“Dom / Дім – our Home”. For the fifth time, they brought different cultures together in Gdańsk
On 8 August, the garden of the RC Foundation at 23 Wita Stwosza Street in Gdańsk Oliwa turned for a few hours into a place where it was hard to find a stranger. The Intercultural Family Picnic “Dom / Дім – our Home. On the Gdańsk Waves of Goodness” took place this year for the fifth time, and its leading theme was a book that almost everyone knows – “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
A deliberate choice. The organizers – Ukrainian Library in Gdańsk, RC Foundation and Mozaika Social Hub – decided to guide visitors through a story about making the unfamiliar familiar, taking responsibility for loved ones, and the fact that the most important things are not visible at first glance. In practice, this meant a literary zone “In the Footsteps of the Little Prince”, an open-air art gallery called “Gallery B-612” – after the asteroid on which the title character lived – and an author meeting, “The Secrets of Iryna Matsko’s Fairy Tales”. Somewhere between the stalls, children were braiding hair and painting faces, and a little farther on adults were weaving camouflage nets for Ukraine – already a permanent feature of the fair, which the organizers describe as an expression of constant solidarity.
From a small fair to an event under the governor’s patronage
Daria Balabai, founder of the Ukrainian Library in Gdańsk and initiator of the entire undertaking, recalled from the stage how modest the beginnings were. “This is already the fifth edition; it all started with a tiny little picnic,” she said. Today the event has the honorary patronage of the Pomeranian Voivode Beata Rutkiewicz, the Marshal of the Voivodeship Mieczysław Struk, and the Consulate General of Ukraine in Gdańsk, and among the guests were representatives of the city authorities, the voivodeship, and Gdynia.
Gdańsk’s Deputy Mayor for Social Development and Equal Treatment, Monika Chabior, did not hide that the difference in scale is impressive. “And now look how beautiful it is, how full of people, what positive, good energy there is, and how many wonderful things are happening,” she said, adding that the point of such meetings is to build a city of people who are open and understand one another.
A similar tone came through in the remarks of Agnieszka Zabłocka, Director of the Office of the Marshal of the Pomeranian Voivodeship, who spoke on behalf of Marshal Mieczysław Struk. In her view, true integration does not happen in offices and on forms, but where there is trust and a sense of security—and she understood multiculturalism as a meeting of many traditions that enrich one another. Anna Olkowska-Jacyno, Second Deputy Voivode of Pomerania, put it even more simply: you can build a home regardless of what language you speak, where you come from, and what you believe in. And Teresa Bysewska from the Gdynia City Council added her definition—for her, home is a community and a table, and that day, a lot of good really did happen at the tables.
Music, workshops, and a moment for yourself
The program was filled with performances by the “Maksymus” Dance Studio and a concert by the band Migracia, a craft yard with a handicrafts and services zone, stands of local organizations and cultural institutions, and a sports-and-health zone with demonstrations and consultations. Safety was overseen by the Gdańsk WOPR. The film “Bajka o koniku” was also shown, along with a meeting with its creators, and food trucks and a grill made sure that no one left hungry.
Kamil Poźniak, coordinator of the Mozaika Social Hub at the RC Foundation, also took the opportunity to remind everyone what his team does on a day-to-day basis—legal advice, career counseling, psychological support, and Polish language lessons for migrants. In that sense, the fair is only one, the most visible element of much broader work that the RC Foundation carries out throughout the year.
The list of partners and co-organizers of this year’s edition includes, among others, the BoFolk Foundation, the Lumus Foundation, the Pomeranian Regional Branch of the Polish Red Cross (PCK), the Balans Counseling Center, Plast – the Ukrainian Scouting Organization in Gdańsk, United Gdańsk, the Zupa na Monciaku Foundation, the Penumbra Foundation, ProfiLingua Gdańsk, the Mali i Duzi Foundation, Cybulska Studio Ceramic Studio, the Turkus Polish-Turkish Association, the Poland–Germany Society in Gdańsk, the Honorary Consulate of the Republic of Moldova in Gdańsk, the Kashubian-Pomeranian Association, the Out of Darkness Foundation, and the Belarusian Cultural Society Chatka. Video footage from the event was prepared by the poprostu creative studio. Media patronage was provided by Trojmiasto.pl.
One dream for future editions
All these voices—the voivode’s, the mayor’s, the director’s, and the coordinator’s—could essentially be reduced to one sentence that Daria Balabai repeated several times in different ways: not to pay attention to where someone is from, what nationality they are, or what color their skin is, but only to whether they are a good person. Agnieszka Zabłocka summed it up from a practical perspective—events like this later translate into real relationships and tangible effects of integration, not assimilation.
Source: the RC Foundation’s Facebook page. Photo author: Jakub Soja.
