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The Circumstances of Finding and Recovering the Coronation Sword of the King Sigismund I the Old in the Light of Marian Morelowski’s Research
Abstract
The article aims to present previously unpublished research on Marian Morelowski’s activities in the process of recovering regalia stolen from the territory of the Republic of Poland. The problem and process of restitution of cultural property after the Treaty of Riga has been subject to a number of studies, but there is no separate study on the participation and merits in this field of, for example, Morelowski. This article describes in detail his participation in inquiries in Berlin as a delegate of the Mixed Special Commission in Moscow, thanks to which he had full knowledge of the fate of works of art scattered after the looting of the Crown Treasury at Wawel, which are part of the Polish national heritage. Materials related to the recovery activities of the Polish Diaspora after World War II were subjected to in-depth research, with particular emphasis on the activities of Stanisław Meyer, Antoni Maryanowski and Edward Raczyński.
It was possible to find a lot of new and unpublished information pertaining to the essential research problem thanks to research on documents forming the legacy of Marian Morelowski, held by the Wróblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in Vilnius, archival materials in possession of the Manuscript Department of the Ossoliński National Institute in Wrocław and the Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw, and the materials related to Maryanowski held by the Archives of the Wawel Royal Castle, as well as interviews conducted with certain people.
The time span of the present paper limits the research to the year 1926, when Morelowski did research in Berlin, finished his work in Moscow and returned to Poland to take up the position of curator of the State Art Collections at Wawel on July 1 of that year. His later work in the 1930s and after the war was mentioned only sparingly. The fate of the coronation sword after 1950 was studied in greater detail.
Keywords:
Treaty of Riga, cultural heritage, recovery of works of art, Marian Morelowski, Sigismund’s SwordDetails
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
