Lewandowski

The first certain record of Lewandowski is an entry of 1673 in the album of students of the Zamoyski Academy at Zamość, and a form probably identical with it, Lavendowski, is already there in 1608. What nobody has settled is what it was meant to say. The candidates run to eight: the plant lawenda, lavender; the Levites; the personal name Lew, the Polish dress of Leon; lew, the lion; lewy, meaning left; the Old Polish lewada, a clearing inside a forest; the Latin levantes, the godparent who presents a child at the font.

The eighth candidate is the most revealing, because it is not a Polish word at all. It is the suggestion that the first syllables copied the particles that decorated western noble names, the le, the van, the de. The one explanation that will not stand is the obvious one. The Warsaw locality of Lewandów looks like the perfect parent for a name meaning 'of Lewandów', but the settlement was founded long after the surname was already being written down.

The -ski ending was not decoration. From the High Middle Ages it was restricted, in Poland and much of central Europe, to the szlachta, and it did the work that von did in German and zu in Austrian: it named the estate a man held. Jan of Tarnów, Jan z Tarnowa, was equally Jan Tarnowski, and the adjective said owner, not resident. Family names begin in Poland around the 13th century and long belonged only to the top of society, grouped into the heraldic clans whose story belongs to other Polish names on this atlas.

Everyone else acquired surnames afterwards, in a sequence that took two centuries to finish. The townsfolk of the burgh had them by the end of the 17th century, the peasantry followed, the Jewish population came last, and the process only closed in the middle of the 19th century. Lewandowski, sitting in a student register in 1673, belongs to that long descent rather than to the szlachta layer above it.

Then, in the 19th century, the dam broke. A wave of noble-sounding surnames appeared among the common population: the bourgeoisie and even the peasantry began to take or to bear the -ski suffix, hanging it on occupations, on nicknames, and above all on places. The rule quietly inverted: a toponymic surname had meant the village you owned, and now it meant the town you came from. Within a generation the marker of a legal caste was carried by people who had never held an acre, which is why the modern assumption that an -ski name proves noble descent is simply wrong.

What made the names permanent was not custom but paperwork, and after 1795 the paperwork was foreign. The final partition ended the szlachta's sovereignty, and until 1918 the legal standing of every Polish family depended on the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia or the Habsburg monarchy. Each ran registers, and a register does one thing above all: it fixes a spelling and hands it to your children.

Prussia moved first, enacting the Hoym Ordinance at Breslau in 1790 to compel the adoption of Jewish surnames; Napoleon insisted on Jews adopting fixed names by decree in 1808; and the Napoleonic Code, taken up in various parts of Europe, laid down that a person carried a given name and a family name that would not change between generations. In the Russian partition the pressure ran the other way. On 19 October 1831, after the November Rising, Tsar Nicholas I signed a ukase on the nobility of the western governorates requiring anyone claiming noble status to prove it to the Russian Office of Heraldry. Petty nobles who could not produce documents were struck off into the taxpaying estates.

The squeeze finished after the next rising. Serfdom was abolished in Russian Poland on 19 February 1864 on terms designed to ruin the landed nobility, freed peasants being barred from selling land back to szlachta buyers, and by that year four in five szlachta families had been declassed, a quarter of the petty nobility living worse than the average former serf. The distinction the -ski ending had once marked was now unenforceable in law and invisible in the registers.

Nothing shows the suffix's descent better than the household at Łaskarzew where Walenty Teofil Lewandowski was born on 17 February 1823, son of Wawrzyniec Lewandowski, a potter, and Jadwiga née Rajewska. In 1848 he fled Congress Poland, took part in the work of the National Council at Rzeszów, and enlisted in the Polish Legion in Hungary, ending that campaign as a second lieutenant of artillery. Interned by the Turks, he joined a section of the Polish Democratic Society, spent a short period in England, and settled in Paris in 1851.

