Kowalski

Kowal is the smith, from kować, to forge, and it sits second on the Polish list. Poland's four most widespread surnames are Nowak, Kowalski, Wiśniewski and Wójcik, and on 30 January 2023 the PESEL register counted 68,454 women and 67,505 men carrying this one. It is occupational and locative at once: made by putting -ski on the settlement names Kowale and Kowalskie, and taken directly as a byname too, because the son of a kowal was called Kowalski.

Those settlement names are the point. Polish occupational surnames come out of the medieval service villages, where a whole village working for the prince, the township or the lord, or a few streets inside a town, held one kind of specialist. The place then took the plural of the trade for its name: Piekary the bakers, Garbary the tanners, Winiary the winemakers, Kowale the smiths. Smiths and bell-founders were kept apart from the rest of a town as well, for the plain reason that their work was fire.

So Kowalski rarely runs back to one ancestor. It runs back to an address, and to the job those addresses existed to do. The -ski ending belonged to the szlachta, and over a dozen armigerous Kowalski families did exist, sealing with Abdank, Gozdawa, Korab, Ostoja, Ślepowron and Wieruszowa among others. The mass of the name is not theirs.

The village smith worked across the whole range of iron: gates, grilles, railings, light fixtures, furniture, tools, agricultural implements and cooking utensils, which is to say the equipment every other trade in the village depended on. A hammer head began as a bar about the diameter of the finished face: the eye punched through it and drifted wider, the peen drawn to a wedge, the face dressed by upsetting.

His material was wrought iron, very low in carbon and threaded with fine stringers of glassy slag, which made it tough and, melting in a weld, sealed the joint against the air so the iron fluxed itself. Good steel stayed rare and expensive until the Bessemer process of the 1850s, and old work shows how carefully it was spent: on an antique axe, adze or chisel a small piece of steel has been forge-welded in to carry the cutting edge, and the body of the tool is iron. None of it involved melting anything: no western fire could melt iron until the sixteenth century. The Slavs had given the work a god long before, in Svarog, of the forge, fire, the sun and creation.

The Statutes of Piotrków of 1496 bound the peasant to the land, and for a forge that cut both ways: the smithy was a fixed asset no manor could do without, which made its keeper valuable, and the law kept him where he was valuable.

Horses were the other half of the obligation. Shoeing took a smith's hands with something of a vet's knowledge of the lower limb: the routine job is trimming the hoof, with iron going on only where the workload or the need for grip demands it. Armies carried the same skill: into the nineteenth century European forces still employed blacksmiths to shoe horses and repair wagons, tack and artillery equipment.

Marian Kowalski was born in 1821 at Dobrzyń nad Wisłą in Congress Poland, in the Russian Empire; his patronymic survives in forms pointing to a father named Wojciech. He graduated from St Petersburg University in 1845, took his doctorate in 1852 for a theory of the orbit of Neptune, and from that year was director of the Kazan Observatory and dean of physics and mathematics there.

His central work analysed the proper motion of 3,136 stars from James Bradley's catalogue, and it was the first usable method of deducing the rotation of the Milky Way. On the strength of it he disproved the idea that one massive central body accounted for the motion of the stars. He also improved the derivation of planetary orbits from observation, publishing the important papers in 1859 as Recherches astronomiques de l'observatoire de Kasan. He died at Kazan and lies in the Catholic cemetery there. A crater on the Moon and a crater on Mars carry the name.

Alfred Jan Maksymilian Kowalski (1849-1915) was born in Suwałki to Teofil Kowalski of the Wieruszowa coat of arms. He studied in Warsaw, Prague and Dresden, settled in Munich in 1876, and worked under Józef Brandt; in 1890 the Munich Academy of Fine Arts nominated him an honorary professor. Alongside Brandt he was the most popular Polish painter in Munich, and his Lone Wolf became his most reproduced picture, especially in the United States. He was buried at the Munich Waldfriedhof, and later brought home to Powązki in Warsaw.

