Cmentarz Powązkowski w Warszawie

• Authors: Fijałkowski Wojciech

Title variants

EN

The Powązkowski Cemetery in Warsaw

• Languages of publication: PL EN

Abstracts

EN

The Warsaw cemetery of Powązki is one of the oldest and largest national necropolises in Poland. Founded “outside” eighteenth-century Warsaw on land offered to the capital by starosta Melchior Szymanowski, it was created thanks to the financial support of King Stanisław August, his brother Primate Michał Poniatowski, the Grand Crown Chancellor Bishop Antoni Okęcki and many other prominent persons. The outlay of the cemetery together with a project of the church and catacombs for high ranking persons was designed by the royal architect Domenico Merlini. The originally small terrain of the necropolis, which at the end of the eighteenth century totalled merely 2,5 hectares, grew almost twenty fold, and in the first half of the nineteenth century reached the size of 43 hectares. The successive expansion of the cemetery was accompanied by an enlargement of the cemetery church and the catacombs. The Powązki necropolis, devised as a great pantheon and the burial site of hundreds of men rendered immemorial in the history of Poland, her culture, art, science, education and economy, became also the site of a special display of numerous magnificent monuments of sepulchral art. It contains many works representing all artistic styles and trends dominating during the last two hundred years in architecture, sculpture and the decorative arts. The authors of these works include celebrated Polish architects and sculptors as well as masters of metal and artistic masonry. During the last world war and occupation, and especially the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, the cemetery and its monuments became seriously devastated. In the wake of postwar reconstruction, the salvage and conservation of the most valuable tombs and gravestones became the domain of work pursued by the Social Committee of Care for Old Powązki, established by Jerzy Waldorff. Thanks to the efforts of the Committee and its creator, it was possible to save from oblivion more than a thousand objects (1974-1999).

Keywords

PL

nekropolia; Powązki; sztuka sepulklarna; Jerzy Waldorff; Cmentarz Świętokrzyski

• Publisher: Narodowy Instytut Dziedzictwa
• Journal: Ochrona Zabytków
• Year: 2000
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 223-233

Dates

published

2000

Contributors

author

Fijałkowski Wojciech

Identifiers

ISSN

0029-8247