Ossolineum


Ossoliński National Institute, or the Ossolineum is a Polish cultural foundation, publishing house, archival institute and a research centre of national significance founded in 1817 in Lwów. Located in the city of Wrocław since 1947, it is the second largest institution of its kind in Poland after the ancient Jagiellonian Library in Kraków. Its publishing arm is the oldest continuous imprint in Polish since the early 19th century. It bears the name of its founder, Polish nobleman, Count Józef Maksymilian Ossoliński.
Although its origin may be traced to the foreign imposed partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 18th century, the institute's actual history dates from 1817 in the former Polish city of Lwów, then known as Lemberg, capital of Galicia, a province of Austrian Empire. The institute first opened its doors to the public in 1817. Ossoliński's purpose was not only to establish a library with archival and other historical materials and a printing works as a basis for the most important Polish national cultural institution at a time when sovereign Poland did not exist, but also to disseminate information to the Polish population through publishing as a means of maintaining cultural ties.
Due to continued existential ordeals provoked by two world wars and other military and political conflicts, such as the ethnic cleansing of the Polish population of the Eastern Borderlands after the annexation of one-third of Poland's landmass in 1939, much of the library and other collections were plundered, scattered or deliberately destroyed. Barely one-third of the artefacts and printed items from the Ossolineum made it to Wrocław after World War II. However those items which survived, did so thanks to the heroic dedication of staff, not least, Mieczysław Gębarowicz.
Since its westerly relocation in 1947 the Ossolineum's Polish department has become the most extensive in the country as it strives to complete a record of the whole Polish scientific and literary oeuvre. It is the repository of manuscripts of some of the foremost Polish scientists, writers and poets, including: Nicolaus Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, Jan Kochanowski, Adam Mickiewicz, Adam Asnyk, Jan Kasprowicz, Władysław Reymont, Stefan Żeromski, Juliusz Słowacki, and in particular Henryk Sienkiewicz, whose chief publisher it has been.
The ZNiO departments are: the Ossolineum Library, the Lubomirski Museum, Ossolineum Publishers, the Pan Tadeusz Museum.

History

Ossoliński who was a politician, writer and researcher had already devoted his long life to building and cataloguing an extremely rich library collection, consisting of books, manuscripts, prints and coins. It was only upon mature consideration and after observing developments since the Congress of Vienna that he opted for Lwów, as the most suitable place in which to house his 52 crates of materials having obtained prior approval of the Austrian emperor, Francis I. Thus began his Institute in Lwów. The income from Ossoliński's landed properties served for over three decades to finance his acquisitions and collection. The Ossolineum quickly became a celebrated centre for Polish science and culture which not only survived under foreign rule, but throughout the Second Polish Republic in the Interwar period.
Until the 1939 invasion of Poland it had combined a library, publishing house, and the Lubomirski Museum.
The National Ossoliński Institute had been located from its foundation until 1945 in the former convent and church buildings of the Carmelite Order of nuns in Lwów at 2, Ossolińscy street,. After the first partition of Poland and the dissolution of many convents by the Austrian emperor Joseph II, the convent buildings had become a ruin. Their restoration became a project for General Józef Bem who in 1823 merged the Lubomirski Museum with the Ossoliński Institute.
Under Austrian rule, the Ossolineum became a beacon for the Polish independence movement and was one of the most important centres of Polish culture despite foreign rule and the Germanization of its structures. During that time there were many persecutions such as police searches and arrests of employees of the institute. It housed a clandestine Polish printing works in the early 1840s, and had exclusive rights for publishing textbooks under the relative Galician autonomy. During the revolutionary upheaval in 1848, the Ossolineum became a Polish landmark in an otherwise highly ethnically diverse city.

Collections

In accordance with the intentions of its founder, the Ossolineum became one of the most important research centres for history and Polish literature, with one of the largest book collections in Poland as well as a large collection of manuscripts and autographs, including medieval manuscripts and some of the rarest incunabula. There were also individual smaller archives and book collections deposited at the Ossolineum by grand families such as the: Jabłonowski, Piniński, Pawlikowski, Skarbek, Balzer, Sapieha, Lubomirski and Mniszech.

Wars of Independence after WW I

After the Russian Revolution and the collapse of Austria-Hungary, before World War I had even ended, Galicia was the scene of further major more localised armed conflict. The Ossolineum was attacked by Ukrainian soldiers during the fighting over the city in 1918.
Before the Second World War, the Ossolineum library consisted of 220,000 works, over 6,000 manuscripts, over 9,000 autographs, over 2,000 diplomas and over 3,000 maps. The Ossolineum also kept a complete collection of the published Polish press from the 19th and 20th centuries, the largest in Poland.
In his last will, Józef Ossoliński had named members of his family as curators and directors to ensure the continuity of the institute and nominated 28 notable Polish families from among whom successors could be chosen in the event his own family died out.

