Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855)
Adam Mickiewicz died in 1855 in Istanbul, Turkey, where he had travelled to champion the Polish cause during the Crimean War. A conflict initially involving only Russia and Turkey soon developed into a European war when France and Britain intervened on the Sultan’s side (1853-1856). The mounting international tensions preceding the war had mobilised Polish émigré circles, including the associates of Adam Jerzy Czartoryski and his Paris residence, the Hôtel Lambert. Polish patriots hoped that the anti-Russian coalition would advance the struggle for Polish independence, lost nearly sixty years earlier when Russia, Prussia, and Austria dismembered their homeland. Mickiewicz shared these hopes. In 1855, he aligned himself with the Hôtel Lambert, which sought support from the great powers for the Polish cause, and received a tentative commitment to form a Polish division stationed in Turkey and funded by Great Britain. Later that year, following the death of his wife, Celina, Mickiewicz volunteered to travel to the East to support the Polish military mission. Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski sought backing for Mickiewicz’s expedition from Emperor Napoleon III, who fully endorsed the plan. A few months later, Mickiewicz received official approval and funding from the French authorities for his mission in Turkey.

The poet departed for Istanbul in September and passed away by November 1855. Thus, his mission in the East was short-lived, and he failed in his plan to form multinational regiments, including a Jewish battalion under the command of General Michał Czajkowski. Mickiewicz’s plans were thwarted by illness, likely cholera. Nevertheless, he died believing that his mission was nearing a successful outcome and the prospect of independence for his beloved homeland was more tangible than ever. „Tell them to love one another” were among his final words, later conveyed by a witness to his death, Henryk Służalski, to Mickiewicz’s children. Over time, this phrase became a message to a divided and fractured Polish society.

Rumours regarding the true cause of Mickiewicz’s death surfaced shortly thereafter. One of the doctors who examined him was convinced it was not cholera, and there were also speculations of poisoning. Intense debates arose over the choice of his final resting place. The Polish community in Istanbul wished for the poet’s body to remain in Turkey, and they suggested various churches or the still-existing Polish settlement of Adampol, founded in 1842 by General Michał Czajkowski at the behest of Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski. Ultimately, family considerations led to the transfer of his remains to Paris, where the poet’s children resided. It is also worth noting that Montmorency was reportedly Mickiewicz’s choice, a preference he had confided to friends on the day of his wife’s funeral. There was hope that Mickiewicz’s remains, resting there, might exert a stronger unifying influence on the divided Polish émigré community.

On 31 December 1855, a ship carrying the poet’s coffin departed from Istanbul, arriving in Marseille eight days later. From there, a hearse transported his body to the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene in Paris, where a funeral service was held on 21 January 1856. The church was filled to capacity with friends, Polish and foreign admirers, and other mourners. Among those in attendance were Adam Jerzy Czartoryski and Cyprian Kamil Norwid, who fervently argued for an honourable burial on Polish soil, one that would serve as a unifying national symbol. Following the Mass, the funeral procession made its way to Montmorency, where the coffin of Celina Mickiewicz, who had died just nine months earlier and was originally interred at Paris’s Père-Lachaise Cemetery, awaited in the parish church. After the service, the coffins were buried together at Les Champeaux Cemetery.

When the Mickiewiczes were laid to rest at Montmorency, there were fewer than ten Polish graves there. The poet’s funeral transformed the cemetery’s standing, elevating it to a national shrine. The poet and Mickiewicz’s friend, Józef Bohdan Zaleski, whom some saw as his successor, expressed this sentiment in his funeral oration: And how entirely Montmorency has changed its appearance today! [...] It has become a sacred site of national mourning for Poland, a locum requisitions for veterans; it has become like an exile’s Ukraine, bristling with famous graves. Here again, stand before us our venerable, honourable patriots, Niemcewicz and Kniaziewicz. [...] And now there arrives another guest, a distinguished guest, all the way from Constantinople. [...] Montmorency is [...] a roadside inn for Polish souls awaiting their return. These illustrious dead shall rise and march northwards on the day of our Homeland’s resurrection. Adam Mickiewicz, we pledge to you and those here with you a grander procession in an independent Poland!

