In a narrow valley in the Low Beskids, close to the Slovak border in south-eastern Poland, stands the wooden church of Saint Paraskeva in Kwiatoń, often called the most beautiful of the Lemko churches. Built in the seventeenth century by the Lemkos, an East Slavic highland people who lived in these hills for centuries, it is one of the sixteen wooden tserkvas of the Carpathian region in Poland and Ukraine that UNESCO listed in 2013. Its silhouette is unmistakable: three towers rising in steps toward the west, each topped with onion-shaped domes and crosses, the walls covered in wooden shingles that have weathered to silver-grey.
The church's story is tied to one of the darker episodes of Polish history. In 1947, in Operation Vistula, the Lemko population was forcibly removed from these mountains and resettled in western and northern Poland, and many villages were abandoned. Churches were taken over by Catholic parishes or left to decay. Today, Kwiatoń is used as a Roman Catholic church, but its iconostasis and paintings remain, and the Lemko heritage of the area is slowly being remembered and celebrated.
The surrounding landscape is gentle mountain country, with rounded forested ridges, meadows and small villages strung along the streams. The roads from Gorlice through Uście Gorlickie toward the spa village of Wysowa-Zdrój are narrow, winding and quiet, with good surfaces in most places and plenty of opportunities to stop and photograph wooden churches, roadside shrines and old farmsteads. Further south, the border crossing to Slovakia opens up more empty roads.
This is also where the oil industry began. In the 1850s, the pharmacist Ignacy Łukasiewicz developed the kerosene lamp in this region, and the world's first oil wells were dug nearby, at Bóbrka near Krosno, where an open-air museum shows the old workings. During the First World War, the Battle of Gorlice in 1915 was fought across these hills, and the area is dotted with war cemeteries, many designed by the Slovak architect Dušan Jurkovič in wood and stone.
Grybów, around twelve kilometres away, and Gorlice have fuel and shops; the villages have small stores and guesthouses. Wysowa is known for its mineral waters. Try a plate of pierogi or a bowl of żurek, sour rye soup, and in autumn ask about local mushrooms, which the Beskids produce in abundance.