The text mentions a 'valuable monument of the past', namely the manor house in Ostashino. Numerous elements of the house, some of the rooms, and the patterns on the cornice or tiles are described and illustrated. In addition, the history of this farmstead, formerly owned by the Baków family, and later by the Szwykowski family, is recalled (Source: Tygodnik Illustrowany, Warsaw 1900, Półrocze I, pp. 393-396, after: Digital Library of the University of Łódź).

A modernised reading of the text

A precious monument of the past.

Few civilised societies have as few monuments to the inner life and life of the past as we do. One need only travel through Western Europe to see how much material remains of how our forefathers lived, lived and worked. But apart from the museums, the magnificent museums of Vienna, Munich, Paris, London and even many smaller cities, which give a precise idea of the past of the respective peoples, how many houses, palaces, castles, yes! how many houses, palaces, castles, even entire cities, such as Nuremberg, which have been so meticulously maintained to the smallest detail, not only externally but also internally, that when one looks at them one is amazed that between all this there are figures like us, not some steel-clad knights or powdered dignitaries.

Everywhere there is a certain respect, a certain veneration for the past, and in spite of the booming present, the reminders of the past remain intact. All the political turmoil, all the misfortunes affecting these societies, do not weaken their predilection for this point. It is heartbreaking to think how the monuments of the past are disappearing and languishing in our country. Most of them are either in complete ruin or disrepair; churches, which, thanks to the care of the clergy and the religious feeling we have developed in our country, are the most resistant to time, are sometimes so altered that it is impossible to find the style and epoch in which they were built; old city walls and old houses are carefully removed or altered, so that, God forbid, they should offend the eyes of their contemporaries with their archaism. In a word, modernism fever. And this has been going on for a long time, since Krasicki in "Pan Podstoli", through the mouth of an old courtier, complained about the ruining of valuable monuments to suit the new fashion.

It is true that every epoch has its own requirements to which it must adhere; however, this must be reconciled with respect for the past. If building monuments deteriorate so quickly, what can we say of the internal fittings, the furniture and furnishings which are the most accurate mirror of everyday life! They perish and deteriorate, passing from hand to hand, serving poorer and poorer strata of society, until finally, somewhere in an attic, in a poor provincial flat, as useless rubbish, they are consigned to the rubbish heap, bringing a miserable end to a life that has often begun brilliantly and in splendour.

This is how documents, which, like the communal song, are the "ark of the covenant between the old and the new years", are lost. A single Krakow museum cannot contain everything that should be preserved. Private collections are not up to the task, as they are not accessible and cannot store too many objects. In short, there is no archaeological association which would take on the task of founding a museum, and there are no monuments of ancient architecture which would also house undestroyed equipment, with the exception of Wilanów and Podhorzec in Galicia.

As a result, it is often very difficult to form an idea of the environment in which the characters from the past, portrayed by poets and novelists, moved, and if the reader is content with the often inarticulate mention of "magnificent chambers" or "modest manor houses", these terms cannot satisfy anyone wishing to visualise the appropriate background for the scenes which literature brings before his or her eyes. However, the one who feels the lack of adequate guidelines most strongly is the painters striving to compose scenes from the past, and this is also the reason for the scrupulous collection of drawings and notes connected with the life of past centuries. The numerous drawings, collected in the past by Lesser, W. Gerson, Matejko, Eljasz, Kossak and many others, and relating to clothing, interiors and everyday objects, were created with the desire to fill the gap in this area.

Sometimes, in their search, they came across unexpectedly valuable and entirely happily preserved memorabilia, which could serve as a test of what they had guessed from more difficult sources. In 1852, Professor Gerson, while touring the southern part of the Kingdom, came across the manor house of the Dąmbski family in Chruszczyna Wielka, in Pińczów. Its original windows, oil-painted murals depicting some kind of hunt and, according to tradition, brought from Gdansk on glass, a large chimney in the corner with the owners' coat of arms above the cornice, and a majolica cooker next to it, all attested to its ancient origins. Today, I hear, although the estate has remained in the hands of the same family, all this has disappeared, blown away by the blast of a new fashion.