His exile was a career in itself. He won 22 votes in the 1855 elections to the Centralisation and took the secretaryship of the Batignolles section, and in 1857 became professor of Polish at the Polish School on Montparnasse. In 1861 he published an address, To the Emigration, arguing that preparations for a rising must go underground. In December 1862 the Central Committee called him home, and on 5 January 1863 made him military chief of the Podlasie voivodeship with the rank of colonel.

He fought at Stok Lacki on 23 January and at his own Łaskarzew on 28 January, and after the reverse at Siemiatycze gave battle at Woskrzenice on 17 February and Sycyna on 21 February. In the Łuków country he joined forces with the detachment of the priest Stanisław Brzóska. After the fight at Róża, wounded several times, he fell into Russian hands on 24 March, and the viceroy Fyodor Berg commuted his death sentence to settlement in Siberia without rights. Even there he did not stop: in 1865 he came to an understanding with Russian conspirators about detaching Siberia from Russia, and when the plot was uncovered in 1866 he served two years in prison before moving to Irkutsk. He came home in 1877 and died in Warsaw on 22 January 1907.

His first cousin on the father's side came from the same small town and the same artisan layer. Wawrzyniec Lewandowski, born at Łaskarzew on 8 August 1831, was the son of Jan Lewandowski, a furrier, and Marianna née Mróz. He went from the elementary school at Łaskarzew to the gymnasium at Siedlce and then to the seminary at Janów Podlaski, where a fellow student was that same Stanisław Brzóska. Ordained on 3 May 1856, he served as curate at Górzno and at Rozbity Kamień, and from July 1863 as parish priest of Seroczyn.

He sat on the insurgent committee, hid weapons in the presbytery and carried food out to Brzóska's men in the forest. His parishioners took him for a model of patriotism and his sermons were preached, as the record puts it, in an exalted patriotic spirit. On the night of 3 July 1864 two of Brzóska's insurgents, the seminarian Stanisław Bojanek of Latowicz and Wincenty Szczuka, came to the grange at Kamieniec to recover horses held there. The owner, Rudnicki, refused, tied them up, and ordered the village head to guard them for the occupying power. Lewandowski rode over from Seroczyn the same night, demanded their release, and when he was refused untied the prisoners with his own hands.

The Russians came to Kamieniec on 5 July and arrested the village head Jan Patolet and two peasants, Ossowski and Pawluk, who had failed to stop the escape. The priest was taken on 9 July, tortured, and gave up nobody. On 27 July a military court at Siedlce condemned him to death for inflammatory preaching and for the order to free two insurgents, and two days later Berg confirmed the sentence while releasing the village head and the two peasants from the hard labour first imposed on them. On 4 August 1864, chained hand and foot and dressed in peasant clothes, he was taken back to Seroczyn and publicly hanged on a hill above the village. His body was thrown into a pit and a troop of Cossacks trampled the ground so the parishioners would not know where he lay. Several people of Seroczyn contrived to mark the spot anyway.

They were still tending it between the wars. The grave was given flowers, then a marble tablet and a monument, and in 1925 the village began building a primary school in his name. At the dedication in 1938 the Siedlce starosta Stanisław Guliński unveiled the monument on behalf of the prime minister, Felicjan Sławoj Składkowski. Tablets to him stand in the churches at Seroczyn and Łaskarzew.

The Prussian partition produced a Lewandowski whose work is still sung weekly on four continents. Louis Lewandowski was born on 3 April 1821 at Wreschen in the Grand Duchy of Posen, and at twelve went to Berlin to study piano and voice, becoming solo soprano in the synagogue. He studied three years under A. B. Marx and entered the composition school of the Prussian Academy of Arts, under Carl Friedrich Rungenhagen and Eduard Grell, the first Jew admitted to it, at the request of Felix Mendelssohn.

