Tolerance is a great social value and a sign of high culture. It is a historical category and not and inborn virtue of an ethos, a nation or a state. We used to emphasise the fact that in the past Poland, in union with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, was a multi-ethnic, multicultural and multi-religious country. And it was a country without stakes, as Janusz Tazbir said, so at least on the level of state power – tolerant. The beginnings of Polish tolerance date back to much earlier than the beginnings of the Republic of Poland (1569).
The Middle Ages, with their low level of literacy of the society, narrow knowledge of the world and omnipresent Church, which by nature was intolerant towards other beliefs, did not encourage tolerance towards the “different ones”. This quality of being “different”, not accepted or accepted with difficulty, or to be more specific, the attitude of social communities or state power towards it constitutes the essence of tolerance or intolerance as a social phenomenon. In conclusion, on the basis of what has just been said, tolerance, as defined here, can be established either on the level of social groups coming into contact with the “different ones” or on the level of state power as a guarantor of a certain social order.
Excluding the process of Poland’s christianisation, which is a separate issue, the discussion should focus on the establishment of the relations of local communities with the settlers from the west: the Walloons, the Flemish People and the German, and separately the Jews as well. The only thing we know about the Walloons and the Flemish is the fact that they were in Poland and that in the course of time
they must have assimilated with the local people. German settlement was much more important. They settled both in the cities and in the countryside, taking advantage of the privileges and legal protection of the nobility. There were cases of phobias among local people, due to the privileged position of the settlers, language or morality, as in the case of keeping fasts. However, there was no “different” religion,
which eased the conflicts and controversies. Eventually, the assimilation took place, sometimes twoway assimilation. Jewish settlers were a separate issue – different religion, perceived as hostile towards Christianity, and hermetic, impossible to assimilate culture. As the “servants of the monarch’s treasury” they enjoyed special legal protection of the nobility, which was guaranteed by western law adopted in Poland. The first noble to acknowledge it was Duke of Kalisz, Bolesław Pobożny (1264), it was introduced all over Poland by Kazimierz Wielki (1334 and 1364). It was of great importance, however, it did not prevent frequent conflicts, or even routes of Jewish people.
In medieval Poland the attitude of tolerance towards the “different ones” was being build by state authority. King Kazimierz Wielki played a special role in that process. Red Ruthenia, which became part of Poland in 1340, was a great challenge. Its inhabitants, people of various ethnic origins, gained special guarantees of their legal and religious status. Namely, according to the privilege of Magdeburg rights for the city of Lviv the king allowed the Armenians, Jews, Saracens, Ruthenians and others who settled in Lviv (also Tatars) to keep their religious ritual and to be trialed according to their law. That law of king Kazimierz was acknowledged by next rulers from the House of Anjou and Jagiellonian dynasty, which means that it was really adopted. What is more, it can’t have been limited only to Lviv itself. It is certain that the Armenians used their own written law for a long time.
Thus, the beginnings of tolerance in Poland date back to the Middle Ages. It was programmed by state authorities, which upheld it. The union between Poland and Lithuania was built on the foundations that had already by prepared. It is also due to that fact that it became a permanent creation. It is not a coincidence that in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth lived more than half of the entire Jewish population.

The beginnings of the parchment documents collection of the Scientific Library of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Polish Academy of Sciences date back to mid 19th century, that is to the time when the whole library collection started being created. It was established mainly thanks to the endowments donated by the members of the Cracow Scientific Society, later Academy of Arts and Sciences. Apart from that, the benefactors were Cracow’s burghers, clerks, priests, doctors, publicists and even students, there were also landowners. Their names were meticulously registered in the books of endowments to the Cracow Scientific Society from 1856 – 1871 and to the Academy from 1887– 1890. Initially, the parchment diplomas were not separated from the rest of the manuscripts. In 1906 Jan Czubek was preparing a publication of the second part of the Catalogue of the manuscripts belonging to the Academy of Arts and Sciences and he came up with an idea to create a separate collection of parchment documents. Three parchment documents from the 15th and 16th century are very interesting. Until mid 19th century they constituted the covers of the Sieradz land registers. After they were removed from the registers, despite being considerably damaged, they were preserved by an anonymous but provident collector and donated to the Academy of Arts and Sciences and its collection. In 2014 they were restored, so today we can identify two notarial documents and one papal bulla, unknown to the historians.

