Antoni Sagan was born in 1894 in Warsaw. He was a railwayman. Since the day of evacuation he kept a diary. Having lived for a month in a railway carriage, transferred from one place to another he chronicled events, experiences, thoughts. A part of his memoirs portrays economic side of life in these atypical conditions - prices and type of purchases as well as other expenses paid throughout the journey. They reveal author's interests and likings, economic conditions of migrants and residents of the land traversed. The chronicle is of great historic value. Written during wartime it concerns a group of people united by a common fate of peregrination through the west part of the Russian Empire, entirely dependent on the incomprehensible decisions of the railway authorities. During the journey the author begins to see the signs of war, although he almost doesn't experience it himself at this particular time. On the one hand the diary provides comments on the situation and events, on the other hand - describes and analyses the inner state of the narrator, his suffering about not having heard from his relatives left in Warsaw. After many ordeals Sagan delivered the railway assets he was given charge of and set off for Moscow.
Reverend Krzysztof Kluk was born in 1739 in Ciechanowiec, Podlasie region. He was a parson of the Ciechanowiec parish since 1770. He is the author of 14 volumes of works of natural science printed between 1777 and 1789 and a 372-page manuscript which was a draft of prepared sermons (here we can find loose insertions, mainly on farm topics). All studies were written during his stay in Ciechanowiec. Here he died in 1796. He wrote his works in Polish complying with grammar and spelling rules. Kluk's works are taken into account in studies about the history of the Polish language. However Kluk's creativity, especially in the part concerning the life and work of rural population had utilitarian and sometimes extremely practical character. Therefore, he used simple language that was understood by people to whom he addressed his works. His utterances often had a colloquial form, taken from the local language. These were agricultural terms, names of objects and activities, emotional words and many other words connected with everyday life and material culture of country people. Numerous examples of dialectal expressions used contemporarily in Ciechanowiec and the neighbourhood can be found in Kluk's writings. The dialectal layer in Krzysztof Kluk's heritage is not sufficiently researched or described. Krzysztof Kluk's works are a source of material - grammar features, phrases and most of all vocabulary common for all North-Eastern area of Polish. They can be found in 19th century dictionaries of this region as well as in dialectal material recorded even in the second half of the 20th century.
Ciechanowiec is one of the oldest cities in the Podlasie region, located in the south - western part of the region. The town is situated in the region of Masovian dialect, with many features characteristic of the north-eastern Polish dialects. The earlier Polish language, which has preserved vocabulary and grammatical features recorded in the eighteenth-century works of Christopher Kluk (naturalist from Ciechanowiec), is at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first century rapidly disappearing. It is displaced by the nationwide language, heard on radio and television.
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