What Zalipie is known for

Zalipie is a farm village in Gmina Olesno, in Poland’s Lesser Poland Voivodeship, at the centre of a wider region called Powiśle Dąbrowskie. It is known for a local custom: women paint bright flowers on the houses they live in, and have done since at least the late nineteenth century.

A legend, and what ethnographers say instead

The origin story says smoke from chimneyless stoves once blackened the walls with soot, and women covered the stains with flowers. It is a legend. Ethnographers instead link the flowering of wall painting to the spread of chimney stoves, which stopped walls from quickly re-blackening. The earliest decorations were not flowers at all, but geometric patterns in local brown clay.

A contest that keeps the tradition new

Around 1905 the folklore enthusiast Władysław Hickel visited and published the first account of the custom in the journal Lud. In 1948 a Painted Cottage contest, Malowana Chata, began in Dąbrowa Tarnowska with 18 cottages entered. It moved to Zalipie in 1965, and the District Museum in Tarnów has run it since 1978.

Whose houses, whose labour

About 100 people, mostly women, took part in the contest in 2018. A map at the House of Women Painters marks about 40 painted properties, and about 19,000 visitors came in 2018, a third of them from abroad. The most visited stop is the painted farmstead of Felicja Curyłowa, whose work also reached the Wierzynek restaurant in Kraków and the MS Batory ocean liner, before the state’s Cepelia company bought her home and turned it into a museum.

A regional tradition, not just one village's

The painting custom is not unique to Zalipie: it survives in Olesno, Niwki, Ćwików and Kłyż too, kept alive mainly through the annual contest. Judges weigh execution skill, colour harmony and fidelity to tradition, and every entry must be new work, not the upkeep of an old one, so the tradition keeps renewing itself.