The article analyses a compendium Parnassus medicinalis illustratus published in the years 1662–1663. Prepared by Johann Joachim Becher, the work was a richly illustrated “garden of health” – a collection of pieces of information on healing properties of plants, animals and minerals. An impulse to its publication was a purchase of woodcut blocks by a publisher, Johann Görlin the Elder. The blocks were made for Conrad Gesner and first printed in Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s herbarium published by Joachim Camerarius the Younger in 1586. The prints were considered to have been well done and to be worth using again. They were supplemented with the prints patterned on the 16th-century treatises and prepared in Ulm. The history of the Parnassus woodcuts contributes into the research on the mechanisms of using old natural illustration. It is a rare example of a situation when a publisher came up with an initiative to publish woodcut blocks purchased from Camerarius’s collection and supplemented them with new but old-like illustrations he commissioned and with a text inspired by the medival in form “gardens of health” .

The objective of the present article is to depict the fortunes of the Smołukowski family situated directly at the backstage of Cracow’s establishment from the turn of the 17th and 18th century. It shows the figures of Franciszek Smołukowski (1647–1729), Cracow’s municipal secretary and iron merchant, his wife, Annnée Gloss (around 1670–1735) and their son, Father Jan Smołukowski (around 1702–1739), canon of St. Ann’s Collegiate Church in Cracow. On the basis of their last wills and other materials the family connections have been established, especially those of Ann Smołukowska née Gloss. The Gloss family was related to the representatives of Cracow’s top establishment (the Hallers, the Bartschs) as well as to the families of different religious beliefs which settled in Cracow (inter alia the Gessing family which came from Gdańsk).

The books from the household collection of Helena Dąbczańska (1863–1956), a famous Lviv collector, are currently preserved in the Central Library of the Academy of Fine Arts and in the Jagiellonian Library in Cracow. The research into the collection has identified portions of the collection that previously were part of libraries collected in aristocratic households. The current article discusses 90 books that were once in possession of Kordula Potocka (1764 – after 1837), wife of voivode of Bełz, Teodor Potocki (1730–1812). The collection is an example of a library created at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at a time when upper-class women were increasingly interested in books: they read intensely and created private libraries, in which love stories were being gradually replaced by a variety of fiction and non-fiction. Kordula Potocka’s choice of books reflects cultural developments of the period. As a lady of fashion and a powerful magnate’s wife, she would read books in French published abroad. Like other private libraries during the period of the Partitions of Poland, Potocka’s collection is dominated by works of fiction and books on history. In the former category, many varieties of the novel are represented. The novel, a genre previously despised during the Enlightenment period, in Potocka’s time was developing and gaining wider readership. The novels gathered by Potocka are an accurate representation of this literary development. Another vast category are books concerning events that occurred during Potocka’s lifetime. The chronological range of the collection, the authors’ periods of activity and the presence of many first editions suggest that the volumes in this category are for the most part contemporaneous with current affairs of the period.

The article presents the most significant book catalogue of a Warsaw printer, bookseller and publisher of the Polish Enlightenment, Piotr Dufour. It also analyses the text structure of the catalogue from the point of view of the content and form of the works that it includes.
The catalogue includes 336 Polish and foreign literary texts including: 164 plays, 139 prose works and 32 poetic works. These texts are dominated by 176 translations from French followed by Polish literature – 92 titles, and translations in: Italian – 24 titles, German – 16 titles, English – 5 titles, Latin – 3 titles and two from Greek and Russian.
It is an assortment catalogue, mostly (95%) presenting book inventories from 1774–1792.
The works discussed in the article, representing Belles-lettres, scientific literature, journalism, religious and popular science literature create a full picture of Piotr Dufour’s activity as a publisher, bookseller and editor.

Known mainly as the discoverer of Troy, during his numerous travels Schliemann did not skip Egypt. He stayed by the Nile four times (1859, 1864, 1886/1887, 1888) visiting the most important sights with great interest and making purchases for the Berlin collection (Egyptian and Nubian pottery, ancient fabrics). His last two trips were especially important for him. During his last expedition, waiting for the arrival of Rudolph Virchow, at the beginning of February 1888 he conducted archaeological  excavations in Alexandria. His objective was to find places where Ptolemaic palaces stood. Obviously he was especially fascinated with Cleopatra VII. Already on the second day, at the depth of 12 metres (!) he found a marble head, which he declared to be Cleopatra’s portrait. The circumstances in which he made that alleged discovery suggest that it was a hoax prepared ahead. When he made his “discovery” he was alone (he employed 36 people, and he was guarded by the representatives of Antiquities Service!). He smuggled his find from Egypt and after his return to Athens deposited it in the Customs Office in order to take it to Berlin without any problems. Presently, “Cleopatra’s head”, declared by the specialists to be an image of Corinna, or rather its Roman copy from the 1st century AD, is exhibited in New Museum in Berlin. This kind of machination is nothing unexpected in Schliemann’s work. It has been proved several times that the same refers to his other “discoveries”. It was confirmed recently by inter alia William M. Calder III and David A. Traill, and in the case of the so called Cleopatra’s head and digs in Alexandria – Wolfgang Schindler.

