Dzieje plantacyjnego obelisku ku czci Floriana Straszewskiego

Abstrakt

THE HISTORY OF THE MONUMENT TO FLORIAN STRASZEWSKI IN THE PLANTY

Kraków is often referred to as a city of monuments. Yet hardly anyone remembers which of its monuments actually began the “monumentomania” in Kraków. At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, the monumentbuilding phenomenon spanned the whole Western Europe, although its scale in Poland was incomparably smaller due to the country’s political situation as an enslaved territory on which the idea to erect monuments to the distinguished heroes and the creators of Polish culture was restricted radically through censorship imposed by the partitioning powers. The situation did not change until the third quarter of the 19th century, when numerous monuments were funded in the major Polish cities, formally patterned after the European style in monument sculpture. The original secular monument in Kraków was the obelisk commemorating Florian Straszewski which has been described in the article. In fact by the mid-19th century the city could have boasted a few free-standing monumental figures, most of which had originated in the modern era, but these were religious works located usually at Kraków’s churches and in their surrounding gardens. The creations devoted to people of merit for the country and its culture amounted to monument-like tombs and monuments built inside churches, or decorative busts in representative public buildings and the local well-off’s drawing rooms.