The text describes in detail Krzemieniec and its history dating back to the 11th century. The secondary school founded by T. Czacki is also recalled, and its first headmasters - J. Czech and M. Ściborowski - are mentioned. The text is accompanied by numerous photographs of the town, including the house in which "Juliusz Słowacki is believed to have been born" (Source: "Ziemia. Tygodnik Krajoznawczy Ilustrowany' Warsaw 1920, no. 3, pp. 16-22, after: Wielkopolska Biblioteka Cyfrowa).

A modernised reading of the text

Krzemieniec

Krzemieniec is an ancient Volhynian town, dating back to the distant past, defensive and busy until the time of Khmelnytsky's rebellion, later famous for its excellent and meritorious, not only towards the Russian borderlands, high school ("żacki").

Today, after the horrors of the Bolshevik-Ukrainian turmoil, it is quiet and empty, but peaceful. The town is now under the armed protection of the Republic of Poland and awaits a better tomorrow and a just and well-deserved historical revival, looking to its hierarchical metropolis, on which the high school used to depend, to the university of Vilnius, because there the good times have returned and the university of Vilnius is alive again. Kamieniec lies in an enchanting valley, surrounded by a ring of mountains, the highest of which, Queen Bona's Mountain, bears on its summit the remains of the defensive walls of the Krzemieniec castle, while others, such as Czercza, Boża, Wołowa, Krzyżowa, The others, such as Czercza, Boża, Wołowa, Krzyżowa, Wiśniowiecka, are an offshoot of the Miodoborski mountain range, which runs from the banks of the Stnytrycza river in Podolia in a north-western direction as far as Volhynia to join the branches of the Carpathian Mountains already in Galicia near Podhorzec and Olesko.

Apparently, by the end of the 11th century, Krzemieniec was in the hands of the Mokosiejów Deniseks, who voluntarily ceded it to Bolesław Śmiały. The fact that during the turmoil of the Rurikiviks it was already an armed stronghold is evidenced by the fact that in 1240 the hordes of Batya, having sacked Kyiv, Kamieniec, Halicz and Vladimir, unsuccessfully retreated from Krzemieniec. From the mid-14th century until the time of partition, Krzemieniec remained almost continuously under the Crown's rule. Sigismund I, having given the city and the castle to Prince Janusz, Bishop of Vilnius, stipulated in a privilege of 1511 that the city should be governed under Magdeburg Law with an appellation to Lviv, and shortly afterwards gave the city and the starosty to Queen Bona, who, by a series of privileges of 1530, 42 and 46, granted Krzemieniec many liberties and generally took great care of it.

The kings Zygmunt August, Batory and Zygmunt III were also kind to the town, providing care for the castle and supporting trade. In 1638, a Ruthenian Cyrillic printing house was established here, where the first book to appear was "Gramatyka albo piśmienica języka Slaviański". The decline of Krzemieniec as a defensive stronghold began with the Ukrainian rebellion under Jan Kazimierz. After the Korsun victory, the famous Krzywonos occupied the town with his menacing horde in 1649, demolished the castle, plundered the town and its surroundings, and had the civic records thrown down the well, acting as the forefather of the Bolshevik-Haydamite mob which today has turned the whole of southern Russia into a desert of ruins and rubble before our eyes. This decline continued until the time of Czacki, i.e. the beginning of the 19th century. Krzemieniec had, apart from magnificent Jesuit buildings, a Franciscan church, endowed by Bona in 1538 as a parish church, in which Marcin Szyszkowski, the Bishop of Łuck, installed monks in 1607, and a Reformati church, founded in 1760, which became a Basilian monastery in 1807, when the Reformati were moved to nearby Dederki. All these churches were converted into Orthodox churches after 1881.