Józef Wierusz-Kowalski (1866-1927) was born at Puławy, left law at the Imperial University of Warsaw after a year for physics at Göttingen, and took his doctorate in 1889 on the strength of glass. From 1894 he taught at Fribourg, where he built the physics department and served as rector; in that first year he introduced Pierre Curie to Maria Skłodowska, and in 1897 he hired Ignacy Mościcki as his assistant. In 1910 he discovered progressive phosphorescence in the spectra of organic molecules. He led experimental physics at the reopened University of Warsaw from 1916, and from 1919 served the restored republic as its envoy to the Holy See, then at The Hague, Vienna and Ankara, where he died.

She was born on 25 August 1905 at Głogowiec in Łęczyca County, third of ten children of Stanisław Kowalski, a carpenter and peasant, in a poor and religious family. At sixteen she went out to work as a housekeeper. In 1924, at a dance in a park in Łódź, she reported a vision of a suffering Christ; she went to the cathedral, then took a train to Warsaw, where she knew nobody, with nothing but the dress she stood in. She spent 1925 as a housemaid paying her deposits to a convent, and on 30 April 1926 was clothed as Maria Faustina of the Blessed Sacrament.

At Płock on the night of 22 February 1931 she recorded the instruction that made her known: paint an image according to the pattern you see, signed Jezu, ufam Tobie, Jesus, I trust in You. She could not paint, and no sister at Płock would help. Only in Vilnius did her confessor Michał Sopoćko, who had first sent her for a psychiatric examination she passed, introduce her to the artist Eugene Kazimierowski. The painting was finished in June 1934 and shown at Mass in April 1935. Her diary, some seven hundred printed pages, is the only mystical text composed in Polish.

She died at Kraków on 5 October 1938, aged 33, and rests in the Basilica of the Divine Mercy there. Karol Wojtyła, then Archbishop of Kraków, opened the first inquiry into her life in 1965; as John Paul II he beatified her in 1993, canonised her on 30 April 2000 and made the Sunday after Easter the Feast of the Divine Mercy. A carpenter's daughter from a Łęczyca village stands on the calendar of the whole Church.

Tadeusz Kowalski, born 31 May 1894, skated in pairs with Zofia Bilorówna, and the two were Polish national champions nine years running from 1927 to 1935, took bronze at the 1934 European Championships and came fourth at the Worlds that year. He played football as well, for Czarni Lwów between 1912 and 1928. A lieutenant of artillery in the Polish-Bolshevik War and again in the defensive war of 1939, he was taken prisoner by the Soviet Union and killed at Kharkov in the Katyn massacre, aged 45; Poland's Minister of Defence promoted him major posthumously in 2007.

Chana Kowalska was born at Włocławek on 4 November 1899, daughter of the Zionist rabbi and politician Jehuda Lejb Kowalski. She turned to drawing at sixteen, studied painting in Berlin from 1922, and went on to Paris with the writer Baruch Winogóra, where she could not afford a studio and painted in her friends'. She showed at the Jewish cultural event of the 1937 Paris World Exhibition and wrote on art for the Yiddish journals; her canvas Shtetl holds one of the small Jewish towns of eastern Europe destroyed in the 1940s. Active in the Resistance under the occupation, she was arrested by the Gestapo and deported on 19 July 1942 to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was murdered.

The name lies thickest where Mazovia is: 26,270 in Mazowieckie, ahead of 15,005 in Łódzkie, 12,076 in Kujawsko-Pomorskie and 11,811 in Śląskie, thinning westward through 9,429 in Dolnośląskie to 2,904 in Lubuskie. It is common enough to serve as the language's worked example, the surname set out in full declension to show how an adjectival name behaves through the cases; a married pair, Pan Kowalski with Pani Kowalska, are together Państwo Kowalscy.

That ordinariness is why the name gets handed to the man who could be anyone. Henryk Sienkiewicz gave it to Roch Kowalski in The Deluge; Marlon Brando played Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, Clint Eastwood played Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino. It belongs to the driver in Vanishing Point, to Leon Kowalski in Blade Runner, to the baker Jacob Kowalski in Fantastic Beasts, and to a penguin in Madagascar. Under all of it is a fire at the edge of a Polish village, set back from the thatch because of what it might do, and the one man there who could make anything anybody needed out of iron.