Stories of Paraná - Poles in Paraná

Stories of Paraná - Poles in Paraná

Poles in Paraná
Maria do Carmo R. Krieger Goulart

The "land of Paraná all nations" - also the name of a show created by journalist and composer Paulo Fortes Adherbal Vitola - received from the last century, people from different ethnic backgrounds as Germans, Italians, Japanese, Ukrainian, Spanish , Dutch and of course, the Poles, who lived moments eternalized his career on Brazilian soil.
The first wave of Polish immigrants arrived in southern Brazil cm 1869. Legend, however, that by his will they disembark away from here.
According to oral history, the Poles longed to reach the city of San Francisco, in the United States.
Eventually landing in another San Francisco: the South Harbour on the north coast of Santa Catarina.
How did they know English as much of Portuguese, it seems they were only notice the difference a few months later, when some families decided to move to Mexico, "near here."
Stories, and humor aside, the fact is that large differences not only of geographical location, iri-am permeate the lives of these citizens, starting with a crucial detail: how immigrants were spontaneous, the Government of His Imperial Majesty had not compared many obligations to them as those assumed, for example, near the German-immigrant invited to populate the newly founded colonies in Brazil.
For starters, the Poles were installed in the then Colony Prince Dom Pedro, near Cologne Itajahy in Vale do Itajai-Mirim, in Santa Catarina, future site of the city of Brusque.
Were infertile land on hillsides, and the Poles were all farmers.
After two years of unsuccessful attempts to take some of that land livelihood, decided to drop everything and transmigrate Curitiba, contrary to orders of His Imperial Highness Dom Pedro, who regarded them as well installed in the region as the settlers of German origin, these on their Most artisans.
Enter the scene then Father Anthony Zielinski, vicar of the Parish of St. Peter the Apostle Gaspar, Gaspar, a city near Brusque, and Edmundo Saporski, residing in the same parish.
Both worked the idea of ​​bringing Polish countrymen here and tried with those who were already coming.
Reaching out, amid setbacks official transmigration first brought the men who came - gasp! - Walk, followed by women and children, such a port-a-path-to for (Itajaí-Antonina) and carts.
In Curitiba rocio Pilarzinho the Poles completed its trajectory immigrants transmigrants, there settling definitively (a century later, in the same neighborhood Pilarzinho live one of his most illustrious descendants, the poet Paul Leminski). Faced, however, the same difficulties regarding lots, housing and food, compounded by the lack of a shelter for them, as Saporski promised, prompting the Ministry of Agriculture to telegraph in 01.11.1871, the Government of Province of Paraná on the situation of Polish settlers, asking whether it was true that "they went begging and they had to occupy." Poles required lots of land to the City of Curitiba and from 1873 began his requests to be met.
In the following decades, waves and more waves of Polish immigrants and their descendants constituted one of the main ethnic groups of Paraná. Came here for freedom and bringing love ancient culture of a people.
Here they built a new home. The saga of the pioneers, however, still prominent in this Paraná many flags.

Maria do Carmo K Krieger Goulart, historian


Source: Stories of Paraná, Brasil.