Wooden residential architecture of Krzemieniec

It was a type of eighteenth-century housing strictly filling the Krzemieniec "Old Town". Along the one and only main axis - Szeroka Street - there were plastered and whitewashed bourgeois houses, inns, shops, often with one storey, with bowed, column-supported porches, broken, S-shaped or shingled roofs with picturesque balconies, wattles, galleries, arcades and external staircases. These buildings disappeared almost entirely with the liquidation of the Krzemieniec ghetto. Nevertheless, until the 1970s, single buildings of the manor house type could still be found.

From the turn of the 18th/19th century there were numerous manor houses, situated near the centre (delimited by the post-Jesuit buildings, accommodating first the college, then the departmental school of the Commission of National Education, and later the Volyn Grammar School and Lyceum), hidden in the gardens , inhabited by grammar school professors, local bourgeoisie providing lodgings for students, and finally by noble families of the latter, coming to Krzemieniec for the winter from the neighbouring estates.

A landmark of the past

One such modest town house preserved to this day is the house of Wilibald Besser (1784-1842), an eminent botanist and florist, professor of the Krzemieniec school. The building is located at today's Drahomanov Street 2 (former Trinitarian Street 2), in the historical part of the town, between the post-Basilian building (part of the high school complex) and the now defunct Trinitarian monastery. This manor house, located on a plot of land of approximately 300 m², was built on a quadrilateral plan (with one folded side) with an area of approximately 85 m².

The original construction of the building was of timber-frame construction, set on a stone foundation, with a hipped roof with shingled slopes, with two chimneys in the ridge. It is a three-axial building, with a south-oriented, enclosed porch in the central axis. The original layout of the rooms has been preserved: porch, vestibule, four rooms, kitchen, chamber without window openings (located in the central axis between the two chimney shafts). During the current repairs and renovations (the last one in 1975-1977), which did not, however, change the character of the building , the foundations were reinforced with concrete fillings and the decayed parts of three external walls (eastern, southern and western) were removed. The cavities were filled with ceramic material, plastered and whitewashed. Part of the north wall was clad in brick, the shingle roofing of the roof slopes was replaced with tar paper. The window and part of the door frames and floorboards were also replaced (probably more than once). Nevertheless, the whitewashed wooden ceiling tracery has been preserved in its former layout as visible from the inside. The walls of the rooms have also remained plastered and whitewashed.

The manor house, known as Besser's house, is said to have been inhabited by him. It is not known exactly whether he built it for himself, acquired the existing one or whether he was originally just its occupant. To clarify this issue, or in fact to consolidate factual conjectures, it will be helpful to briefly recall the life story of this remarkable, foreign, Krzemieniec lecturer and scientist of European renown.

A page from Besser's biography

Wilibald Swibert Joseph Gottlieb von Besser was born on 7 July 1784 in Innsbruck, Austria. After the death of his parents, he moved to Lemberg, where he completed grammar school and began university studies. In 1805, he left for Krakow, where he obtained his doctorate in medicine two years later and studied botany. The Krzemieniec period of his life began in 1808, when he was appointed by Tadeusz Czacki (one of the founders of the Wołyń Gymnasium in 1805) as a lecturer in zoology and botany; he took up his duties a year later. While working in Krzemieniec, he created a botanical garden at the school and conducted scientific research on the flora and fauna of Podolia, Volhynia and Ukraine. He worked in Krzemieniec until the school was closed in 1832, then left for Kyiv, where in 1834-1838 he was professor of botany at the newly established (on the basis of the closed Lyceum of Volhynia) Imperatorial University of Kyiv St. Vladimir . As a protest against the closure of the Lyceum, he lectured at the university not in Russian but in Latin. He returned to Krzemieniec in 1841 , where he died after a year, leaving a wife and a son and daughter. Wilibald Besser's tombstone is preserved in the local Basilian cemetery.

It can be assumed that after arriving in Krzemieniec in 1809 to take up a lecturing post, Besser did not have enough time to start building his own house. Even if he had sufficient funds at his disposal (which, despite his career only just beginning, was possible, as he received a fairly high emolument as a respected foreign lecturer), he would rather have opted to purchase an existing house. Most likely, therefore, he would have initially rented accommodation and possibly only later come into possession of his own (as they said at the time) real estate. If the Besser's house was his first residence in Krzemieniec, then it must be concluded that it was built before 1809 ( the date of his taking up his post), possibly still in pre-partition times (as an accompanying or servant building for the schools which had operated there earlier). If, on the other hand, the first seat was not, then it could have been built after that date, and perhaps by Besser himself. This is quite likely, as a brick with the date 1822 was encountered during renovation work (in the 1970s).

Further fate of the house

The next known owner of the manor house, after Besser's direct heirs, was probably Wojciech Majewski (b. ca. 1779) , a Kraków physician who arrived in Krzemieniec - perhaps Besser's acquaintance from his medical studies, and then his descendant, also a physician, Antoni Majewski (1870-1929) , followed by his wife Zofia (1891-1957 ) , who transferred ownership of the house to Father Bronisław Mirecki (1903-1986) , parish priest in Haluszynce, who in turn handed it over to Irena Sandecka (1912-2010 ) , who was already living there.

She was an 'institution' of Polish Krzemieniec after 1939, a graduate of the local secondary school and the Jagiellonian University, a scout leader, catechist, Polish language teacher and church organist. It is thanks to her that the Besser house has retained its former, unique atmosphere. In addition to the owners' flat (heated, as it once was, by cookers, without running water or a telephone), it housed a private library serving the Polish community not only in Krzemieniec. It still had the sound of a 19th-century piano, as Queen Bona's Mountain once peeped through its windows, and was shaded by a huge spruce tree, probably still planted by Professor Besser's hand.

Current situation

In May 2005, Irena Sandecka bequeathed the estate to the "Wspólnota Polska" Association in Warsaw, so that it could continue to be a centre of Polish culture as a home for Poles, both local and visiting, who come to Volhynia to learn about and research our past. This is what the Besser Manor House is still waiting for.

At the beginning of the 21st century, a granite plaque depicting Professor Besser in Ukrainian and Polish was placed on the wall of the manor house. It should be noted that in the current municipal registers the house is listed only as a residential building, not listed in the register of historical monuments, and is therefore not under legal protection.