Mozolne początki zmagań o ochronę zabytków w Galicji.
The Arduous Beginnings of the Struggle for Monument Protection in Galicia.

Reflections on the Margins of the Latest Book by Tadeusz Łopatkiewicz

Summary/Abstract: The article reflects on the process of birth and slow maturation of the monument protection system in Galicia (one of the crown countries of the Habsburg monarchy), taking place in the 1860s and 1870s. One of the key figures of the time was Ludwik Mieczysław Lubicz Potocki, a conservator active in Eastern Galicia – an area covering 49 political districts of the time, including the town of Krosno and its surroundings. The starting point for the discussion is the latest book (published in 2022) by Tadeusz Łopatkiewicz dedicated to Potocki figure of this conservator and his activities in Krosno and the surrounding area. The book takes a closer look at the figure of the conservator himself and the vicissitudes of his life (the last chapter), shows the background against which he grew up, received his education and began to cooperate in discovering and interpreting traces of the past (chapter one), presents the foundations of the emerging system of historic monument protection in the Habsburg monarchy, including Galicia (chapter two) and, most importantly, based on the archival sources, presents and explains in detail Potocki’s achievements in the official care of historic monuments in Eastern Galicia, with particular emphasis on the monuments of Krosno and the surrounding area. The work is supplemented by a source appendix, bibliography, indexes, and an abstract in English. This publication by Tadeusz Łopatkiewicz, the fruit of his many years of research and archive and library searches, is an important contribution to a new synthesis of the history of the conservation and the protection of historical monuments in the Polish lands in the 19th century. A particularly valuable element, found by the book’s author and used from the perspective of the town and its surroundings under study, is Potocki’s Conservator’s Diary, written down between 1866 and 1878, on the pages of which all the glories and shadows of the conservator’s work of the time are visible, brilliantly brought out and commented on by Tadeusz Łopatkiewicz. It is imperative that this source have to be published and interpreted in its entirety in the near future, preferably through the collaboration of a group of researchers more closely involved in the person of Ludwik Mieczysław Lubicz Potocki in recent times, including Tadeusz Łopatkiewicz.

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