Hi, my name is Oskar Kubrak. My career began in 2007, when after passing my high school diploma I got to study at the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Warsaw. Even before my first lecture, I was offered to participate in archaeological excavations – that’s how it started. In the following years I took part in research in Crimea and Georgia. Thanks to teachers and practitioners, I focused on the presence of the Roman army in the Black Sea basin region, i.e. beyond the borders of the Roman Empire. As is the case in any career, once there are failures and other times there are successes. For the sake of not talking about the worse moments, my greatest successes include: a very good defense of my master’s thesis entitled Gladiators on the orchestra. Evidence of bloody spectacles in Roman theaters, receiving a Diamond Grant in 2015 (the highest student award in Poland; I was ranked 44th nationwide at the time) for research in Armenia titled Exploration of an unknown camp of the Scythian Legion IV in Armenia, and participation in many international scientific conferences.

In 2017, I took a course to become atour leader and rep at Orion tourist office. Since then I started leading tours. I started with domestic tours, but these were quickly supplanted by foreign events. As time went by, I specialized in the so-called Big Three of Christianity – Armenia, Georgia and Ethiopia, the countries that were the first to embrace the Christian faith. Thanks to the linguistic skills acquired during my years as an archaeologist in the East, I began conducting tours in Russian-speaking countries. So far I have had the honor to leading tours in such destinations as Armenia, Belarus, Czech Republic, Ethiopia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Poland, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Italy.

In the work of a tour guide, the most important thing for me is the satisfaction of tourists and the realized program of the tour. Transmission of acquired knowledge, public presentations through a microphone or with the power of vocal cords, organizational work, solving current problems compensates for the unfulfilled (so far) dream of working at a university as a lecturer. Also, being “in the field” as archaeologists say, i.e. on an archaeological site or leading a group, I feel like a fish in water.

On the blog I will reveal to you the secrets of the work of a tour manager, tell you about various emergency situations, some will give you goosebumps, some will make you laugh, and some will give you the knowledge of what a tour manager has to deal with during his work. I will also delight you with information, curiosities and history of places more or less known, some are the basis of tour programs, and others are those that are overlooked – sometimes a mistake.