At the same time, the fame, glory and merit of Krzemieniec, that which binds it to the heart of Poland and demands its resurrection, refers to the beginnings of the last century, i.e. to the moment when Tadeusz Czacki's immortal thought and work was consolidated in the physical form of the Krzemieniec Lyceum. The year 1795 destroyed all the work of the Educational Commission, especially in the eastern borderlands, and threatened the entire national existence of the Polish settlement in southern Ruthenia, as the extinguishing of educational centres against the background of the general depression would have entailed a very far-reaching and very widespread straying. The Ruthenian Borderlands were linked to the typical powers of obscurity, so although the schools existing there were not closed for the time being, but in the absence of resources and all public encouragement and state aid, they were condemned to a slow death, one which was quite in keeping with the general conditions of the Moscow Tsar. The teaching of general history, general principles of law and political economy was forbidden; teaching lasted only 142 days a year, and the remaining 223 were used up on holidays of both faiths, on the incredibly numerous "galas" and on endless holidays; and the teachers were provided by the Moghul Academy in Kyiv, which, in the words of the visitator Czacki in a letter to Kołłątaj, was "a satire of human reason".

This was also the reason why the number of students fell sharply from year to year, and this eclipse of education threatened the country's Polishness with the most disastrous consequences. The catastrophe was averted and the borderlands saved by Tadeusz Czacki, who in 1806, with the participation of Father Hugo Kołłątaj, and with Alexander I's permission, opened a lyceum (initially a middle school) in Krzemieniec, in the splendid post-Jesuit edifice founded by the Princes Janusz and Michał Wiśniowiecki as early as 1703, and extended as a collegium in 1731. According to Czacki's plan, the lyceum was a kind of supreme institution, under whose wing county gymnasia and schools for the people were established. The Lyceum, where all subjects were taught in Polish, in addition to an almost university-level college, incorporated a school for governesses, a teachers' convent to prepare teachers for lower schools, and an institute for surgeons (something between a feldsher and a doctor). The large and valuable lyceum library, containing a total of 34,378 volumes, consisted of the library of Stanisław August, acquired by Czacki, the library of the Jabłonowskis, and the collections of the Nikoszewski and Moszyński families.

The physical cabinet consisted of 259 instruments. The beautiful mineralogical collection, the chemical laboratory and the art collection, after the deletion of the Lyceum together with the library and the magnificent specimens of the botanical garden, which had been arranged by the famous Professor Besser, were taken by the Muscovites to Kyiv and laid the plundering foundation for the so-called St. Vladimir's University, founded by Emperor Nicholas in 1832 for the special purpose of Russifying the Ukrainian borderlands. The first headmaster of the school was Jozef Czech, and after his death Michal Bęborowski. He was followed by the poet J. Alojzy Feliński, beloved by the pupils, as headmaster, and in 1822 by Andrzej Lewicki, who died in office in 1830. After Czacki (who died in 1813), the inspector of schools in Ruthenia was Fr Filip Plater, in 1816 Szymon Malewki, in 1820 Jan Nepomucen Wyleżyński, and finally, in 1824, Kazimierz Moniuszko. The year 1831 marks the end of the golden era of Krzemieniec, the merits and significance of which it is difficult even to summarise in a casual article. "The activity of Tadeusz Czacki," writes Marian Dubiecki ("Polish Youth at the Kyiv University before 1863"), "prevented... the fall of light which took place after the last partition; it dispersed the darkness rapidly gathering on the horizon of life in the southern provinces, newly incorporated into the Empire, and laid what seemed to be a very solid foundation for a better future and for the increasingly prosperous development of our education". Above all, Krzemieniec brought up a numerous host of unparalleled pedagogues whose work and national activity spread and deepened Polish thought in the borderlands for long years even after the Krzemieniec school was murdered.

This was a fundamental concern of Czacki, who more than once remarked:

"I do not begrudge the work and expense, so long as the teachers are enlivened with holy zeal". "And they were enlivened," states Dubiecki, an aged witness of the post-secondary era. "And the torch of dedication to their arduous profession did not go out in their breasts. But soon a new cataclysm removed the ground from under their feet - the Polish school was missing".

After the November catastrophe of 1831, Nicholas I-azy with one stroke of his pen abolished more than 200 scientific establishments in the once Polish lands. The universities of Vilnius and Warsaw, the Lyceum of Krzemieniec and a whole series of secondary schools, especially in the south-eastern borderlands, fell victim to an ostracism unparalleled in the history of civilisation. Apart from the Krzemieniec secondary school, the eight-form grammar schools in Vinnitsa and Mezerich, the district schools in Humań, Kaniów, Bar, Miedzyłoż, Kamieniec, Lubar, Owroc, Vladimir, Teofipol, Berdyczów, Dąbrowica and Klevuń, as well as the people's schools, maintained by the Catholic and Uniate clergy and citizens, were abolished. A total of 248 academic institutions, mostly established on Czacki's initiative, were destroyed in Volhynia, Podolia and Kyiv. Not content with common murder, however, Nicolas decided to make poison from the ruins of Krzemieniec for the use of those to whose benefit and rescue the Lyceum had been erected.

