Two letters by Wincenty and Zygmunt Krasiński and the first editions of the Bible in Polish from the collection of the Fr. Józef Jarzębowski in Licheń Stary remind of the International Mother Language Day that is celebrated today.
The collection of the Museum in Licheń Stary includes many letters, including two written by Wincenty and Zygmunt Krasiński, which until recently were completely unknown. Last year, employees of the University of Nicolaus Copernicus in Toruń, participants of the doctoral seminar of prof. Grażyna Halkiewicz-Sojak began to read both of these letters. The edited ones appeared in print for the first time in the university's scientific publishing house, "Sztuka Edycji" 2018, No. 1 (13), edited by Dariusz Pachocki.
The museum collections also include numerous autographs and manuscripts of other writers and poets who wrote in Polish, including Henryk Sienkiewicz, Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, Eliza Orzeszkowa, Maria Konopnicka and Cyprian Kamil Norwid.
The Polish language emerged from the group of Slavic languages, more precisely from their western group. The first texts in Polish were mainly translations of fragments of the Holy Scriptures and psalters.
In the Museum in Licheń Stary, you can also see the first Bibles printed in Polish. These are: the Catholic Bible of Leopolita, also known as Szarffenberg's Bible, published in 1561, the Calvinist Bible of Brest, also known as Radziwiłł, published in 1563, and the Bible of Jakub Wujka from 1599.
The International Mother Language Day commemorates five students from the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh who, in 1952, died in a demonstration demanding Bengali status as an official language. This day also reminds us of the importance of taking care of the mother tongue.
