14/10/2021
The great collection of Kazimierz Sobański - that is, back and forth of Polish numismatics ...
Kazimierz Sobański (1859–1909) - one of the most outstanding, however partially forgotten Polish numismatists of the 19th century. He was born in Wasylówka in Podolia,studied law and political economy at the University of Warsaw and at the University of Lille. He started his numismatic interests during his agricultural apprenticeship at the estate of Stanisław Walewski, also an outstanding numismatist, author of the first catalog of Polish Tripple Groschen - "The Crown Tripple Groschen of Sigismund III from 1588 to 1624". After the practice, Sobański quickly determined the scope of his future collection and decided to collect coins of early modern Royal Poland, that means coins from the reign of Sigismund I the Old to Stanisław August Poniatowski. The quick development of the collection was influenced by the fact that in 1886 he received the property in Guzów from his father. The efficient management of which brought him lucrative income. The property was of over 6,000 hectares, including nearly 3,000 hectares of arable land and over 2,200 hectares of forest land. The Sobański’s collection of coins counted, according to the register, of 1910, 8 882 items, including 395 gold coins (including 16 portuguezes, 11 halfportuguezes and 3 gold thalers). When referring to individual items, one cannot ignore the three absolute unique specimens in this set. These rarities are: the Lviv thaler of John II Casimir from 1661 which came into the hands of Sobański by exchange from the collection of the Swedish king Oscar II, the Gdańsk 4 ducats of John III Sobieski, minted in 1692in one of the last Gdańsk issues of that king, and the trial thaler of Stanisław August Poniatowski, made by Holzhausser. Apart from the numismatic collection, Sobański gathered in Guzów a valuable collection of books and works of art, mainly paintings and old furniture. Kazimierz Sobański died in 1909 in Warsaw and was buried in the cemetery in Wiskitki. In his will, he bequeathed his entire collection to the Capital City of Warsaw and set an annual annuity of 3,000 rubles for completing and maintaining his collection. Due to formal reasons, and then as a consequence of the outbreak of World War I, the collection could not be moved to its destination, instead it was transported to Cracow, where it was carefully cataloged by Marian Gumowski, the curator of the Czapski Museum in Cracow at the time. Unfortunately, the catalog was never released. After the end of the war, the collection was transferred to the newly established National Museum in Warsaw in 1920. The peaceful times of Sobański's coins did not last long. In 1939, the outbreak of World War II forced the employees of the National Museum in Warsaw to hide the collection by bricking it up in the basement of the National Museum in Warsaw. Only four people were present during the walling up - the Director of the National Museum in Warsaw, the Head of the Numismatic Department and two 'most trusted' workmen. The hiding place did not remain a secret for long time. Probably due to the betrayal of one of the two workers who indicated the place where the boxes with coins were hidden, the Germans quickly found them and took them to Cracow. The next breakthrough event and the stage of the numismatic 'journey' was the retreat of the troops of the Third Reich and the hiding of the chests with the stolen collection, for fear of the Red Army, in one of the Silesian repositories. After World War II, at the turn of 1945 and 1946, thanks to intensive searches, a large part of the collection was found in the town of Morawa near Strzegom. The next step was to take the coins back to Cracow, and then to Warsaw, where they remain to this day. For many years the collection by Kazimierz Sobański was considered non-existent. However, the research initiated by Maciej Widawski allowed for its partial reconstruction. On the basis of the preserved inventories and correspondence, it was possible to determine which artefacts kept at the National Museum of Warsaw belonged to Kazimierz Sobański. The entire collection, mainly robbed of gold coins, has not been found. In addition to the loss of the numismatic items themselves, the provenance was also irretrievably lost, and thus the possibility of completing the collection of Kazimierz Sobański again. However, the intense activities of the current team of the Numismatic Department of the National Museum in Warsaw, led by Andrzej Romanowski, offer a glimpse of a chance to regain some of the rarest and most valuable assets (by Karol Piotrowski).