is still working. I'd slept with the window open, which I never do in cities, and the only sound all night was the occasional rustle of something moving in the undergrowth below. It's day three here in Białowieża, and I'm starting to understand that this place doesn't give you its stories all at once. You have to let them catch up to you.
I had a slow breakfast at Gospoda Pod Żubrem, the kind of place that serves you żurek at eleven in the morning without blinking. The sour rye soup, a boiled egg hiding in the bowl, a slice of good bread - it costs about 35 zloty, roughly eleven dollars, and it's the kind of meal that doesn't so much fill you up as it sets you right. The room was half-empty, mostly locals reading newspapers and one table of German tourists plotting their day with a map spread out like a picnic blanket.
The plan was simple. I needed to walk off that żurek on the Royal Oaks Trail over in Stara Białowieża, the old settlement quarter. It's a route that leads you through what's left of the former royal forest, past trees with names and histories. I'd read about it in the little guide I picked up at the Nature and Forest Museum, and the thought of seeing an oak that's stood for four hundred years felt like the right pace for a Tuesday morning.
I'll admit it, I was not fully prepared for the walking. The trail starts pretty gently along a wide, sandy track, the kind of path that makes you think you're on a nature walk. But then it narrows, and you're suddenly inside the forest proper, and the scale of it hits you. These aren't the tall, uniform pines you see planted in rows elsewhere in Poland. These are gnarled, ancient beings, some with trunks wider than my car back in Warsaw, their lower branches twisted and dead, their canopies so high above that the light filtering down is green and watery.
I passed a sign for a named oak - I won't butcher the pronunciation of it, but it was one of the ones on the Royal Oaks Trail, named after a king or a legend. The sheer mass of it was humbling. I just stood there for a while, listening. There's a sound to this forest that's hard to describe, a low, layered hum of insects and the rustle of leaves that isn't wind. It feels ancient in a way that's almost unsettling, like you've stepped into a place that doesn't need you to exist.
And then, of course, the thought that's been buzzing in the back of my head since I arrived finally hit the front. I'm talking about the bison. The European bison, the żubr. They're the whole reason this forest matters, the reason it's a UNESCO World Heritage site, the reason people fly across the Atlantic to walk these paths. And they are currently in the middle of their rutting season, which runs from August into October. I'd heard the warnings, seen the posters, but being out on the trail, deep in their territory, it becomes less of a warning and more of a fact.
Just a few days ago, on the third, a tourist walked within a few meters of a bison right here in Stara Białowieża, not far from where I was standing. The viral videos are all over the internet - you might have seen them. The animal, a bull, knocked the person to the ground and injured them badly. It's a sobering thing to read while you're surrounded by the very habitat where it happened. It's not a story designed to scare you away; it's a story designed to make you respect the space.
The locals, the ones I've talked to at the Białowieska and at the little shops, they have a measured way of talking about it. It's not fear, it's a deep, practical understanding. They live with these animals on the edges of their village. One man told me, in that careful Polish way of understatement, that you just have to give them their space. 'They are not a zoo animal,' he said. 'They are a forest animal.' And the forest, out here, is not a backdrop. It's a working, living, breathing thing.
I walked for another hour or so, not seeing a single bison, which was honestly fine by me. I saw plenty of other signs of them, though - massive, hoof-churned wallows in the muddy patches of the trail, and a few trees where the bark had been rubbed smooth by a bull's sheer, enormous mass. It's a different kind of wildlife watching. Instead of looking for the animal, you're reading the evidence of its presence, and in a way, that feels more real.
Coming out of the forest, back into the heat of the midday sun, I felt the tension I hadn't realized I was holding just drop from my shoulders. The village was coming alive again. A few cyclists were rolling past, and the little cappuccino at Sarenka Cafe Gallery is starting to sound like a perfect idea. It costs about 14 zloty, around four dollars, and the woman behind the counter remembers me from yesterday. In a city, that would be a nice surprise. Here, it feels like the default.
Over my coffee, I started to think about the bigger picture of this forest. It's not just a pretty place to walk. This whole area is a stage for a bitter, long-running political fight. The previous government's 'sanitary' logging was deemed illegal by the EU courts, and the current ministry wants to make nearly the whole forest a national park. But that plan is bitterly contested by local foresters and parts of the community here, who see it as a threat to their jobs and a fast-depopulating way of life.
It's a complex situation. On one hand, you have the last primeval lowland forest in Europe, a place of incredible ecological importance. On the other, you have a small, economically struggling village that has depended on the timber industry for generations. To a traveler, it might seem clear cut, but when you sit here and see the families and the businesses that survive on the edge of this place, you realize it's a story about people as much as it is about trees.
There's also a road-widening project on Provincial Road 687 running right through the forest, and while it's the bird-breeding season, environmental groups are trying to get the contractor to stop work. The breeding-season ban apparently runs until the end of this month, but the fight continues. It's a constant, low-level background hum to the peace and quiet, this awareness that the forest you're enjoying is a contested landscape.
I wandered back through the village toward the Palace Park, Park Pałacowy, the old English-style garden. It's free to walk through, and it's a strange, beautiful thing. The 19th-century garden is still there, with its dozens of tree species, but the actual palace, the tsarist hunting palace, was destroyed in 1944. All that's left is the landscaped ghosts of it, this beautiful empty space where power used to sit.
There's also a small Orthodox church, the St. Nicholas Orthodox Church, with its double domes that look straight out of a different era. It was built in the 1890s for Tsar Alexander III, an attempt to stake a Russian claim on this land. The interior is famous for its porcelain iconostasis, I'm told, the only one of its kind in Poland, brought all the way from St. Petersburg. I didn't go in this time, just stood outside and listened to the quiet. It's a different kind of history than the one in Warsaw, a more personal, more borderland history.
And that's the thought that I keep coming back to here. Warsaw is a city of reconstruction, of building things back up from zero. This is a place of preservation, of trying to hold on to something that was never really supposed to survive. The forest, the bison, the old wooden architecture in the skansen out in Zastawa - it's all a testament to a different kind of endurance.
As the afternoon started to fade and the light got that golden, late-August quality to it, I found myself back at my guesthouse. I'd walked a good eight or nine kilometers, a map of the day in my tired legs. The nights here in Białowieża are early. There's no big nightlife scene, just the warmth of the guesthouses and the occasional sound of music drifting from a restaurant. It costs roughly 120 zloty for a simple room here in a pension, if you're looking for a base, and honestly, right now, it feels worth every single grosz.
Tomorrow I'm thinking of getting a bike and trying a stretch of the Green Velo route that runs through the village, maybe heading toward the Narewka river. It's supposed to be a good way to see more of the forest without hiking the whole time. But today, this slow day, this quiet day of walking and thinking, was exactly what I needed. The city, with its relentless energy, feels a world away. Here, the bison are wild, the forest is old, and the only thing you have to keep up with is the setting sun.
So from the quiet edge of the Białowieża forest, on a warm Tuesday in August, this is Kacper, signing off. The żurek is simmering somewhere, the bison are somewhere in the trees, and for now, that's more than enough. Trzymaj się, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.