Kozłowski

Kozlowski is a place turned into an adjective. Kozłów and Kozłowo take their names from kozioł, the he-goat, for the herds once kept on them, and the suffix -ski turns the settlement into a description of a person: the man of Kozłów, his wife Kozłowska, the household together Kozłowscy. Polish naming used animals twice over: directly, as lis, the fox, produced Lis and Lisowski, and at one remove, making villages of them first and surnames of the villages afterwards. Kozłowski took the second road.

Toponymic surnames of this shape first meant the owner of a village rather than anyone who happened to live in it, but in the nineteenth century they were commonly taken from the name of the town a person came from, and the ending settled on families with no claim to the land at all. There is no single Kozłów behind the name and no single family behind it either. Goat pastures were everywhere, and so, in time, were Kozłowskis.

The result is one of the largest name-groups in the country: twelfth in Poland in 2009 with 76,657 bearers, and 37,265 women and 36,640 men on the PESEL register in January 2024. It is thickest in the north and the east, ranking second in both Warmia-Masuria, with about 7,764 bearers, and Podlaskie, with about 5,560.

Felicjan Antoni Kozłowski was born on 9 June 1805 at Tupadły in the Płock country, son of Józef Kozłowski and Marianna née Chamska, who owned the estate there. He studied in the faculty of sciences and fine arts at the University of Warsaw from 1825 to 1828 and went straight into teaching, first at the practical-pedagogical school on Leszno in Warsaw. In 1833 he was transferred to the Gubernial Gymnasium, the school put in place of the Warsaw Lyceum after its abolition in 1831, and there he taught classical languages, history and statistics.

In 1839 he formally proved his nobility, without a coat of arms: the -ski ending was one thing and a herb quite another. In 1843 he won a large sum on the national lottery and bought an estate in the Piaseczno district, where he lived until his death on 25 September 1870. He is buried at Sobików, where an obelisk stands beside the seventeenth-century wooden bell tower.

He wrote throughout, and his subject was Mazovia. Dzieje Mazowsza za panowania książąt, the history of Mazovia under its dukes, appeared in 1858. He had published on early Greek civilisation in 1829 and, in 1845, an essay on Plato prefacing his own translation of the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. He married Ludwika Stawnicka in Warsaw in 1833; their son Kornel Antoni became a historian and ethnographer in turn. Another Kozłowski in the same records, Wiktor Kazimierz Grzegorz (1791–1858), was a captain in the Polish army, a fighter in the November Uprising and afterwards a forester; no kinship between him and Felicjan is recorded.

Szymon Marcin Kozłowski was born at Alytus in 1819 to Jan and Magdalena Kozłowski. He finished his schooling at Kėdainiai, entered the theological seminary at Vilnius in 1839, took the tonsure in 1841 and moved to St Petersburg in 1842 to continue in theology. He was ordained priest there on 23 December 1844 by Kazimierz Dmochowski, and took his master's degree from the Saint Petersburg Roman Catholic Theological Academy in 1845, summa cum laude.

The career that followed was academic long before it was episcopal: professor of moral theology and homiletics at Vilnius from 1846, professor of church history and canon law at St Petersburg from 1848, rector at Vilnius from 1851, honorary canon in 1852, doctor of theology in 1862.

Leo XIII appointed him Bishop of Lutsk and Zytomyr on 28 March 1883. He was consecrated in the Church of St Catherine on 13 May by Aleksander Kazimierz Bereśniewicz, bishop of Włocławek, with the bishops of Kielce and Vilnius assisting, and made his entry into Lutsk on 7 July. On 17 December 1891 he was appointed Archbishop of Mohilev, and he held that see until his death in 1899. He was buried in St Petersburg.

Feliksa Magdalena Kozłowska was born on 27 May 1862 at Wieliczna near Węgrów, into an impoverished szlachta family bearing the Nałęcz arms. She was eight months old when her father Jakub died in the January Uprising, and she was raised by her mother and by her paternal step-grandparents, the Pułaskis. She left a Warsaw high school with fluent Russian, English and French and worked as governess to a general's family. Tsarist regulation of religious orders put the enclosed Visitation Sisters out of reach, so at nineteen she entered the Franciscan Sisters of the Afflicted, the congregation founded by Honorat Koźmiński.

On 8 September 1887, with five other women, she formed a covert community at Płock that kept itself by embroidering church vestments and lived without meat or fish. As its superior she took the name Maria Franciszka and added to the usual three vows a fourth, of perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. Her widowed mother Anna sold her Warsaw property in 1890, moved to Płock, and in 1903 made her own profession as Maria Hortulana.

From 1893 Kozłowska reported visions, and the movement that grew from them took the name Mariavites, from the life of Mary. Rome refused it. The Inquisition judged the visions hallucinations in 1904, and in April 1906 Pius X excommunicated her and her followers by the encyclical Tribus circiter; in December she and Jan Kowalski were excommunicated by name, the first occasion on which a woman was condemned as a heretic in her own name. In November of that same year, under the freedoms of the October Manifesto, the Russian government granted the movement official status in its part of Poland, and full legal recognition followed in 1912.

