Opiekunowie Kopca Kościuszki w Krakowie: Słownik biograficzny członków Komitetu Kopca Kościuszki 1820-2020

GUARDIANS OF THE KOŚCIUSZKO MOUND: A BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF THE MEMBERS OF THE KOŚCIUSZKO MOUND COMMITTEE 1820–2020

The Kościuszko Mound Committee is a civic body organically integrated with the object of its care: the Kościuszko Mound. The institution has been active for 200 years and continues to function today. The introductory piece outlines the history of the Committee since its beginning in light of various transformations of the government system in P oland thought these years. A fter the remains of General Tadeusz Kościuszko, the ‘last defender of the homeland’ and the head of state at the time of the 1794 insurrection, who died in Solothurn in Switzerland on October 15, 1817, were brought to P oland, commemorated at Kraków funeral celebrations and solemnly buried in the royal vaults in the Wawel Cathedral, an idea emerged to pay tribute to the hero with a ‘monument plain and lasting.’ I t was decided to follow the example of the prehistoric mounds near Kraków, shrouded in the legends about Krak, the mythical founder of the town, and his daughter Wanda, and erect a gigantic symbolic grave as a monument to Kościuszko, which over the years came to be known as the Kościuszko Mound. Poles readily contributed to this end from all regions of the country torn apart by Russia, Prussia and Austria. Soon after the work on the symbolic grave started on October 16, 1820, the Governing Senate of the Free City of Kraków (which was instituted by the Vienna Congress) established a Committee to supervise its construction. During its erection, the Mound received soil from battlefields of Racławice, Dubienka, Szczekociny, and Maciejowice and later, in 1926, from battlefields of A merican W ar of I ndependence. The Mound was the first of about 300 K ościuszko monuments that exist worldwide nowadays.
After the construction was finalized in the seasons of 1820–1823, the Committee did not dissolve, but changed into a guardian of the monument. This earth structure could only last owing to everyday care of the place that was exposed to the elements (spring thaws, heavy rains) and the destructive impact of voles.
Austrian land registers recorded the Mound as the National Foundation of the Grave Monument for Tadeusz Kościuszko, which means it was founded by the Polish Nation and stays in its possession, while the Committee takes care of and manages it on its behalf.
The Committee was not an association of private people, but a civic body created by the highest power of the Kraków Republic and was a public organ recognized by successive Austrian occupation authorities, being renewed generation after generation by incorporating new members.
Neither did the Committee cease to function after the rebirth of the Polish statehood in 1918 nor at the time of its formal nonexistence during the second world war and in the new reality of the P eople’s Republic of Poland (when it continued to function as a committee under the auspices of the Society of Lovers of the History and Monuments of Kraków) until its present form as an association. I t continues to realize its mission without any break, retaining the same name and the official historic stamp. It is a traditional and legal guardian of the K ościuszko Mound, the ‘symbol of Polish independence and solidarity of nations for the good of mankind.’
Thus, the Committee of the Kościuszko Mound has a 200-year history of incessant conservation of the Mound so as “it may grow green with fresh grass each spring’ and 200 years of the cultivation of the memory of the hero, who is inscribed in the global consciousness and still much needed today.