- Title: POLAND: Polish businessman builds upside down house
- Date: 3rd September 2007
- Summary: TOURISTS IN QUEUE VARIOUS OF TOURISTS VISITING HOUSE
- Embargoed: 18th September 2007 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Poland
- Country: Poland
- Topics: Light / Amusing / Unusual / Quirky
- Reuters ID: LVABIJC8PTIPM5AH6WC8QVT5T2CL
- Story Text: Polish businessman and philanthropist says he has built an upside down house to remind people of wrong-doings against humanity. The house has been attracting thousands of tourists.
A ceiling instead of a floor and furniture above your head - this is the feeling visitors have upon entering the house which was built upside down.
A feeling of dizziness comes after just a few seconds of walking around the structure, which is also tilted sideways to add to the effect.
"It's just terrible here. I'm visiting for the second time and it's terrible! You would have to be inside for at least half an hour to get used to it. I feel terrible; I can't even speak because I'll feel dizzier," said tourist Joanna Ziencik, who held on to the walls to keep stable as she walked around the upside down house. Although the floor (normally a ceiling) in this house is level, the perception of being upside down is enough to develop mild sea sickness.
But the skewed view of the world keeps thousands of tourists pouring in. It takes a few hours of queuing to get into the house and it was visited by as many as six thousand people on just one Sunday this summer.
The upside down or inverted house was built by local businessman and philanthropist Daniel Czapiewski. Czapiewski descends from the ethnic minority of Kaszubs who live in the Wistula river estuary, named Kaszuby after its inhabitants.
Czapiewski had the idea to build his house when Poland was still under communist rule. It was then that he realized practically all decisions of the ruling communist party were detached from reality. Today the house is a symbol of every wrongdoing against humanity.
"This house is a warning about the path we are taking,"
Czapiewski said.
"Mankind is spoiling this world and only mankind can fix it. There is an exhibition of Polish painters inside the house illustrating the precarious position the world has found itself in world and how people must do more to protect it. The paintings show fascism, terrorism, Hiroshima, tsunami, famine, Oswiecim (Nazi concentration camp), communism and poverty. At the end our great countryman Pope John Paul II is pretending to look through binoculars and showing us that it can be better, but everything is up to us," he added.
It took 114 days to build the structure. A typical project made by Czapiewski's corperation which specializes in wooden houses, would normally take 21 days to construct. He remembers that his workers had to take an hour's break every three hours while working inside the house because they were feeling disorientated and confused from the strange angles of the walls.
The upside down house is not the first unusual structure made or devised by Czapiewski. He is infamous for making the longest single piece of wood in the world - a Guinness World Record. Czapiewski also smuggled a complete antique house out of Russia. The house was built by Polish detainees sent in their thousands to desolate regions of Siberia by Russian Tsars in the eighteenth century. Because of its age, suspected to be over 240 years old, the Siberian house was officially an antique and therefore illegal to export.
Czapiewski refused to name his accomplices in the procedure. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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