The city of Gdańsk has bid the final farewell to its iconic writer, literary critic, and academic lecturer, Paweł Huelle. The most difficult thing to cope with is the fact he won't write anything anymore. And he had so many stories to tell," Gdańsk Mayor Aleksandra Dulkiewicz said during the funeral at Srebrzysko Cemetery on Thursday (Dec.7).
The funeral ceremony at the Church of St. John was attended, among others, by Gdańsk Mayor Aleksandra Dulkiewicz, Senator Bogdan Borusewicz, Wojciech Książek of the Solidarity trade union, and Basil Kerski - the European Solidarity Center director.
The holy mass was conducted by Father Krzysztof Niedałtowski and Father Marcin Hintz, who was friends with the late writer.
"We receive life as a debt we must repay. We pay it back the moment we die. Paweł was paying his debt with great generosity. He would leave so many traces of his presence, it was enough for us to mend this world's gaps," Fr. Niedałtowski said.
"Recently he would say he could not fit in, that it was hard for him to live in a world in which art and literature were marginalized, in which only those count who are the loudest and who ride roughshod. He would hide, maybe he wanted to disappear, Weiser Dawidek, we shall never find out," the priest added.
Funeral at Srebrzysko Cemetery
After the mass, the ceremony moved to Srebrzysko Cemetery in the Gdańsk district of Wrzeszcz.
Gdańsk Mayor Aleksandra Dulkiewicz said that Huelle "dreamt of warm Greece, but fate drove him towards cold sea". "But he loved this Gdańsk of his more than anything," she noted, adding that news about his passing like a bolt from the blue.
"I don't need to convince anyone just how great a loss Polish culture and the city of Gdańsk have incurred. ... The most difficult thing to cope with is the fact he won't write anything anymore. And he had so many stories to tell," she added.
Marshal of the Pomeranian Voivodeship Mieczysław Struk also spoke during the funeral ceremony.
"He passed away too soon and tragically. He was a writer and Gdańsk's iconic personality. He helped us understand Gdańsk. ... We are bidding farewell to an intellectual, without whose decades-long presence Gdańsk and Pomerania would have been spiritually poorer, and we would have known much less about ourselves," he said.
Paweł Huelle was buried at the cemetery's honor lane. He had died at the age of 66 in his apartment in Gdańsk on Nov. 27. In 2022, Huelle had celebrated his 65th birthday at a special function at Gdańsk Old City Hall, at which he had received the City of Gdańsk Award in Culture.
Źródło: TVN24 News in English, TVN24, PAP