The story
The name is a pun, and the owners said so themselves. Their earliest surviving website, from October 2006, opens: "Everyone has heard of Johnny Walker; you're only now hearing about Rymanów's Jaś Wędrowniczek." Johnnie becomes Jaś, Walker becomes Wędrowniczek — the wanderer. The bar page notes that Johnnie Walker Blue Label reigns there.
That same 2006 page calls it a newly established *zajazd*, a roadside inn on the Krosno–Bieszczady route, with 10 rooms and 25 beds. It now has 19 rooms, 42 beds and five function spaces including a 200 m² banquet hall.
What was here before? Open ground. The hotel stands in the town part called Pustki — "the empties" — the historically undeveloped northern outskirts on the road toward Krosno and Brzozów, so the building is new rather than a rebuilt older inn. What the address points to is the interesting part: the street is named for Dr Ignacy Bielecki, whose 1885 villa and museum stand further down it, and following the street south about half a kilometre reaches the Rynek and Rymanów's old Jewish quarter — one of Poland's oldest synagogues and the site of the 1942 ghetto around it. The hotel is at the northern end of that street, not within the quarter, but on the road that leads to it.
What makes the inn notable is the programme it has run since February 2007 in a town of about four thousand: a "Great Expeditions" series bringing Himalayan climbers to the Beskid Niski — Krzysztof Wielicki, Leszek Cichy, Ryszard Pawłowski, Kinga Baranowska, Andrzej Bargiel — alongside concerts by KSU, Dżem, Maciej Maleńczuk, Grzegorz Turnau, Kult, T.Love and Lao Che, and appearances by the writer Andrzej Stasiuk. In August 2015 it hosted the seventh Days of Remembrance of the Jewish Community of Rymanów, including the March of Remembrance along the 1942 deportation route to Wróblik Szlachecki.
Everything that was here
- 2006–present · still open
Hotel Restauracja Jaś WędrowniczekHotel
Everyone has heard of Johnnie Walker. The roadside inn on the Krosno–Bieszczady road named itself after him in Polish, then spent twenty years bringing Himalayan mountaineers and rock bands to a town of four thousand.
See the map in 2007 →
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Connected places
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Nearby history
House of Dr Ignacy Bielecki (Dom dr Ignacego Bieleckiego)
The Old Synagogue of Rymanów (Synagoga w Rymanowie)
Parish Church of St Lawrence (Kościół św. Wawrzyńca)
Rymanów Market Square (Rynek w Rymanowie)
Malka's Jewish House (Żydowski dom Malki)
Kino Sokół and Regional Historical Chamber (Kino "Sokół" / Regionalna Izba Historyczna)
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