The text is a broad description of Pilawin, a manor belonging to Józef hr Potocki. The article crosses out the journey to Pilawin (from the Pilawa coat of arms) located near the village of Suchowola. The hunting lodge is also described in detail, as well as the park and the game preserve located around the manor. The memorial plaque of Prince Józef Czartoryski and the history of the manor and farm itself are also mentioned (Source: "Ziemia. Tygodnik Krajoznawczy Ilustrowany', Warsaw 1910, no. 51, pp. 6-9, after: Wielkopolska Biblioteka Cyfrowa).

A modernised reading of the text

Pilawin

After several hours of rail travel, around noon on a lovely August day, I was delighted to see the walls of a pine forest, surrounding the South-West railway station. Slavut. From there, I still had to travel 50 versts to reach Piszczów, the estate of Count Józef Potocki, where, in the midst of a vast forest covering an area of 32,000 decimals, a game park - the Pilawin Park (from the Pilawa coat of arms) - had been established at great expense and effort. I eagerly awaited the moment when I would see this attractive place. When I got out of the carriage, I was accosted by owners of various vehicles offering their services.

I chose the least shabby, as the owner called it, a "phaeton-lejn", which had a shed that kept falling off, and springs that were only there for form's sake, mattresses that were slipped and so sat on that one had to hold on with both hands to avoid falling out into the mud or the muck. The three horses harnessed to the phaeton were in perfect harmony with it, as the buffalo one was blind, a fine without an ear, with a quiver in its tail, and the bay one was lame on the reins.

After long preparations we set off. Rudy Hersh on the goat began to work the whip vigorously from the spot, and the tin bucket attached to the axle accompanied him with its sound. When the forest ended, it alternated between sands, puddles or hard-dried clay. At the edge of the horizon, the uninterrupted forest darkened. Hersh was cackling more and more strenuously and using his Burmese sceptre, he was watering the horses or greasing the axles of the phaeton unlubricated with grease. When we left on the road, the ride went more smoothly, and after crossing the Kotka River, we got to Piszczów at dusk, and I rode up to the flower-filled porch of a house, surrounded by a pretty garden against the backdrop of a large forest, the home of Piszczów's forest manager, Mr Romuald Sokalski, where I was received with great hospitality by the host and his family. The next day we left for Pilawin by a perfectly maintained road leading through a beautiful forest.

After travelling quite a distance, to the right of the road, a neat hunting lodge appeared, decorated with deer and elk antlers with taste, gracefully drawing its white birch bark on the blue-green darkness of the forest. Beyond it is a huge park - an animal sanctuary, surrounded by a nine-foot fence and having only two entrances: one near the house, where a pair of beautiful and very tame Belarussian bears lives by the gates in a spacious wire fence and a cottage, and the other one a few versts further on the opposite side, over the road leading to the nobleman's hamlet of Kamionka. The fenced area occupies the very centre of the Piszczów forests, touching only on the east-north side the governmental forests, and the ground surface of the zoo is generally flat, with a slight undulation here and there. It is sprinkled with numerous streams and flowing rivers: Sokalec, Osowieczka, Kroplowna and Czartorya.

Nine years ago there was a wild, inaccessible forest here, which was cleared, and the muddy land was drained by skilful drainage. The waters were captured in ponds (the largest, the Vietnaya 8 hectares), divided by capital dikes and benches. Painted bridges, neatly thrown into traffic, and posts, with which a dozen or so versts of excellent roads have been marked, gracefully whitewash their way across the entire animal sanctuary. Artificial glades have been created in suitable places. On the drier spots, spreading oaks, lime trees, maples, birches and aspens - on the wetter ones, alders, rails and rushes - further on, an endless compact colonnade of pine forest without any undergrowth, where darkness prevails and the ground is covered with black berries, lingonberries or clumps of ferns.

Here and there, pine trees are scattered sparsely, lined with hazel and other shrubs, of which the floristic peculiarity is the tall and profusely spreading azalea (Azalea pontica); in May it covers itself with a large yellow-orange flower, strongly scented. In a village called Mosques, a pond has been set up in an animal sanctuary especially for the beavers that nest there. Bison, elk, various exotic species of deer as well as domestic deer and white-tailed hares live and breed freely in the area.

Grouse, black grouse, hazel grouse, cranes, rare black storks, lots of waterfowl and forest songbirds nest here, feeling safe from the onslaught of predators, which are systematically exterminated here and in all adjacent forests belonging to the estate. The owner's basic thought is that the game park should be a place for acclimatisation, cross-breeding and breeding of species, disappearing in the desolate national forests. The surplus specimens of the decaying species are to be released into other forests in complete freedom, thus increasing the game stock, which is a major source of income in other countries.

What we have today was not created immediately: in 1900, a small area was fenced, where two elk were released, then three; the following year, 36 elk were brought in and the fenced area was increased to 1,500 tithes. At the beginning, 23 of the moose were killed - but when the ones born on the spot grew up, the reproduction was successful, so that the number of moose has now reached 68. The idea of bringing in various exotic deer was then taken up; in 1902, American red deer (Cervus wapiti canadensis) were brought in from Hamburg by Hagenbeck. The following year, Forestry Superintendent Mr Sokalski travelled to the Yenisei Governorate, where he purchased Moral deer (Cervus moral capi arcticus); Kamchatka deer (Cervus dybowski) were imported from the zoo in Berlin.

