Until 18 September 2022, the exhibition “Słowacki in Lebanon” will be held at the Museum of Literature in Warsaw’s Old Town Square. This Saturday, 9 July, the Museum is inviting visitors to a tour of the exhibition led by Agnieszka Papieska, curator who will talk about the exhibition.

“Juliusz Słowacki’s journey to the Middle East, which began in a state of existential crisis and culminated in the monastery of St Anthony in Ghazir, is a little-known fact in the poet’s biography. However, it was the trip to Lebanon that changed him as a man and an artist” states the exhibition catalogue, which tells the story of Juliusz Słowacki’s inner journey and spiritual transformation, what was a trigger to write the poem ‘Anhelli’.

Słowacki set out on his journey in August 1836 from Naples. His route included Greece, Egypt, Palestine and Syria. He reached Lebanon on horseback, saw the ruins of Baalbek and arrived in Beirut.  During his travels, he wrote and drew. Sketches, alongside manuscripts of works, filled the pages of two notebooks: “Drawing Album of a Journey to the East” and “Eastern Diary” – considered lost until recently”, says the Warsaw Museum of Literature.

In February 1837, Słowacki arrived at the monastery of St Anthony in Ghazir (known as Betcheshban), where, learning Arabic, he spent several weeks among the monks. There, he sketched the first version of the poem ‘Anhelli’, and created one of the work’s characters, the angel Eloe, based on legends he heard from the monks.

His stay at the Ghazir Monastery was a time of meditation and spiritual transformation. In June 1837, Słowacki’s journey came to an end. A year later, a poem Anhelli was published in Paris, the fruit of his stay in the Lebanese monastery and a testimony to his fascination with Dante’s Divine Comedy, from which the structural idea of the poem stemmed: the journey of the master (Shaman) and the pupil (Anhelli) through the circles of hell.

Adrian Andrzejewski