Eugeniusz Niebelski
An old church in Irkutsk – called “the Polish church” to this day – has long belonged to the city; it is now a concert hall with organs (“organ hall”) where concerts regularly take place. In the post-perestroika years, some renovations were carried out on the church and the steeple, whose cross was replaced with a new one. Rather than being thrown away, the old cross – wooden, sheeted with metal (properly rusted by then) – was taken to a new church on the other side of Angara, where it was placed somewhere in the recesses of a curial building; no one knew what could be done with it.
The cross from the Irkutsk church
An idea for the Irkutsk cross was born from my few visits with Father Andrzej to the parish in the faraway village of Wierszyna, famous for its residents being descendants of Polish settlers who arrived there voluntarily from Congress Poland in the early 20th century, and for Polish still being spoken there. There was an old wooden church in Wierszyna that had started functioning as a chapel again in the revived worship community after perestroika. Father Andrzej and I decided that we would “install” that cross somewhere there – let it even degrade with time before the very eyes of the people, who would know of its existence. In the tiny church, there was no space for it; in general, there was already a crucified Jesus figurine at the altar, with his arms broken off, which had been shot at during the Bolshevik persecution of the Church like it was a shield (a bullet hit the eye of the shooter by ricochet, who unfortunately was a local Pole, one of the Bolsheviks). The figurine was next kept in the village as it served during secret religious ceremonies; it was a sufficient testament to the old, hard times, so we put the cross up on the outside wall of the church, on the presbytery’s side. During a few of my visits to Wierszyna in the following years, I checked if “our” cross still outstretched its arms on the raw boards of the chapel. It did! In 2017, an original traveller and internet video creator (“Gregor on the road”) came to Wierszyna. He filmed a documentary film “I Returned from Siberia”, which I coincidentally watched rather recently, “discovering” to my surprise the cross on the Wierszyna church from the Irkutsk church tower. Later on, I saw another newer video, “Polish Siberian village – Wierszyna” made by KamperManiak, where that cross is present as well. Is the cross I put up in Wierszyna still there? Nowadays, with the war in Ukraine, successful communication is difficult not just with Siberia.
Jerusalem cemetery
During that first year of familiarising myself with Irkutsk and its “Polish” history, I also wandered off to an old cemetery, referred to as Jerusalem Cemetery, where all the deceased Irkutsk residents – Russian Orthodox, Catholics, evangelicals, but also Jews and Buryats – had been buried in the past in separate plots. But now the cemetery was gone, although the big area with its old iron fence was mostly maintained. There was a “park of culture and leisure” instead, with entirely wild, green parts in which one could often find a “weird” crowd hiding, while around the main entrance was the amusement park with carousels and music. Hopes of finding any traces of Catholic (or any other) graves there turned out to be forlorn. Maybe around a dozen old gravestones were still standing on edge of the “park”, but there were no Catholic ones among them. Indeed, one monument had been left in the “cemetery”, on the outskirts of the previous Catholic quarters. It had not been destroyed in the Bolshevik times only because, despite not having a cross anymore, it was the grave of a Decembrist, Josif Poggio, a Catholic who died in January 1848. In the following decade, I observed how the cemetery-park was changing: the amusement park was gone, the wilderness areas had been eliminated, and the whole place had been covered with a thick layer of soil. It was evident that no one had searched for anything there; a few tiny pieces of stony tombstones were left, but nothing on them was readable. Big boards were positioned in a few places around the fence, a scheme of the long-forgotten cemetery. But no one will ever again find out where Father Szwermicki was buried in 1894. I was in that “park” in 2017 for the last time. I watched as some cars came in through the open gate from time to time, where a dog was let loose to get some fresh air.