Revolutionary atmosphere of the Revolutions of 1848 reached Galicia directly after the bloody events of 1846, thus it was considerably less intense. It was due to the uncertainty about how would peasants react to that revolutionary wave and the fact that numerous local activists either died or dispersed. Despite that, political animation, apart from Cracow and Lviv, reached the Sącz region as well. The present article discusses revolutionary activity on the basis of local source materials preserved in private collections of landowners and representatives of intelligentsia. Those activists (their interesting letters and manuscripts have been preserved) did not aim at armed combat, instead they demanded the abolishment of the privileges of the nobility and serfdom of the peasants and postulated agrarian reform. “National Council of the Sącz District” developed its activity, which later had a big influence on the development of Galicia’s independence.

Aleksandra Apolonia Czechówna (1839–1923) was a daughter of Tomasz Czech and Aleksandra née Zielińska. Her Journal of the whole life..., written almost without breaks for almost 68 years (1856– 1923), is kept in the National Archives in Cracow with a reference no 29/1582/1–29/1582/44 (old reference numbers IT 428/1–428/44). It constitutes an excellent source material depicting cultural, social and moral life of Cracow in the second half of the 19th century and two first decades of the 20th century. The development of touring, which nowadays is called tourism, began on the turn of the 18th and 19th century, and Cracow’s suburbs were already famous for their beauty. People eagerly visited Zwierzyniec, Łobzów, Krzeszowice, Czerna, Bielany, Swoszowice, Tyniec or Mogiła. However, Ojców and Wieliczka were considered to be the most worth visiting. Ojców and the valley of the Prądnik River,  where it is situated, due to their beautiful nature, Wieliczka because of its salt mine, one of the oldest ones in the world. Together with her parents and sister, Aleksandra Czechówna also went on such excursions. In the summer of 1856 she was in Ojców, Grodzisko and Pieskowa Skała. Next year, in October, on the day of the miners’ celebrations, she went to the Wieliczka salt mines. The text presented includes colourful accounts, full of delight, written after her return home by then young Aleksandra Czechówna. Picturesque and full of charm views of Ojców’s neighbourhood and mysterious, sometimes fairytale-like underground tunnels of the mine stimulated her vivid ima- gination. The text comes from two subsequent volumes of Aleksandra Czechówna’s Journal: volume 1, refernece no 29/1582/1 (old reference no IT 428/1) and from volume 2, refrence no 29/1582/2 (old reference no IT 428/2).

The article refers to the material from the manuscript collection of the Scientific Library of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow – a text by a poet, publicist and journalist, Zdzisław Kleszczyński (1889 – 1938) The Prologue for the Warsaw theatres for the 3rd of May 1916 written on the 125th anniversary of the Constitution. It includes the analysis of the work, information about the author and the circumstances of its creation and performance. The article is supplemented with an appendix – a scientific and critical publication of The Prologue. The Prologue was performed on the 3rd of May 1916 in the Rozmaitości Theatre in Warsaw before four stage productions of The Return of the Envoy by Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz. Between The Prologue by Kleszczyński and the comedy of the Enlightenment age people sang God Save Poland.

The present installment in the series aiming at the identification, reconstruction, and presentation of Japanese documents preserved with Bronisław Piłsudski’s archives in the Academic Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Lettres (PAU) and Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) in Cracow focuses on three letters and one picture post card written and sent respectively in February, March, April, and July 1906 to Piłsudski by Ms. Kōko Sōmiya, a sister of charity in the Japanese Red Cross Society, a resident of Yokohama who had served Russian POW camps following the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese war. The letters are written in Cyrillic characters in sort of a Russo-Japanese pidgin with the proportion between Russian and Japanese language material gradually (and chronologically) changing with each item in favor of the latter: while the lexicon of the first item is almost entirely Russian and quasiRussian, the lexicon of the fourth item is almost entirely Japanese. The ppc comes from the famous (now especially among collectors) firm Kamigataya of Ginza, Tokyo, and depicts a doll arrangement for the annual March 3 “doll (or girls’) festival (hinamatsuri). As a principle, the original manuscript text has been retransliterated into print fonts, Japanese-language fragments provided with the standard Hepburn transliteration and with a reconstruction in current Japanese characters (kanji-kana majiribun). Actually, the correspondence remained incomprehensible without its situational context until a lucky instance of discovering Piłsudski’s own 1908 newspaper article describing his personal contacts with Ms. Somiya centering round the problems of emancipation of women in Japan at the beginning of the 20th century and mixed Japanese-foreign marriage perspectives. The present paper (a by-product of  research project The fifth volume of The Collected Works of Bronisław Piłsudski (CWBP-5) – Mate- rials for the Study of the Nivhgu Language and Folklore – preparation for publication and completion of the five(-six)-volume edition financially supported by the National Center of Academic Research (Narodowe Centrum Nauki) in Cracow grant 2012/07/B/HS2/00461) republishes the article in question and ends with commented translations of the four pieces of correspondence into Polish.