I do not know whether any thought has been given to preserving these precious keepsakes, or to sending them to at least some kind of collection, but I only know that a memory remains in Professor Gerson's album and in the description in "Kłosy" (Volume IX, page 88). Unfortunately, this is not enough! Looking at this drawing, I was sometimes envious of the opportunity which allowed lucky wanderers to see with their own eyes such an interesting monument. I never imagined that I would have the opportunity to experience this pleasure in person. At the beginning of July I arrived in Novogrudok. My host, himself endowed with a high artistic sense, drew my attention to the village, which should have been visited because of the old manor house, not badly preserved to date.

So, on our way to Svitezh and considering Svitezh as the main destination of the trip, we went to Ostashyn, the village where the prominence manor house is located. At around two in the afternoon, having taken a short hike through lush and flower-scented meadows, we stood in front of an old but externally completely well-maintained building. It is a typical country manor house, the likes of which are still to be found in large numbers, especially in further afield. The originality of its exterior lies in the buttresses which support the corners and in the brick porch, the entrance to which is formed by a door with a semicircular top, flanked on the sides by two windows with similar ends. The mansion, it was explained to me, is built of hewn clay, and the buttresses were given later to support the ruinous construction. Above the first door in the porch is a commemorative plaque, the language and the very character of the writing tainting its ancient origins; the text a simple their strange serenity over the judgements of Providence.

Above the second door, leading into the great hallway, hangs a second plaque, somewhat worn or plastered, which gives us the metric of the construction:

"MURDERED R.P. 1670, REPAIRED R. 1731."

We thus learn that the walls date back to an era when the country, having passed through the raging Swedish turmoil, was healing its wounds, repairing the damage, putting up buildings from the ruins and getting ready to continue living. There was much rejoicing at the time, for, as a stove-builder who travelled through Poland in 1678 testified, it was rare to find burnt-out towns and villages. The country was in ruins. Many of the private and public buildings that have existed to date also bear the character of the second half of the 17th century. The oak door leading from the porch to the hallway caught my eye with its original carpentry and locksmith work. They lead into a large hallway which, according to tradition, was once larger and lit by two windows symmetrically located on both sides of the door. Nowadays, to the right of the entrance, there is a wall, and one window, separated from the hallway, belongs to the room constituting the farm store.

Beyond this recently created chamber, we find a large corner chamber, with three windows on the front and two on the top. When I entered it, reassured by my guides that there was nothing there of such interest, because it was just old stuff, I confess that I was amazed - not that I found there any extraordinary richness of motifs or an accumulation of details, but the whole that I saw moved me. This chamber, with its great whitewashed chimney, its old cooker filling a corner, its faded upholstery, its oak door with a curious fitting, its ceiling covered with a pendant of carelessly whitewashed linen, spoke to me in its entirety. I could smell the past blowing from here. And the thought and the heart tore at her.

My companions, it seemed, did not understand my rapture and were sure to suspect me of exaltation, while I was seized by the possibility of catching the past, so to speak, in the act. This chamber, so similar in design to the one which Professor Gerson found almost 50 years ago in Pińczów, testified that at that time large areas were built in the same way, the walls were decorated in the same way, similar furniture was used, and craftsmanship must have been highly advanced if they could produce such woodwork and fittings. The Chruszczyn manor is no longer an exception, but more or less the general type.

The accompanying drawings relieve me to a certain extent of the need for descriptions, which are not at all sufficient in matters where shapes are concerned. At most, some explanation will be needed, especially because of the colours, which cannot be reproduced in print. The main drawing depicts this corner of the chamber, where the entrance door, chimney and cooker are located. This original oak door is decorated with notched slats of the type sometimes seen in old Danzig wardrobes, also from the 17th century. The fittings are mainly an old-fashioned lock, with a handle in the upper part and a bolt in the lower part, from which a small handle protrudes at the bottom. The lock is completely visible on one side of the door, on the other side it has only a visible handle and a dial next to it, convexly ornamentally forged and engraved.

On the opposite half of the door, opposite the lock, there is always a handle by which you could hold the door with your hand as you closed the lock with the other. I found a completely similar contemporary fitting in the sacristy of the Sisters of Mercy in Lublin. Each half of the door is hung on two hinges, nicely drawn, forged by hand, with the result that each door has a separate drawing.There are still quite a few such doors throughout the house, and I regretted that the shortness of time did not allow me to draw more than two different types. The cooker is composed of majolica tiles. Their background is of a pale straw colour and the drawings are made on it in two colours, i.e. emerald green and blue. The main tiles are painted in flowers, the frieze in birds and the cornice in fancy fruit. The corners of the cooker are the columns, screw-shaped, appropriate to the era.