In 1904, three bison were received as a gift from the Bialowieza Forest: a bull and two cows; a pair of bison was imported from Hagenbeck, but the male bison was killed and the cow is holding on to a herd of bison. Last year it had a calf from a crossbreeding with a bison, which, however, died. Today, the number of bison has already reached seven. In 1905, after receiving a gift of a deer deer from Mr Koziełło-Poklewski, Mr Pawłowski, the hunter, travelled to Siberia and acquired more locally. These roe deer are very shapely, similar to Ukrainian roe deer, only much bigger, and since they are in heat at the same time as domestic roe deer, it is possible to raise the domestic breed by cross-breeding.

Reindeer from the Vologda Governorate could not cope with the climate change and became extinct, as did the American turkeys. The breeding of white hares has been successful - but as this animal is difficult to keep in a fenced-off area, they are dispersing in various directions. Last autumn, the game area was expanded to almost 5,000 tithes. In addition to a large area of woodland, the enclosure includes arable fields with scattered clumps of trees; these are to remain unchanged for the animal's use. On the place where the highest elevation exists and where the rock overlooks the surface, a nice gazebo of birches and oaks was built this year. From this gazebo, there is an expansive view of the village of Storolow and others, framed by the bluffs.

The fence of the game preserve is wooden, strong, more than 3 metres high; in only one part of the newer one, where the fields are, a fence of strong barbed wire is erected by the oak posts. In April this year a new batch of deer arrived, and during the summer many new specimens of deer arrived at the game enclosure, among which the interesting ones are saiga and Kashmir deer, rarely seen in European zoos, so that the number of imported animals has increased considerably, for up to now there have been 300 animals in addition to the same number of domestic deer. Direct observations by the residents of the zoo have shown that all animals born locally or imported have grown significantly in size and maturity as a result of the excellent conditions in which they live.

Each animal finds a proper and safe place for itself, plenty of water, abundant fodder in summer, because besides natural meadows, they sow 80 morga of clearings within the game park: rye, oats, buckwheat, vetch, serradella, lupine and potatoes - a grass called bison also grows here. For winter feeding, the meadows are cut for hay. The twigs of various trees, cut with green leaves, are tied in sheaves and dried, for elk feed; besides this, the animals feed on oats, carrots and maize, ground together with acorns.

Licks (bricks made of clay with salt and aniseed) are spread in the fields across the meadow. In this seclusion, interesting for a nature lover, perhaps the only one in the country, with the kind permission of the owner and thanks to the great kindness of Mr Sokalski, I had an easy stay for a few weeks, located within the game park in a pavilion, inhabited by the hunter Mr Pawłowski. I had every opportunity to devote myself completely to the study of nature and to observing the life of animals in their own habitats. A pair of horses and the inscrutable Hal Adam drove me around the forest all day.

While I was sketching, Adam, who during his long life had bred many horned specimens that now roamed the forest, sitting under a pine tree with a pipe, would recount details of animal customs or various episodes from forty years ago, and when at the end, heat-weary, he took a nap, I listened to the sounds of the woods: woodpeckers rattled by, sometimes a squirrel jumped from branch to branch, or a large bird flapped its wings in the top branches of the pines, or a flock of ducks broke from the rushes.

And often a deer or an elk would run out of the bushes, stand, watch me carefully and then walk away, grazing on the way. During my stay there was a rut of Canadian deer; during the day they were seldom seen, but before evening they would gather in herds and begin a barreling that lasted all night. It was dangerous to encounter them then, as not only do these cuckolded deer fight fierce battles among themselves, but they attack people and horses. The nights were warm, bright and the moon shone brilliantly.

The trumpeting of deer under the house itself was matched by the hoots in the distance, which stimulated the elk to grunt. From time to time a bison roared or a platypus rumbled, and I no longer knew what sounds near and far blended together. When I was falling asleep, it seemed to me that I was in the African jungle or that I had travelled back in time to distant centuries, when King Jagiełło ordered a great hunting trip, perhaps also in these forests, in order to procure spies for the troops before the need at Grunwald.

When writing about Pilawin, it is impossible not to mention the now very rare larch forest in the middle of the forest - a dozen or so wiorsts from the game preserve. Having passed through the Kamionka hamlet and its adjoining arable land, one enters the forest again along the same road as in the zoo. In the depths of the forest ancient larches of unusual thickness and great height appear in groups among other trees and finally the road enters a compact thicket of extremely high larch forest. At the top, the branches join together above the road and form a corridor which disappears somewhere far away in the blackness of the forest.

The space occupied by this now rare forest covers several tens of tenths. The older larch trees of stately height and thickness were planted in the 18th century at the will of the then owner of these spaces, Prince Jozef Czartoryski, while the younger ones have become abundant on their own over time and have grown into a dense thicket. - To commemorate this so ancient forest culture, the present owner erected a monument this summer of unworked lumps of rough stone, into which a stone plaque with a carved inscription was embedded:

"On the centenary of the death of my great-grandfather Jozef Duke Czartoryski Stolnik of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, an exemplary landlord and founder of larch culture in the 18th century, in honour of his memory a grateful great-grandson Jozef Potocki 1894".

Neat benches made of birch and oak branches have been arranged near the monument and the whole place remains carefully maintained under the careful care of the forest supervisor.