I 112 Perspectives from Poland people of the late 1970s and the 1980s through the Thorgal comic series and similar pop-culture influences.19 The closely interrelated fields of Slavic Neopaganism and black metal music gained momentum after the end of state socialism as described elsewhere in this volume by Mariusz Filip for the Pagan movement and by Ryan Buesnel for the black metal scene. Both, like other scholars before them, identify the 1990s as a kind of (trans-)formation phase. However, this also holds true for early mediaeval reenactments of Slav and Viking battles, which, in Poland, developed alongside the Wolin festival.20 Apart from a number of previous local initiatives, the festival began in earnest in 1993, when Scandinavian reenactment groups performed there. It eventually became a permanent annual event, for which an association was founded, and an open-air museum established.21 Historically and archaeologically speaking, mediaeval Wolin was home to Scandinavian trading settlements and one of the multicultural emporia in the Baltic region. However, it is usually also interpreted as being the location of Jomsborg, a legendary place on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea that various Icelandic sagas present as the fortress of the fabled Jomsvikings. This story forms the background narrative for the festival, providing the idea of a Viking stronghold on Slavic soil and thus uniting Slavic and Viking history. Furthermore, the Jomsviking saga portrays the Jomsviking warrior group as a particularly heroic community of men that was organised according to fixed social rules. Though observers and chroniclers of the Wolin festival rarely discuss its political ambiguity in any great detail, a certain affinity has been discernible from the early years onwards. Apart from the prominent coverage in the Resistance Magazine, there were also reports from the early 2000s of violent and openly extreme rightwing visitors to the festival, such as neo-Nazis who inflicted severe beatings on people on the train heading to the festival because they did not look “Polish enough” to them and members of the Polish branch of the international extremist organisation Blood and Honour who visited the festival and chanted right-wing slogans.22 For these radical-right segments of the Pagan-mediaevalist milieu, the most important medium for the exchange of political ideas at this time were self-printed magazines (“zines”) in which theories of the European New Right were discussed. Some of the actors mentioned and quoted in the Resistance Magazine report were also actively involved in editing and contributing to these zines. It even seemed as if the faction that described itself there as Narodowy Socjalizm (“National Socialism”) was primarily Neopagan in character at that time.23 During the transformation period, this movement arose due to the air of political resignation triggered by the social and economic problems caused by the transition to capitalism, coupled with euroscepticism and a new sense of nationalism. This led people to hark back to the culturalist and nationalist ideology of the interwar Zadruga group. One of the political concepts discussed in these zines was that societies should be organised hierarchically and that elites are necessary in order to lead a nation, referring more or less directly to concepts proposed by Vilfredo Pareto and Julius Evola.24 In particular, the latter’s social ideal of a caste system, which framed racial and class-specific elitism as an Indo-Aryan tradition to be restored, is echoed in some of the statements made. This formed one of the key elements of Evola’s anti-modernism, which was heavily inspired by the ideas of French intellectual René Guénon in many ways.25 In order to establish “the ideal state”, Igor Górewicz suggested, Fig. 3 Cover of Krak magazine (December issue 1937) edited by Stanisław Szukalski.
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