Graduating with high honours, he was made choirmaster of the Berlin synagogue in 1840 and built an extensive body of music for the ritual. In 1866 he received the title of royal musical director, and shortly afterwards became choirmaster of the New Synagogue, for which he composed the entire musical service. The great controversy of his lifetime was whether an organ belonged in a synagogue at all; Lewandowski argued for congregational singing and held that the organ was what made it possible. His writing married the strict four-part harmony of church music to ancient cantorial modes, and his principal works, Kol Rinnah u-Tefillah, Todah ve-Zimrah and forty psalms, went out from Berlin with pupils who became prominent cantors in their turn.

He founded the Institute for Aged and Indigent Musicians and managed it into prosperity, and died in Berlin in 1894. He lies with his wife Helene at the Weißensee cemetery under the inscription Liebe macht das Lied unsterblich, love makes the melody immortal. His settings reached the English-speaking world when Samuel Alman added several of them to The Voice of Prayer and Praise in 1933, and Berlin has run an international choir festival in his name since 2011.

Stanisław Roman Lewandowski was born at Kotliny on 28 February 1859, to Ludwik and Antonina née Ambroziewicz. He finished secondary school at Kraków, studied sculpture at the Kraków School of Fine Arts from 1879 to 1882 under Matejko and Gadomski, then at the Vienna Academy under Edmund Hellmer and Karl Kundmann. In 1888 the Warsaw Society of Fine Arts gave him its award for a figure called Slav Breaking His Fetters, which says plainly enough what a Polish sculptor working under partition was for.

He lived at Lwów from 1890 to 1894 and then in Vienna until 1932, running a shelter there for Polish legionaries during the First World War and making medallions of the Polish Legions in 1915 and of Józef Piłsudski in 1916. In 1924 he was appointed chief medallist of the Polish mint at Warsaw, and after settling in Warsaw in 1932 became conservator of the State Art Collections at the Royal Castle.

His public work runs through the country's memory: the Mickiewicz monument at Rzeszów of 1892, destroyed in 1940 and replicated in 1986 by Krzysztof Brzuzan; the medallion on Adam Mickiewicz's sarcophagus in the crypt of the bards at Wawel cathedral; the sarcophagus of the actress Helena Modrzejewska at the Rakowicki cemetery; a bust of President Ignacy Mościcki in 1933. He held the Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta and died in Warsaw on 3 February 1940.

The registers that once wrote the name down now count it. In 2009 Lewandowski was the seventh commonest surname in Poland with 93,404 bearers, and the PESEL database on 19 January 2024 held 46,640 women called Lewandowska and 44,891 men called Lewandowski. It is a name of the centre and the north: in the Kuyavian-Pomeranian voivodeship 1.1 per cent of the entire population carries it, the highest concentration of any surname anywhere in Poland. Abroad it fractures into Lewandowsky, Levandovski and Levandoski, and the feminine form is the first casualty, because western registries hand the masculine ending to daughters and wives alike.

The twentieth century took its share. Janina Antonina Lewandowska (1908–1940), a glider and aeroplane pilot, was the only woman killed at Katyn; Edward Lewandowski (1893–1940), an infantry officer of the Second Republic, died in the same massacre. Tadeusz Lewandowski (1922–2010) served as a master mariner and survived the sinking of the destroyer ORP Grom at Narvik. Jakub Henryk Lewandowski (1807–1882) was a pioneer of Polish veterinary science, and Czesław Lewandowski (1922–2009) bishop of Włocławek.

The living roll is as broad. Janusz Lewandowski, born in 1951, is an economist and politician who has sat in the Sejm and in the European Parliament; Ricardo Lewandowski, born in 1948, is a minister of the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil; Marcin Lewandowski, born in 1987, took the European 800 metres title in 2010; Anna Lewandowska, born in 1988, is a Polish karateka and entrepreneur. And the bearer who has put the name on the world's team sheets is Robert Lewandowski, born in 1988, the Polish footballer whose No. 9 has made an old adjectival surname legible far outside Poland.