Szymański

Szymon is the Polish Simon, and it was a font name long before it was anybody's surname. In Poland a child's names were given at baptism, and where the parents offered something outside the calendar of saints the priest could press for a Christian name to stand beside it, so a boy christened Szymon went through life with a patron attached. The step that turned the given name into an inherited one came when a Szymon of some standing put his name on ground: villages called Szymany, Szymanowo and Szymanów sit across the Polish map, each of them a founding Szymon fossilised in a settlement.

Szymański is the adjective made from those places, 'of Szymany', built with the -ski formant that Polish used to say belonging to or coming from, doing the work German did with von and zu. That is why the name reads as a place-name and still points back to a person, and why the Polish classifiers can file it two ways at once: with the toponymic surnames taken from a village or a town, and with the patronymic ones, nazwisko odimienne, made straight from a given name the way Adamczyk was made from Adam and Łukaszewski from Łukasz.

Hereditary family names appear in Poland around the 13th century, and for a long stretch they belonged to the upper ranks alone. They reached the townsmen only by the end of the 17th century, the peasantry after that, and the Jewish communities last of all; the process was not finished until the middle of the 19th century. For every generation in between, the fixed written thing about a person was not a surname but the entry a parish priest made when the child was carried to the font. The church book was the register of record, and a name existed because it had been written there.

That book decided more than spelling. A child was often given two Christian names so as to have two patron saints instead of one, and at confirmation took a further name that never left church documents and was used nowhere else in life. In eastern Poland the day that mattered afterwards was not the birthday but the imieniny, the name day of the patron the priest had entered; western Poland kept to birthdays instead. Modern Polish registry offices will record no more than two given names, a civil rule laid over a far older parish habit.

The register also settled how a woman's name was written, and in Polish that is a question of grammar rather than courtesy. Szymański is masculine, Szymańska feminine, and the feminine form is the one that stands in birth, marriage and death certificates and, later, in identity cards and passports. Older books went further and separated the daughter from the wife, adding -ówna to a father's name for an unmarried woman and -owa to a husband's for a married one. A household together was the Szymańscy. Where a man had lived under two names, most often a soldier who took a false one after an uprising and then refused to give either up, the clerks joined them with the Latin vel, 'or', and the family kept the doubled form for good.

Helena Palińska was born about 1840 to Józef and Teodora Józefowicz, a Jewish family, and at the age of four she was baptised together with her mother and her brothers and sisters. That afternoon of parish paperwork is the hinge of her life, because everything after it ran through the same books: the stage name, the marriage, the burial ground. She trained at the Warsaw ballet school, and from 26 October 1856 until 1858 she was appearing at the Vilnius theatre as an actress and dancer, billed as Palińska. In 1859 and 1860 she played Kaunas and Suwałki.

Then she married the actor Józef Henryk Szymański, and from her first appearance under his name at Vilnius in 1860 she worked as Helena Szymańska for the rest of her career. She made her Warsaw debut on 5 December 1863 and was not engaged. Kraków had her through 1864 and 1865; from 1 May 1865 to 1871 she was at the Lwów theatre, moved to Poznań for the 1871/1872 season, and went back to Lwów, where she died on 23 June 1874 and was buried in the Łyczakowski cemetery. Her half-sister Salomea Palińska was an actress too, and the journalist Józef Kenig was her brother-in-law. Her daughter by Witold Count Dunin-Borkowski, a second Helena Szymańska (1868-1954), went on the stage in her turn.

Adam Szymański was born at Hruszniew on 15 July 1852, went to school at Siedlce between 1872 and 1877, and entered the University of Warsaw to read law in 1877. That same year he took part in Adam Stanisław Sapieha's 'National Government', and he helped Jan Ludwik Popławski found the 'Sons of the Fatherland', a socialist group presented as a patriotic answer to Ludwik Waryński's network. For that he spent 1878 and 1879 in the Tenth Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel, and after it he was exiled to Siberia.

Exile made him a geographer and an ethnographer of the Yakuts. He lived first at Yakutsk and from 1882 at Kirensk and Balagansk, and in 1885 the Imperial Russian Geographical Society elected him a member; the same year he was permitted to move into the European part of Russia, though still outside Poland. He reached Warsaw again in 1895, settled in Kraków from 1902, and edited the magazine 'School Reform' from 1904 to 1913. He died in Moscow in 1916.

It is what he made of Siberia that kept his name. 'Srul from Lubartów' appeared in 1885 and went into the Szkice, the Sketches, of 1887; the German 'Unter Ansiedlern und Verschickten', with settlers and deportees, followed in 1894, and 'Maciej the Mazur' in 1904. They are close-focus depictions of Poles living out their sentences a very long way east, and several of them, 'Srul from Lubartów', 'A Pinch of Salt' and 'Maciej the Mazur', have been translated into English. He left a library, which his son Jan (1913-1953) inherited.