World War II seizures

After the takeover of Lwów by the Soviet Union in the September 1939 attack on Poland, the Communist Party nationalized and redistributed all private property. The Ossolineum was closed and its library holdings were absorbed in the newly created Lviv Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. The Lubomirski Museum collection was distributed among various Lwów museums managed by the Ukrainians for the next two years. During the subsequent German occupation of Lwów, from 29 June 1941 to 27 July 1944, the Ossolineum library was incorporated into the structure of the new German Staatsbibilothek Lemberg. At the beginning of 1944, the German government decided to move not only the collection of Staatsbibilothek Lemberg, but also the university and polytechnic libraries and the Shevchenko Scientific Society collection.
Following German orders, two archival consignments were prepared by professor Mieczysław Gębarowicz, the Ossolineum's manager during part of the war, and were supposed to include only specifically German literature and a reference book collection from the main reading room. However, in the event it also contained the most valuable and carefully selected special collections of the Ossolineum's cimelia. Gębarowicz sent instructions by covert letters to his colleagues in Kraków. Altogether there were 2,300 manuscripts, ca. 2,200 documents, ca. 1,700 old prints, ca. 2,400 figures and drawings from an old collection in the Lubomirski Museum, the Pawlikowski collection and hundreds of old coins. Moreover, it also included c. 170 of the most valuable manuscripts of another Polish foundation library the Baworowscy Library, and the most valuable manuscripts and incunabula of the University Library in Lwów. Among the evacuated literature of the 19th and 20th centuries there were the autographs of Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz, the entire literary legacy of Juliusz Słowacki: his manuscripts with autographs of Mazepa, Lilla Weneda, Król-Duch, and Aleksander Fredro, with autographs of Pan Jowialski, Śluby panieńskie, Zemsta and Dożywocie, and the autographs of works by Seweryn Goszczyński, Teofil Lenartowicz, Józef Conrad, Henryk Sienkiewicz, including autographs of The Deluge, Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, Jan Kasprowicz, Władysław Reymont, including the autograph of Chłopi, and the papers of Stefan Żeromski.
The manuscript collection of Lwów's own scholars was included in the move: Wojciech Kętrzyński, Ludwik Bernacki, Oswald Balzer, Karol Szajnocha along with the archive of the Galician activist peasant movement of Bolesław and Maria Wysłouch. In terms of documents, the oldest and most valuable items were selected, including the documents of Pope Gregory IX from 1227 and the Silesian prince, Henry I the Bearded from 1229.
The Ossolineum cargo reached German occupied Kraków during March and April 1944, with the intention of safe storage in a cellar of the Jagiellonian Library during the expected military actions. However, in the summer of 1944, the consignment was transferred by the Germans further West and stored in Adelin near Złotoryja in Lower Silesia. Fortunately, it survived the whole war and in 1947 was able to be incorporated in the collection of the relocated Ossolineum Library in Wrocław.
After the subsequent reversal of military fortunes and a second seizure of the city of Lwów by the Soviet army, till then under German occupation, from August 1944 the library holdings became part of the so-called Polish Sector of the Lviv Institute of Sciences' library. Only a small part of the library and archival material was transported from Lviv to Wrocław during 1946–1947 as a "gift from the Ukrainian people to the Polish nation". It arrived in two train consignments in sealed carriages in Wrocław, which was still in ruins at the time, and was opened to readers in September 1947.

Postwar appropriation and destruction

In 1946–1947, the Ukrainian authorities divided the Ossolineum collection into two parts. They followed the general rule that all materials referring to or with origins in lands east of the Curzon line, especially those connected with the history and culture of West Ukraine, and those connected in any way with Russia, Belarus, Podolia, Volhynia, Lithuania, Turkey were to remain in Lviv. This rule applied even to those materials in which there was only a single reference to West Ukraine. As an example, a large carton of papers pertaining to Greater Poland and Silesian could not be released to Poland since it contained a single page referring to Zhovkva. The same happened to foreign materials which, in the Ukrainian commission's opinion, were not connected to Poland.
Originally, the Ukrainians planned to hand over just 30,000 volumes from the Ossolineum Library. This number was reviewed several times so that in May 1946 it had finally reached 150,000 items including books, prints from the 19th and 20th centuries and manuscripts. It constituted only 15–20% of the entire collection because the graphical and cartographical collections, and almost the entire collection of Polish periodicals from the 19th and 20th centuries were not taken into consideration.
Polish staff was not allowed to participate in the decision-making and were assigned solely to technical tasks, whereas management decisions and therefore ultimate control were the preserve solely of Ukrainian staff. The premises where materials were being packed were closed off, and Polish staff were denied access to them. The whole operation was conducted in a great hurry.
While dividing the collections, apparently arbitrary criteria were applied. Among the deeply questionable decisions to withhold documents were:
In Lviv stayed a priceless collection of the Polish press, which lay unprotected and "temporarily" stored for 50 years in the Jesuit Saints Peter and Paul Church. This collection was subsequently deliberately destroyed as a part of the Soviet tendency to eradicate any evidence of Polish heritage and its 600-year role in the history of Lviv.
The National Ossoliński Institute in Lviv was renamed W. Stefanyk Lviv's National Scientific Library of Ukraine.