Kazik — the Polish person who chose to stay in My Son and Hoi An

At the end of Hoi An's ancient town, in a quiet corner, there stands a stone monument depicting the face of a man with a long beard. He is not Vietnamese. The nameplate reads: Kazimierz Kwiatkowski.

The people of Hoi An simply call him Mr. Kazik.

Kazik is a Polish architect who came to Vietnam in the early 1980s as part of a cooperation program for monument restoration. At that time the country had just emerged from war and was still very poor, and My Son had been almost forgotten: the towers had collapsed, bombs and mines had not yet been fully cleared, and forest trees covered the foundations.

He stayed. Not for a few months, but for almost the rest of his life. He worked at My Son, then Hoi An, then Hue. He lived alongside Vietnamese craftsmen, learned their methods, and in turn taught them European conservation techniques.

His view on restoration is quite firm and is still cited to this day: preserve the current state, reinforce what exists, and do not rebuild what has been lost based on one's own imagination. An honest ruin is more valuable than a new structure that merely looks antique.

He passed away in 1997 in Huế, while still working. Two years later, Hội An and Mỹ Sơn were both recognized by UNESCO as World Cultural Heritage Sites. He did not live to see that day.

The monument in Hoi An was built by local people. What catches my attention every time I pass by isn't the statue itself, but its base: there are often fresh flowers, and sometimes even a lit incense stick. No one forces anyone to do that.

This is perhaps the kindest thing in this story. A foreigner came to work for the heritage site of a country that was not his own homeland, and worked there until his death; and the people of that land remembered him the way they remember their own family members — with flowers and incense, not merely with a bronze plaque.