Torun – 3

Excerpt from the new book about visiting Poland and The Baltics.

Also on Rynek is the frog fountain paying homage to a Pied Piper type story. The frogs are all looking at a young man called Janko Muzykant playing a fiddle. The tale is that a witch once came to Torun and was not welcomed in a nice enough way, so she inflicted a plague of frogs of biblical proportions on the town. The mayor offered a bag of gold and the hand of his daughter in marriage to the first person who could rid his town of the frogs. 

A peasant boy came forward and played such a mellifluous tune on his fiddle that the frogs were enchanted following him as he headed into the woods, thus saving the town. What is interesting is how this fountain and the folk story have been interwoven with a novella Janko Muzykant by Polish writer and winner of 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature, Henryk Sienkiewicz, first published in the Kurier Warszawski in 1879.