Kazik — the Polish man who chose to stay with My Son and Hoi An

After walking through the whole of Hoi An's ancient town, in a quiet corner, there stands a stone monument carved with the portrait of a long-bearded man. Not a Vietnamese person. 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 cooperative program for restoring historical monuments. At that time, the country had just emerged from the war and was still very poor, and My Son had been almost forgotten: towers were collapsing, mines and bombs hadn't been fully cleared, and forest trees had grown over the foundations.

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

His view on restoration was quite firm and is still quoted to this day: preserve the existing state, reinforce what remains, and do not rebuild what has been lost according to one's own imagination. An honest ruin is worth more than a new structure that merely looks like an antique.

He passed away in 1997 in Huế while working. Two years later, Hoi An and My Son were both recognized by UNESCO as World Cultural Heritage sites. He didn't live to see that day.

The monument in Hoi An was erected by local people. What catches my attention every time I pass by isn't the statue itself, but its base: there are usually fresh flowers, and sometimes even an 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 of a land that was not his own, and worked there until the day he died; and the people of that land remember him the way they remember their own family — with flowers and incense, not just with a bronze plaque.