The cooker may have been moved, as evidenced by the newly added doors and even more by the changed corner tiles, where sometimes the capitals serve as the base and vice versa. The outline of the lines of the upper part of the chimney indicates the 17th century, when the Baroque style introduced more and more curved lines combined with straight ones. Above the cornice of the chimneypiece are ornaments in the shape of sizable knobs, nearly 24 cm high, and reminiscent of an artichoke. These knobs are olive-coloured. A similar cooker was found by Professor Gerson in Chruszczyna Wielka, which I mentioned above. They were apparently widespread in this era, and are supposed to have originated in Gdansk and were also called Gdanskian.

There are two more such cookers in further chambers of the manor house, but unfortunately I did not have time to draw and study them. Around the chamber I'm talking about, there is a low wainscot stretching to a height of almost 60 cm, and above it is a panel sewn on canvas, composed of bricks about one metre wide, which covers the walls completely, and for strength is edged with narrow slats. Some parts of the embroidery are done in crosses, others in half-stripes. Taking into account that the length of the chamber is 7 metres and the width is 6 metres, and the height of the staircase is 2.50 metres, we are convinced that if we exclude even half of the wall surface calculated according to these data for the doors, windows and the cooker, the staircase would have a surface of 35 square metres, i.e. more than 100 square cubits of the old measurement, filled in with canvas work.

How much work, how much patience was expended in the execution of this work. The housekeeper herself and all the staff must have had a lot of work done before the work was successfully completed. The pattern of this embroidery consists of large diagonal squares, the longer diagonal of which faces vertically, the sides of which are made up of a wavy curved line. The colours are very faded, and the dust makes it impossible to assess their original state, but in general a shade of blue of varying strength prevails. The joints of just the tops of the squares, which are narrow rectangles, are various shades of brown, while the centres are enlivened with red-stitched narrow patterns. The ceiling probably once had a beam visible. This is how they built in those days. There was also such a ceiling in Chruszyna Wielka.

Here, however, in apparently later times, the beams were covered to even out the ceiling with canvas, which had sagged from old age, creating cobbled curves, a perfect shelter for mice and rats. The windows, set in deep frames of thick masonry, have themselves nothing original in drawing and seem to date from later times. One thing that is interesting about them is that beneath each window the wall is so recessed that it provides a sort of bench for sitting. Complementing this age-old internal device are 6 chairs, which by some coincidence have remained intact. They are chairs with curved legs and high backs of Louis XIV style. Their covering is also canvass embroidery, testifying to the industriousness of our great-grandmothers and their love of beautifying their homes.

The house, half of which is unoccupied, is turned for storage and larders, while the other half houses the kitchen and journeyman's room. Its general plan is essentially very simple, namely, that a chimney wall goes in the middle along the length of the house, dividing it into two parts, of which the front, wider, occupying two gable windows, contains a large vestibule in the middle and two corner chambers, while the rear, occupying only one gable window, is divided into a number of smaller chambers, the size, number and quality of which, however, I have found it difficult to judge by the alterations made. Ostaszyn Brick once belonged to the Bak family, from whom it was acquired by the Szwykowski family, Calvinists.

According to local tradition, it was they who founded the manor house and built a temple for their co-religionists nearby, which still exists today. In those days, as I was told, the large hallway in the manor house used to be the place of church meetings. The portraits of the founders, although somewhat damaged, are still stored in the chamber I have described. When the Szwykowski family converted to Catholicism and wanted to turn the temple into a Catholic church, their relatives Otienhaus and Guenter bought Ostashin and kept the Calvinist temple, so that it is now a branch of the Slurkia church.

At the beginning of this century, the estate was inherited by the Grabowski family and now belongs to Mr Karelia Grabowski, who does not live there, however, and leases the farm. In concluding this description, it only remains for me to express my fervent wish that this precious monument may be cared for with the care and attention it deserves as it is unique. To all those who are interested in the past, I dare to ask that if they find similarly interesting memorabilia, they should not only respect them, but also let them know about them at the address of "Tygodnik Illuswany", in order to restore them and preserve them, at least for future generations.