Ignacy Szymański, born in 1806, was literally a Szymon's son: his father was Simon Szymanski, who had fought in the Kościuszko Uprising of 1794, and his mother Francisca Vandernoot. He served in the Ulan Division alongside Prince Adam Woronecki in the November Uprising of 1830 and 1831 against the Russian Empire. When the Polish army was beaten, part of it went to France in hope of Napoleonic help; Szymański did not believe it would come, and after seeing to soldiers still trying to get out through Austro-Hungarian territory he went to England and then to the United States.

In America he made himself useful to the men who had followed him out. Victor Labeski, one of his officers, who reached New York on the ship Adria in 1835, described how active he was among Polish soldiers and immigrants. Szymański moved to New Orleans in 1835 and married Charlotte Hortense Lacoste; the city's newspapers name him repeatedly between 1835 and 1875, and knew him as Colonel Ski, or Old Ski. His friends in the South were other settled Poles, Gaspar Tochman, Valery Sulakowski and Hypolite Oladowski. In the Civil War he was recruited as colonel of the Chalmette Regiment of the Louisiana State Militia, a unit made up largely of Scandinavian immigrants, and afterwards served as agent for the exchange of prisoners in the Trans-Mississippi Department.

The line ran south rather than back east. His son Jean worked for him at Sebastopol until his early twenties, then settled at the port of Tampico, where he worked as a tailor for the foreign community the oil boom had drawn in and married Carmen Castelló Caimares. The Ignatius name was deliberately kept alive down the generations, and Jean's son Julio Fructuoso was the father of Monsignor Arturo Szymanski, Bishop of Tampico and Honorary Archbishop of San Luis Potosí. A name that began in a Polish baptism register ended up entered in Mexican ones by a bishop who bore it.

Julian Szymański, born on 10 May 1870, qualified in medicine at Kyiv and worked as an assistant in an ophthalmological clinic before spending his prime years about as far east as a Pole could get. He was physician to the Russian merchant fleet at Vladivostok from 1896 to 1898, an ophthalmologist for the East China Railway at Harbin from 1899 to 1902, and a military physician in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. His part in the Russian Revolution of that year made staying unsafe, so he emigrated to the United States, ran a practice in Chicago and became secretary of the Polish Medical Association there.

In 1912 he moved to Brazil and became a professor at the Federal University of Paraná in Curitiba, where he produced one of the first textbooks of ophthalmology in Portuguese; a Polish edition followed in 1920. Poland took him back in 1922 as a professor at Stefan Batory University in Vilnius. In 1928 he was elected to the Senate of the Second Republic, became Marshal of the Senate in the same year, held the chair until the term ended in 1930, and then declined to stand again.

He stayed in Warsaw under the German occupation as chief physician of the Malta Hospital. In 1949 he took his family to Brazil a second time and joined the scientific life there; after seven years he came home, his travel costs met by the State Treasury in 1957, and he died at Białystok on 8 June 1958.

Antoni Szymański was born at Poznań on 30 July 1894 and grew up a Prussian subject, which put him into the First World War on the Western Front, Verdun included. Independent Poland then made a soldier of its own out of him, and from 1932 to 1939 he was the last prewar Polish military attaché in Berlin, watching the German army from inside its own capital.

He left Berlin on the night of 5 and 6 September 1939 for Copenhagen, reached Vilnius by way of Stockholm and Helsinki, and fought the Germans at Lwów. When Lwów surrendered on 22 September 1939 he passed into Soviet hands and stayed in prison camps until 1941. The Sikorski-Mayski agreement freed him and he joined the Polish army commanded by General Władysław Anders. He died in London on 11 December 1973.

His wife Halina Szymańska had the stranger war of the two. Working as a British agent, she met Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and Hans Bernd Gisevius several times in Switzerland and Italy.

On 19 January 2024 the Polish PESEL register counted 43,894 women and 42,841 men carrying the name, which puts Szymański tenth on the national list. That is a very large crowd to have come out of some founding Szymon's village, and it is the ordinary arithmetic of the system: a saint's name given at a font becomes a settlement, the settlement becomes an adjective, and the adjective becomes an inherited surname written down in one parish after another.

The resulting roll is broad rather than dynastic, which is exactly what a font name produces. Antoni Szymański (1881-1942) was a Catholic priest and rector of the Catholic University of Lublin. Roman Szymański (1840-1908) was a journalist, Adriana Szymańska, born 1943, is a poet, and Irena Szymańska (1921-1999) was a translator, writer and publisher. Stanisław Szymański (1930-1999) was a classical dancer and Mieczysław Szymański (1903-1990) a painter and draughtsman. Paweł Szymański, born 1954, composes concert music, and the same Szymon root in its -owski form gave Polish music Karol Szymanowski.

The war years put the name into the resistance and into exile. Henryk Szymański (1921-1981), who used the cover name 'Samotny Jastrząb', the Lone Hawk, was a scoutmaster and the first commander of the Secret Scout Troop in Gdynia. Maciej Matthew Szymanski, born 1926, fought in the Warsaw Uprising and became an architect in Canada. Others took the name into the sciences: Wojciech Szymański, born 1932, a medieval archaeologist, Michał Szymański, born 1959, an astronomer, Edyta Szymańska (1970-2015), a mathematician and computer scientist, and Zdzisław Szymański (1926-1999), a physicist.