Nikolayevsky's "ukaz", having in one day destroyed the work of generations, years, and immeasurable effort, and having plunged large areas of land where the old culture had once flourished into the darkness of obscurity - at the same time, Dubetsky writes, decided to immediately build a university in Kyiv, with the aim of Russifying the then-influential layers of nobility inhabiting the Russian lands. To this end, the library, collections, zoological and botanical specimens, and all material resources, including scholarship bequests and endowment funds connected with the Lyceum, were immediately transferred to Kyiv and transferred to the new university.

Having thus dealt with scientific aids and funds, the matter of filling the chairs was equally ruthlessly dealt with. So, although the Kyiv university was to be used for Russification purposes, but since it was impossible to find Russian professors, apart from two or three, almost all of them were taken from Kyiv. They were not invited to sit on chairs, they were not summoned according to the customs of civilised peoples, but were ordered to deliver to Kyiv - Dubiecki testifies - a body of professors from Krzemieniec, and the order was obeyed.

Almost all of them were delivered. The exceptions were the eminent Hellenist Michał Jurkowski, who was defended in his old age, and the eminent history professor and fiery speaker Józef Uldyński, who was simply feared, and so he stayed in Krzemieniec in his tiny house and lived long after the Lyceum's demise, as if a shadow of the school he loved as dearly as he loved his homeland. And here is a brief mention of the Kyiv professors 'resettled' to Kyiv, which we give after Marian Dubiecki, a student of Kyiv University of those times. Prominent among philologists was Maximilian Jakubowicz (1784-1858), an excellent philologist, a God-fearing man, and an exponent of wisdom.

He lectured in Latin. The second philology professor was the well-known Polish novelist Józef Korzeniowski (1797-1863), who lectured on Polish literature in Krzemieniec and had already been a member of the Warsaw Society of Friends of Science for several years. He lectured in Latin, using French in part. The Polish language was forbidden when it came to public appearances even outside the university walls. When Rector Cych died, a Pole, Korzeniowski, spoke over the grave of this Russian - in French. The Polish language lecturer became the lesser-known Jozef Mikulski, who had been an English language teacher in Krzemieniec, reflecting the Moscow authorities' conscious disregard for this subject. The French and German language lecturers had former teachers from Krzemieniec devoted to themselves: Antoni Planzan (who had resided in Poland since 1812 and was completely fused with our society, and a Knight of the Legion of Honour) and Wojciech Lieds.

As far as the sciences were concerned, one of the most eminent professors at that time was Stefan Wyżewski, born in 1783, a master's degree in philosophy from Vilnius University, who taught mathematics in Krzemieniec. Adjunct at the chair of mathematics was also the Krzemieniec Grzegorz Hreczyna, who died as a professor in Kharkiv and whose death was mourned by the Poznań press, considering him a man full of extensive views and important ideas in physical and mathematical skills. Of other Krzemieniecans, let us mention the eminent botanist Willibald Besser, creator of the botanical garden in Krzemieniec, who - like the shadow of Slowacki's Mother appearing among the professors of the Poles beyond the Dnieper - lectured for a number of years at the Kharkiv Cathedral, and died almost blind near Kobrin in his small estate called Gubemja.

If we add that Juliusz Słowacki was born in Krzemieniec in 1809, that he spent his childhood there and that his mother's remains are buried in the local cemetery - should I ask Polish hearts what future they want for Krzemieniec and its lyceum buildings today, when our victorious army has already occupied this shrine of great memories and no lesser national merit in its revindication procession?... After 1795, when all the lights in Poland went out, Krzemieniec was one of our brightest catacomb torches. When, in 1831, after the last state catastrophe, our greatest executioner, Nicholas I, bricked up all the windows in our prison, Krzemieniec died with Poland ... Should it not rise with Poland?