As most bloggers know, to keep your web page showing up into the google search engine results, you have to post on a regular base. Apart form this little tidbit of knowledge, I have no clue how this google algorithm works. To be blatantly honest with you, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and all the other crap related to it doesn’t interest me. It makes me very bad at promoting my website and, by consequence, my books.
About a year and a half ago, I decided to post once a week an article of about 500 words on my website, mostly centering around artistically or scientifically subjects that influenced my own literary activity.
Now this week I have a dilemma; either to post nothing because I have nothing to share with you and damn the whole google algorithm or to post a picture of my cat like most other writers do when they have nothing to write about.
In our relation, my wife is the photographer and she pertinently refuses to take pictures of the cat. Because the cat bites her. She has a strained relation with our cat. She told me a little grumpy to publish instead a picture of Pan Twardovski. That’s part of her Polish background.
According to an old legend, Twardowski was a nobleman (szlachcic) who lived in Kraków in the 16th century. He sold his soul to the devil in exchange for great knowledge and magical powers. For his sins, Twardowski, on his way to hell, fell on the Moon where he lives to this day.
So this week, instead of some overwrought distillation of my musings or a picture of our cat, you’re getting a picture of Pan Twardowski, the Polish Man in the Moon.
Shaharee Vyaas 
Well, to be accurate, Pan Twardowski was a nobleman and alchemist who made a pact with the devil – his soul in exchange for knowledge. Twardowski helped people with his newfound alchamical and medical knowledge, but when the devil came to collect his soul (through treachery, I might add), Twardowski escaped to the Moon on his magical rooster 😉 Every now and then he sends down his spider to collect news from Kraków…
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In the version I’m familiar with, he got on the Moon when he fell of the devil’s back on his way to Hell because he was praying feverishly to the holy virgin. But I find your version more fun. Thank you for sharing this.
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It is a quite popular legend, and has a good few versions! I agree with you: the pious one is definitely less fun than the one with a gigantic magic rooster!
As an aside, I even visited the restaurant called Rome where Pan Twardowski was supposedly tricked by the devil 😉
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