14 Jan 2021
Highlanders in Poland’s “winter capital” of Zakopane are rebelling against lockdown, with hundreds of businesses vowing to reopen in defiance of government restrictions.
Sebastian Pitoń, who has emerged as leader of the Górlaskie Veto — Highlanders’ Veto — movement, was previously best known as an architect whose Tolkienesque designs were the subject of a Snopes article, as some people had doubted that viral images of his beautiful if eccentric traditional buildings were real.
Now, he cuts an exotic figure in the international media, holding press conferences in the traditional dress of Poland’s southern highlanders as ad hoc spokesman of some 200 businesses which have promised to “end this madness”.