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Authors: Norman Davies
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Republic with a camera and notebook, and starting a collection of annotated pictures of castles and country houses. After the war, when many of the historic buildings had been destroyed, he realized that his collection, though incomplete, was unique. And he spent the next forty years compiling a detailed photographic and descriptive record of every single landed estate in Lithuania, Byelorussia and Ukraine. He contacted all the surviving former owners or their neighbours, persuading them to submit every available photograph, plan, inventory or family history. His daring operation in Communist times was completely illegal, but its results were sensational. In 1986 he published the first volumes (out of a total of twenty-two) of a work which lists and describes in detail more than 1,500 residences. Part I, consisting of four volumes, deals with the former grand duchy, and is organized by the palatinates that existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There are 148 substantial entries, from Abele to Z˙yrmuny, for the Palatinate of Vilnia alone. This is no mere catalogue. It is a comprehensive compendium, giving full accounts of almost every landed family and their estates, together with their homes, their galleries, their gardens, their furniture, their genealogies, their legends and their fortunes. It is an intellectual rescue operation of a lost world on a grand scale. 113
The volume on the residences of the Palatinate of Brest contains a description of the birthplace of the last king-grand duke:
The Volchin estate lay to the north-west of Brest, close to the junction of the Bug and Pulva rivers. In the mid-16th century it had belonged to the Soltan family, and in 1586 Jarosław Sołtan, Starosta of Ostryn built an Orthodox church there. In 1639, the first wooden Catholic church was erected by the next owner, Alexander Gosiewski, Vojevoda of Smolensk… Between 1708 and 1720 [during the Great Northern War] the property passed by sale or inheritance to the Sapiehas, the Flemings, the Czartoryskis, and the Poniatowskis…
Stanisław Poniatowski proved to be an excellent manager. While enlarging the palace initiated by the Sapiehas, he re-modelled a score of farms, built seven water mills, reduced the obligations of his serfs, bred a herd of pedigree cattle, and constructed a fleet of ships for carrying grain [by river] to Danzig. In 1733, he opened the octagonal chapel in which his son, the future king, was christened.
Nonetheless, the estate was sold in 1744 to Poniatowski’s son-in-law, Michał Czartoryski, the Lithuanian chancellor, who completed the palace in mid-century, adding stone-built wings to the central section built of spruce logs. As well as the 92 main rooms, there was a library, a theatre, an orangerie, a frescoed altana, and a home park of 60 morgs . The furniture and tapestries were French, and the paintings mainly Italian. Portraits of Charles XII, of August II and III, and of Stanisław Poniatowski himself held pride of place… Since Volchin was relatively close to the capital, Warsaw, it was the scene of numerous balls, garden parties, theatrical performances and boat races.
[Thanks to the First Partition, however,] the Czartoryskis moved their main residence in 1775 to Puławy [near Lublin], and Volchin was neglected. [After the Third Partition of 1795, it found itself in the Russian Empire, and was abandoned.] It was eventually sold in 1838 to settle the family’s debts, and in the mid-nineteenth century the [ruined] palace was demolished.
After that, only the chapel survived, having been converted by the tsarist authorities for the purposes of Orthodox worship. The chapel register, which contained the record of King Stanisław-August’s baptism, was preserved in a nearby Catholic parish. Restoration of the chapel, which accompanied its reconversion to a Catholic sanctuary, was completed in time for the arrival of the king’s coffin from Leningrad in 1938. 114
Even diligently reconstructed
The volume on the residences of the Palatinate of Brest contains a description of the birthplace of the last king-grand duke:
The Volchin estate lay to the north-west of Brest, close to the junction of the Bug and Pulva rivers. In the mid-16th century it had belonged to the Soltan family, and in 1586 Jarosław Sołtan, Starosta of Ostryn built an Orthodox church there. In 1639, the first wooden Catholic church was erected by the next owner, Alexander Gosiewski, Vojevoda of Smolensk… Between 1708 and 1720 [during the Great Northern War] the property passed by sale or inheritance to the Sapiehas, the Flemings, the Czartoryskis, and the Poniatowskis…
Stanisław Poniatowski proved to be an excellent manager. While enlarging the palace initiated by the Sapiehas, he re-modelled a score of farms, built seven water mills, reduced the obligations of his serfs, bred a herd of pedigree cattle, and constructed a fleet of ships for carrying grain [by river] to Danzig. In 1733, he opened the octagonal chapel in which his son, the future king, was christened.
Nonetheless, the estate was sold in 1744 to Poniatowski’s son-in-law, Michał Czartoryski, the Lithuanian chancellor, who completed the palace in mid-century, adding stone-built wings to the central section built of spruce logs. As well as the 92 main rooms, there was a library, a theatre, an orangerie, a frescoed altana, and a home park of 60 morgs . The furniture and tapestries were French, and the paintings mainly Italian. Portraits of Charles XII, of August II and III, and of Stanisław Poniatowski himself held pride of place… Since Volchin was relatively close to the capital, Warsaw, it was the scene of numerous balls, garden parties, theatrical performances and boat races.
[Thanks to the First Partition, however,] the Czartoryskis moved their main residence in 1775 to Puławy [near Lublin], and Volchin was neglected. [After the Third Partition of 1795, it found itself in the Russian Empire, and was abandoned.] It was eventually sold in 1838 to settle the family’s debts, and in the mid-nineteenth century the [ruined] palace was demolished.
After that, only the chapel survived, having been converted by the tsarist authorities for the purposes of Orthodox worship. The chapel register, which contained the record of King Stanisław-August’s baptism, was preserved in a nearby Catholic parish. Restoration of the chapel, which accompanied its reconversion to a Catholic sanctuary, was completed in time for the arrival of the king’s coffin from Leningrad in 1938. 114
Even diligently reconstructed
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