The Forgotten Colleges of the Commonwealth of Poland

In October 1823, a secret student society with unknown goals and structure was formed within the college; it was called “Black Brothers”.
The student organization at the college in Kroże followed the Philarete ideas, i.e. learning and virtue, love of the homeland, and interest in the Romantic poetry and – possibly – in the freemason movement. The members expressed their solidarity with the Philaretes from Viland protested against their arrests.

Russian police, who uncovered the organization, arrested and court-martial six students, the youngest of whom was 15 at the time. As the sentence, passed in March 1824 and approved by Tsar Alexander I, was intended to terrorize the population and discourage dissent, it was exceptionally severe – the plot organizers, Jan Prosper Witkiewicz and Cyprian Janczewski (who was later depicted as one of the characters in Mickiewicz’s drama Dziady), were sentenced to death, and the other members were sentenced to exile and hard labour. Ultimately the most severe sentences were reduced to permanent exile and loss of nobility.

Since 1832, after the failed November Uprising, the lessons at the college had to be conducted in Russian. In 1842 school was finally transferred to Kovno, along with all the precious movables: the library of several thousand volumes, the science laboratory equipment, a collection of minerals and almost a thousand items in the numismatic collection.
Since 2009, in the former building of the dormitory of the Jesuit college there has been operating lituanian Kražių Motiejaus Kazimiero Sarbievijaus Kultūros Centras (Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski Cultural Center) housing among others, regional museum and exhibition gallery.

The very well-equipped school and the excellent staff working according to the ambitious programme of study enabled the college to achieve a very high level of education, almost university standard. As a consequence, the school became an important cultural and intellectual centre, which was of great value not only for the eastern borderlands, but also for the other parts of the country which had been divided and incorporated into three different states. It also vastly contributed to the fact that Krzemieniec started to be referred to as “the Volynhan Athens”.

The November Uprising (1830-1831) brought an end to the Volynhan Lyceum – Tsar Nicolas I perceived the insurrection as a token of ingratitude for his policy allowing the development of Polish education on the lands incorporated into Russia. The reprisals involved the tsar’s order of 21 August 1831, closing the Lyceum, and soon afterwards all the 250 Polish schools in the south-western governorates (Volynhan, Podolia and Kiev) were closed. The Lyceum’s library and vast collections, as well as much of the collection of the botanical garden, were transferred to the newly established Kiev University. 16 out of 20 Lyceum teachers were also transferred to Kiev, including Willibald Besser, who expressed his dissent by lecturing in Latin. The Lyceum ceased to exist.

Due to a legal decree of the Marshal Piłsudski from 1920, the former college of Krzemieniec resumed its activity in 1922, as the group of schools. It was continued up to 1939.
Today District Academy of Humanities and Pedagogic of Taras Shevchenko in Krzemieniec is placed in the old collegium. In the former college church, there is Lord's Transfiguration Church of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

The tragic turning point was the year 1769, when the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa occupied the Polish part of Spiš and unified it with the Hungarian part. The college started to lose the Polish character, and more decisive steps to that effect were taken in 1787, when the Polish Piarists were removed from administration of the school, and teaching in Polish was replaced first with teaching in German and then in Latin. The school went into gradual decline, though the status and form of the gymnasium was preserved until 1849.
Today Piarists complex belongs to the Redemptorist who restored the church and a part of the monastic buildings. In some parts of convent there are working social institutions, such as: vocational school run from 1991 by the Redemptorists with the boarding house and children's home - both institutions named after Hofbauer St Klement - and Centre of the free time of the father Augustín Krajčík.

The three colleges described here were all located on the borderlands between various nations (Polish, Lithuanian, Rusyn, German, Jewish) and religions (Catholic, Protestant, Russian Orthodox, Judaic), even though until the late 18th century these lands were a part of one multinational and multicultural state – the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The foundation of the three schools was preceded by the Act of Parliament of 1573 called the Warsaw Confederation, guaranteeing religious freedom.

In a broader perspective we should note that for several centuries the Commonwealth and the other European countries of that period were in fact a European union, which was a Christian union sharing the language of high culture – Latin. This situation shaped the underlying message expressed in the programmes of study of these schools, as their main goal was to teach the civic ethic which would now be called European. It was rooted in Christian values, and it was not connected with a particular nation.