Preserving Wooden Churches: International Beginnings of Their Protection and the Example of Wojciech Dzieduszycki in the 1880s

We invite you to the lecture by Olha Zarechnyuk that continues the series of lectures, "Let's Have a City."

In 1880, a call to study and preserve wooden churches in Galicia was circulated in newspapers. The author of the text was the young Count Wojciech Dzieduszycki (1848-1909). A wealthy landowner from a well-known family, a conservative politician, and author of a number of literary works, the count was also the newly appointed conservator of monuments. Thus, he officially represented the state policy of Austria-Hungary to study and preserve the heritage on its territory in all its diversity.

Typical of an educated European aristocrat of his time, Didushytskyi was fond of art, especially ancient and Renaissance art, and traveled extensively to the cities of Greece and Italy. The newspaper "Dilo" ironically noted that the count was more familiar with houses in Athens than in his native Galicia. What prompted Didushytskyi to look at his native land? How did the mostly Greek Catholic village churches begin to occupy more and more of his attention and imagination? How did he develop the infrastructure for their research in Lviv? Why did contemporary Polish researchers treat the count's hobby coolly, calling his texts unscientific? Why did he abandon this topic after devoting less than a decade to it? 

During the lecture, we will try to find answers to these and other questions by referring to documents from the Austrian State Archives in Vienna and to the author's own publications from the early 1880s.

Credits

Cover Image: compilation of a drawing by Julian Zachariewicz (Austrian National Library) and a portrait of Wojciech Dzieduszycki (Nowiny illustrowane, 1907, No. 46, s. 2).