The renowned Siberian Tunka
As far back as 2017, we took up other efforts along with Father Andrzej. These in turn were connected to a small “Polish” graveyard in the village of Tunka (West of Baikal’s South border), where 156 priests were located in 1866–1875, transported to Siberia after the 1863 uprising, over a dozen of whom died and were buried there. The graveyard still existed in the inter-war period, although it was time-worn because no one took care of it: only the remains of an old wooden fence, toppled crosses, and graves covered in sand were left. In 1933, a Polish serviceman, writer and traveller, Marshal Piłsudski’s adjutant Mieczysław Lepecki, visited Tunka and the graveyard, wandering in the footsteps of a young exile named Ziuk who was deported to Tunka in 1890–1892. After Lepecki, the graveyard was likely not visited by Poles anymore; it disappeared entirely, probably covered by sand. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century was the graveyard completely “restored” (Father Andrzej played a part in this), while the Irkutsk Catholic community and the Polish consulate took care of it. The graveyard is now located on the periphery of a working Russian Orthodox cemetery in the forest near Irkut. It’s fenced and in the centre stands a solid, undersized wooden Latin cross, but there’s no information about what that place is. Polish tourists visiting those grounds would have trouble finding the graveyard. Therefore, Father Andrzej made a signpost saying “Graveyard” in Polish; in 2007, we put it up in a place visible from afar, high up on a pine tree at the edge of the forest. [We were] hoping that no one would be able to reach it, but the next year it was already gone. Every time I stayed in Siberia, I visited Tunka and the small graveyard, and I noticed that Polish tourists do visit it after all, as shown by the rosaries, Polish eagles, and bannerets. It gave me hope that it won’t be forgotten. There have also been official efforts on Poland’s part to permanently commemorate that place.
On the cusp of the 21st century, the matter of creation of a stony cross-monument in the “priestly burial ground” of Tunka with the buried Polish priests’ names dragged on for years. I was the one to draw up (based on documents from the Irkutsk archive, among others) the full list of the names and dates of death of the priests buried there, which would be inscribed on the monument. A few years ago, this project was nearly complete. It had a pre-approval from the Republic of Buryatia but… suddenly, it all vanished. Will there ever be a good time for it?
In Memorium of Usolsky hard-labour workers
There’s another place near Irkutsk that is marked by Polish presence – both in the past and the present – also using crosses. It’s Usolye on the Angara River, which I got to know well. This location served as a destination for Polish exiles in the 19th and 20th centuries. After 1863, there were several hundred deportees there, hard-labour workers, among whom were many important figures of high authority in the Kingdom and the Lithuanian uprising. Notable individuals included the former tsarist officer and later member of the Lithuanian underground, Józef Kalinowski, as well as Barefoot Carmelite Father Rafael, also known as Saint Raphael of the Catholic Church and the patron of the Siberian Church. The exile community had a chapel and a small separate graveyard in Usolye because, unfortunately, some of them died there. The graveyard is not there anymore but the chapel building remains – now as a private dwelling. Both the chapel and the graveyard were depicted in drawings by two Usolsky exiles, Stanisław Katerla and Maksymilian Oborski. There were two tiny crosses on the chapel (drawn by Katerla in 1866–1868): one on top of the roof and another on the small porch leading inside. The graveyard (drawn by Oborski in 1867) was dominated by a large central cross at the first grave, which stood close to some birch trees.
Barefoot Carmelites have arrived at Usolye now, following in Józef/Rafał Kalinowski’s footsteps – so there are Brothers with their small new church and enclosed Sisters with their monastery on the edge of the city. Both the Sisters (not all the women in this community are Polish) and the Carmelite Brothers serve all the local Catholics and will hopefully continue to do so for many more years.
Where the Poles fought…
And one more place that is exceptionally important in the Polish-Siberian story is Mishiha on the east bank of the Baikal, a tragic place where an armed Polish uprising failed in the summer of 1866 (four “rebellion” leaders were executed by firing squad in Irkutsk in November of that year). There is a Polish cross there and the grave of 8–9 insurgents who fell in those battles. Before, there had been a wooden cross, erected as far back as the 19th century, which said in Russian that Polish rebels who had fallen in combat against the army in Mishiha on the 28th of June 1866 were buried there. Still, the place was restored in the 20th century by Russian youth – Komsomolets. After perestroika, a new cross and a memorial inscription (in Polish and Russian) was placed by Polish representatives in Irkutsk. It still stands and anniversary meetings are held there for Siberian Polish immigrants (from Irkutsk and Ulan-Ude), representatives of the Irkutsk consulate of the Republic of Poland, Polish priests, and sometimes casual Polish tourists. Mass was said, there were uprising memorials, and then social banquets. I have been there several times – individually, as well as at anniversaries – and I even cleaned up the area around the cross in 2016, cutting grass and hay. That’s when an “exotic” guest arrived in Mishiha with consul Marek Zieliński, professor at the University of Tokyo: Koji Morita, a Polish teacher (!) who academically worked on Polish cryptolects in Belarus (this time he was supposed to research a Polish cryptolect in Wierszyna).
In east Siberia there are plenty of Polish exile locations from the 19th century, especially beyond Baikal, but there is nothing left of the Poles who were there.
Eugeniusz Niebelski, PhD, DSc, Professor
Translated by Hanna Nawrocka