Szortal

» see szortal.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

A szort, in the Polish sense Szortal meant, is a piece of fiction of about three and a half thousand characters. Not a short story, shorter than that, and the site had names and lengths for everything below it too, down to the drabble at exactly one hundred words. Szortal was built in 2011 by Krzysztof Baranowski with Aleksander Kusz, Rafał Sala and Aleksandra Brożek-Sala, and the entire premise was that Polish fantasy and science fiction had writers producing work at that scale with nowhere to put it.

In December 2012 the portal added a magazine, Szortal na wynos, Szortal takeaway. Free and digital, out every month, with an ISSN of its own. It carried fiction alongside comics and interviews, and it ran translations, including Dutch fantasy brought into Polish, which is not a route much writing takes. Aleksandra Brożek edited it from the second issue to the eighteenth. Marek Ścieszek took it from the nineteenth to the end.

The end was issue 67, in May 2019. Sixty-seven regular issues and twelve specials over roughly seven years, which for an unpaid literary operation is a serious run. There is no Polish equivalent to this in English and there is no reason there would be. The distance here is a language and a genre scene that never had a Turkish counterpart at all: Poland's speculative-fiction culture is deep and self-sustaining in a way Turkey's has never been, and a site like this only exists where enough writers already do.

~ the dossier ~

~ twelve hundred bytes ~

The Internet Archive has szortal.com serving a full portal of around twenty-nine kilobytes on 8 July 2019. The next capture, on 23 July, is twelve hundred bytes. The title is Serwis w trakcie prac konserwacyjnych, the site is undergoing maintenance work, and the body says: we are currently on a technical break at Szortal, it should be over soon, thank you for your patience.

It was not over soon. On 7 September the site came back, running on Backdrop CMS, tagline intact: uwolnij moc ukrytą w szortach, unleash the power hidden in shorts. Then it went again. By 4 February 2020 szortal.com was a placeholder page from nazwa.pl explaining that the domain was hosted on their servers, with links to buy hosting.

~ what a maintenance page means ~

Nobody at Szortal announced a closure. There is no farewell issue, no editorial explaining the finances, no dated post saying this is the last one. What exists is a temporary notice that stopped being temporary, which is how most volunteer publications actually end. The intention when that page went up was almost certainly to come back, and the September flicker suggests somebody tried.

~ what is still there ~

szortal.pl answers today. It serves a static archive called Archiwum Portalu Szortal, a plain page with the years 2012 through 2019 across the top and every issue of Szortal na wynos listed underneath with its cover and a download link. No CMS behind it and nothing to log in to. Somebody took the output of eight years, flattened it into files, and put it on a server where it costs almost nothing to leave running.

That is a better outcome than most of the graves on this site get. The portal is gone and the conversation around it is gone, but the sixty-seven issues are two clicks away and will be for as long as somebody pays the domain bill.

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