She stayed out of public view herself and left the politics to Kowalski, raised to bishop at the Old Catholic congress at Utrecht in 1909. By then the Mariavites had begun their cathedral at Płock, the Temple of Mercy and Charity, and counted fifty to sixty thousand adherents across sixteen parishes; at their probable peak in 1917 the figure may have reached 160,000. Kozłowska revealed her last vision in 1918 and died in 1921. Her followers call her Mateczka, little mother.

Edward Kozłowski was born at Tarnów on 21 November 1860, in what was then the Austrian Empire, and emigrated to the United States in 1885. He settled first in Chicago, then moved to Milwaukee to study for the priesthood at St Francis Seminary in Wisconsin. His first charges were Polish parishes in Michigan, and they were hard ones: after quieting a violent parish he was sent to a worse one at Manistee, where shots had been fired at the priest before him. He calmed it, and kept on good terms with the German archbishop besides.

Milwaukee then sent for him. St Stanislaus sat at the centre of a quarrel between the Polish parishes and an archdiocese run by German and Irish clergy. Michał Kruszka's paper Kuryer Polski was pressing for Polish representation in the hierarchy; many Poles spoke no English and worked at the bottom of the economic ladder; and the feeling that they were not "American enough" for church leadership had already split the church, with a branch of the rival Polish National Catholic Church established in the city. Kozłowski was sent in as pastor to mend it.

On 14 January 1914 Pius X named him Milwaukee's first Polish bishop, only the second Polish-speaking bishop appointed in America after Paul Peter Rhode at Chicago in 1908. A carriage and four horses carried him from the cathedral where he had been consecrated through torchlit streets to St Stanislaus, where an estimated fifty thousand people gathered to catch sight of him. He spent his single year in office on the grievances of Polish priests, who were paid less than their German and Irish brethren, then contracted sepsis and died on 7 August 1915. Some thirty thousand mourners came to the funeral, at which Rhode said: "How difficult it was for us to obtain a second Polish bishop, and how easy to lose him".

Kozłowski crossed the Atlantic as Kozlowski. The barred ł has no key and no English sound, and it went; so, often, did the final -i, replaced by the -y that English, Czech, Slovak and Ukrainian all use and Polish never does. Polish names met the same handling across the emigration generally, w written as v and sz as sh, and in Spanish-speaking countries something more drastic still, a Spiczyński ending up as plain Spika.

The heavier loss was grammatical. In Poland the name is Kozłowski for a man, Kozłowska for a woman, Kozłowscy for the family. Western registries have no such distinction, so clerks in the United States, in Germany and in Argentina entered the masculine form for wives and daughters alike. A form that would never be met inside Poland became the ordinary one abroad, and where the feminine survives outside the country it is usually because a family insisted on it.

The stripped spelling is now a name in its own right on three continents. Brian Kozlowski, of Polish descent, played tight end in the National Football League from 1993 to 2007; Linda Kozlowski, also of Polish descent, became an American actress; Glenda Kozlowski, born in 1974, is a Brazilian journalist. Even the sciences carry the shortened form: the graptolite genus Kozlowskitubus is spelled without the stroke, because scientific Latin has no letter for it.

Roman Stanisław Jakub Kozłowski was born at Włocławek on 1 February 1889, studied in Switzerland and Paris and took a licentiate in natural sciences at the Sorbonne in 1910. He worked at the Museum of Natural History in Paris until 1913, then left Europe for Bolivia as professor and director of the National School of Mines. His work on graptolites made his name: he sat in the Polish Academy of Sciences, was the inaugural director of its Institute of Paleobiology and founded the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, and he took the Mary Clark Thompson Medal in 1958 and the Wollaston Medal in 1961. He died in 1977.

The rest of the roll runs wide. Leon Kozłowski (1892–1944) was an archaeologist who served as Prime Minister of the Second Polish Republic from 1934 to 1935. Zofia Kozłowska-Budkowa (1893–1986) was a historian and palaeographer and Aniela Kozłowska (1898–1981) a botanist and virologist. Józef Kozłowski, born in 1757 or 1759, was a Polish-Russian composer; Leopold Kozłowski-Kleinman (1918–2019) a pianist, composer and conductor; Helena Roj-Kozłowska (1899–1955) a folk artist and writer of the Podhale.

Public office took others. Krzysztof Kozłowski, born in 1931, was a journalist and philosopher before serving as Poland's minister of internal affairs and head of its state protection office. Teofil Kozłowski was the first mayor of Gorlice after the Second World War, for the Polish Socialist Party. Rościsław Kozłowski, born in 1936, is an Orthodox priest and professor of theology who was rector of the Orthodox theological seminary. Twelfth commonest name in the country, and a goat pasture at the root of every one of them.