Tymów fair on St Kordula’s Day brings the countryside together at the last notable feast before Yuletide, but its festive promise is shadowed by the need to make ends meet. Lipce’s households arrive facing taxes, communal contributions, debts, servants’ wages, and winter purchases; even families with fifteen morgen must consider selling a horse or cow. Within the crowded marketplace, Boryna’s gift to Jagna turns an ordinary buying trip into a telling scene of courtship, money, and divided attention.

Seasonal Necessity and the Journey

The fair offers Lipce a brief reason to hope for manageable travel before winter closes in. The roads have not yet become muddy, and villagers hope the weather will hold until the market. In the cottages, however, preparations mean arguments over what to sell—cattle, grain, or smaller livestock—and what clothing, tools, and farm goods must be bought. The calculations are difficult because ready cash is scarce and many obligations fall due together. Households with substantial holdings still face hard choices; poorer villagers have fewer options.

Before dawn, not long after the second cockcrow, people fill every road and path toward Tymów. A morning rain gives way to dark clouds and mist, leaving puddles and waterlogged ruts. The fair’s scale becomes apparent as Boryna enters the marketplace: people, carts, and goods press through streets, squares, alleys, and courtyards toward the monastery church square. The crowd moves like converging rivers, while the noise swells into a broad uproar. Cattle calls, music from the carousel, beggars’ laments, and the sharp pipes of basketmakers come through in fragments.

The Marketplace and Its Bargains

The market is at once a place of abundance and of need. Stoves smoke among the carts and stalls, where visitors can buy hot tea, roast sausage, cabbage, and borscht with potatoes. Beggars gather beneath carts and beside walls, including blind, lame, mute, and physically impaired people who play hymns, sing, or tap their bowls while asking for coins or help. Their presence makes visible the hardship that the busy exchange does not erase.

Boryna makes his way to the pig market behind the monastery, a sandy square crowded with people, carts, and rows of pigs beneath large oaks still carrying yellow leaves. He finds Hanka and Józka at the edge of the market and asks whether they have sold anything. The scene places his own commercial errands among the practical concerns that brought Lipce’s families to the fair, without establishing what the women ultimately sell.

Jagna, Boryna, and the Silk Scarf

In the crush of the fair, Boryna offers to help Jagna move through the crowd, making a passage with his elbows so she can walk freely behind him. At the fabric stalls she slows, captivated by the display. Ribbons flutter above her, and she admires their beauty. Boryna initially overcomes his habitual reluctance to spend and invites her to choose one that pleases her.

The exchange shifts when Boryna says he must go and see Antek, who is farther down the street with the wheat. Jagna’s eyes brighten at the news that Antek is at the fair. Boryna then gives her a silk scarf, which she receives with astonishment and delight, questioning why he has bought it for her and marveling at its beauty. He insists she take it and tells her there is no need to hurry in returning a drink if someone offers one. His gift is generous, but the scene also shows how carefully he attends to her and how her attention turns immediately toward Antek. The fair’s transactions thus carry an intimate charge: a costly object becomes part of a courtship in which the giver and the recipient are not equally absorbed in one another.

Economic Pressure and Narrative Significance

The market’s liveliness does not resolve the precarity visible in its preparations. Elsewhere in the novel, hired workers face winter without employment, and poor households struggle to find food or credit. The fair’s urgent buying and selling belongs to the same rural economy: survival depends on cash, work, livestock, and the timing of the seasons, while need is distributed unevenly. The contrast between crowded stalls and the beggars asking for small coins makes that inequality part of the event’s texture.

The fair also brings economic and romantic plots into the same public space. Jagna’s delight in the fabrics and scarf is set against the household accounting that has driven the village there; Boryna’s attentiveness is set against her sudden interest in Antek. Neither the crowd nor the exchange conceals that tension. Instead, the market makes it legible through gestures and objects: the effort to clear a path, the fluttering ribbons, the silk scarf, and Jagna’s brightened eyes. St Kordula’s fair is therefore not merely a seasonal gathering but a compact social scene in which scarcity, status, generosity, and desire meet.