The historic funeral that Norwid had called for would be delayed by thirty-five years. The idea of bringing Mickiewicz’s remains to Kraków first emerged in 1869, but tangible efforts were not undertaken until 1883. The effort was led by the Academic Reading Room, a mutual aid society founded partly by students from the Jagiellonian University, who proposed interring the poet at Wawel Cathedral. Fund-raising began and was soon followed by negotiations with the poet’s son, Władysław, and the cathedral chapter. The process came to a successful end on 27 June 1890, when Mickiewicz’s grave at Les Champeaux was opened, and his remains were prepared for the journey home. The route from France to Poland passed through Switzerland and Austria. In Zurich, a dignified and grand ceremony marked the passing of the funeral procession, attended by local Poles and Swiss citizens, including the university’s rector and professors. In Vienna, however, Austrian authorities refused to permit a formal reception for the poet’s remains. The coffin transfer from the French to the Austrian train carriage occurred covertly, without family or designated delegates. On 4 July 1890, the remains reached Kraków. After being addressed by Władysław Mickiewicz and Jan Tarnowski, Marshal of the Galician National Sejm, the funeral procession moved towards Wawel Hill. The route was adorned with flowers, rugs, and banners sent from around the world. Thousands accompanied the poet on his final journey: peasants in traditional folk dress, nobility in kontusz robes, townspeople in distinctive coats, clergy, professors from the Jagiellonian and Lwów (present-day Lviv) Universities, deputies of the National Sejm, family, and friends. Upon arrival at the cathedral, the poet’s coffin was placed on an imposing, uniquely designed catafalque, and a funeral service was held to the strains of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem. Mickiewicz’s coffin was then laid in a sarcophagus lined with sand from the River Niemen (Lithuanian: Nemunas), the largest river in his native Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and from Nowogródek (present-day Navahrudak), his birthplace, now located in Belarus.

Adam Mickiewicz sparked controversy both in life and after death. Various legends circulated about him, including claims of him being a phantom. This myth became so entrenched that, reportedly, certain circles demanded the poet’s decapitation before his remains were transferred from Montmorency to Kraków. One must return to the poet’s youth to understand why some viewed Mickiewicz as a spectral figure. In the 1820s, Mickiewicz studied at the University of Wilno (now Vilnius University) and was active in the paramasonic organisations of the Philomaths and Philarets, which opposed the classical Enlightenment order. At this time, ideas of Romanticism began to take root, focusing on the spiritual and otherworldly, rejecting a purely scientific view of the world. In 1820, Mickiewicz wrote Oda do Młodości („Ode to Youth”), which echoed the work of Friedrich Schiller, who, turning away from the earthly and unsightly, preferred to create imagined, spiritual worlds. A year later, influenced again by Schiller, Mickiewicz wrote the poem cycle Romantyczność („Romanticism”), which also features spirits understood as phantoms and ghosts returning from beyond the grave. This collection, which became the manifesto of Polish Romanticism, countered the arguments of Jan Śniadecki’s essay O pismach klasycznych i romantycznych („On Classical and Romantic Literature”). Śniadecki, a prominent scholar and former Rector of the University of Wilno, extolled reason and condemned the inclusion of phantoms in literature as pandering to ignorance and common tastes. The culmination of the spectral elements in Mickiewicz’s work came in 1823 with the publication of Dziady („Forefathers’ Eve”), Parts II and IV, and the preceding poem Upiór („The Phantom”). In Part II of Dziady, we encounter a folk ritual of summoning the dead, referred to as phantoms and as spectres, spirits, souls, and even „little angels.” At the poem’s end, the phantom from the prologue appears: a young man who took his own life due to unrequited love. Mickiewicz portrays this figure not as a demon or immaterial soul but simply as a human being. The phantom returns in Part IV of Dziady, now the main protagonist. Mickiewicz uses this figure as his alter ego, interweaving themes of his unrequited loves into the story. The phantom shifts form in Part III of Dziady, which was published nearly ten years later. It represents not only a person but can also serve as a metaphor for various events, such as political turmoil, or even embody Poland, divided by partitioning states and social rifts. Mickiewicz explained this in his 1841 lecture at the Collège de France: The phantom is not possessed by an evil spirit; it is a human and natural phenomenon, yet extraordinary and beyond rational explanation: The phantom, it is said, is born with a dual heart and a dual soul. Until adolescence, it lives without self-knowledge or awareness of its being; but when it reaches a decisive point in life, it begins to feel the stirrings of a destructive impulse in its heart, and this soul, which the scholar Dalibor calls a negative soul and a negative heart, begins to take control. Thus, The phantom became strongly associated with the poet himself, and it is little wonder that Mickiewicz came to be identified with this haunting figure.