2016 marks the 170th birthday and 100th death anniversary of Henryk Sienkiewicz. On this occasion The Senate of Poland proclaimed 2016 the year of Sienkiewicz. In the Scientific Library of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Polish Academy of Sciences there are a lot of materials connected with the writer, the majority of them studied and published. There are bio- bibliographi- cal materials; especially interesting are his letters to private people and to institutions. A very valuable item is the manuscript of the “Letters from Africa” from the “Czas” (a daily newspaper) files. Sienkiewicz is referred to in the memoirs of Felicja Kęszycka-Schnayder, who describes her meeting with the writer in Switzerland and later his funeral. Sienkiewicz and his work was also the subject of the studies of Józef Marian Święcicki, Benedykt Filipowicz or Józef Tretiak. An example of the writer’s interest in fine arts are his pencil drawings- sketches. The Library possesses also numerous photographs of Henryk Sienkiewcz. What is more, in Father Jan Fijałek’s collection there are numerous newspaper clips referring to Sienkiewicz giving an insight into his life and work. Sienkiewicz’s links with the Academy of Arts and Sciences should also be mentioned. He was a founder of Maria Sienkiewicz née Szetkiewicz (his wife) scholarship that was administrated by the Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The text includes a passage from a diary of a Lviv journalist, Michalina Grekowicz-Hausner (1891– 1967), daughter of Józef Grekowicz, a well known commander in the January Uprising. She graduated from the Teachers College in Lviv, she did not acquire university education. She started her journalist work in 1917; she published articles in a few Lviv newspapers, she was also a speaker in the Lviv City Council, where she worked in the City Committee of Winter Help to the Unemployed. During the war she managed to avoid the fate of tens of thousands Poles and she was not exiled to Siberia or Kazakhstan. In 1946, together with her husband, she made a painful decision to expatriate from Lviv. They first moved to Szczecin, then to Cracow. She continued publishing in Szczecin’s and Cracow’s newspapers and at the same time worked in the Municipal Public Library in Cracow and wrote two (unpublished so far) books: a biography of Józef Grekowicz “Trough the daughter’s eyes” and her own diary “A Me- mory”. Their typewritten copies were bought in 1973 and 1976 for our Library. The passage from the “Memories” presented here refers to a life journey made by Michalina Grekowicz- Hausner in the summer of 1927. She used the scholarship that she was granted by the Ministry of Culture and Art to pay for her trip to Switzerland. The outcome of the travel which included Basel, Geneva, Chamonix, Vevey, Montreux, Chillon, Lucerne, Bern, Zurich and Rapperswil is the text pre- sently discussed. Apart from obvious praises of the country and its beauty, the author, of her professional interest, focuses on charity institutions, care centres, sanatoria and orphanages. The trip also resulted in numerous press reports in the Lviv and Warsaw newspapers.

The manuscript heritage of Professor Marian Tyrowicz is preserved in three Cracow’s institutions: The Archives of Science of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Polish Academy of Sciences, The Scientific Library of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Polish Academy of Sciences and in the Library of the History Department of the Pedagogical University. His materials are also preserved in the Ossoliński National Institute in Wrocław. Marian Tyrowicz (1901–1989) was a historian, teacher of secondary schools, university lecturer, since 1955 he had worked in the Pedagogical College in Cracow. His research covered universal history and history of Poland of the 19th century, he was an archivist, newspaper expert, source materials editor and author of many publications and articles. The biggest amount in volume (about 20 metres of files) belongs to the Pedagogical University due to Professor Tyrowicz’s strongest connection with it. The files were purchased from the widow, Regina Tyrowicz, in 1990. This heritage has not been fully inventoried. The materials of Professor Tyrowicz in the Archives of Science of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Polish Academy of Sciences were endowed by Professor himself in 1976. After being rearranged, 29 files were acquired and 66 files were passed by the widow in 1990. The Scientific Library of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Polish Academy of Sciences possess Iconographic Files of Professor Marian Tyrowicz, purchased in 1988. They encompass 11 thick volumes, and the other 3 are in the files. Professor Tyrowicz’s scientific correspondence is kept in the Ossoliński National Institute in Wrocław. The manuscript heritage of Professor Marian Tyrowicz serves the researches of many branches of science connected with the issues that he was preoccupied with all his life.