Pope John Paul II

He was born in 18 may 1920 in the Polish town of Wadowice. John was elected pope in 16 October 1978. He died in 2005 year. John Paul II was one of the most influential leaders of the 20th century. He was helped in the end of communist rule in Poland and all of Europe.He significantly improved the Catholic Church's relations with Judaism, Islam, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Anglican Communion.

Karol Józef Wojtyła was born in the Polish town of Wadowice. Emilia Kaczorowska and ^Pope John Paul II

Karol Wojtyła was his parents. Emilia was schoolteacher, she died in childbirth in 1929 when Wojtyła was eight years old. He had sister who died before he born, but his older brother Edmundnicknamed Mundek was close to Karol. Edmund was 13 years old. Edmund's work as a physician eventually led to his death from scarlet fever. It was affected Wojtyła deeply.

In mid-1938, Wojtyła and his father left Wadowice and moved to Kraków, where he enrolled at Jagiellonian University. While studying such topics as philology and various languages, he worked as a volunteer librarian and was required to participate in compulsory military training in theAcademic Legion, but he refused to fire a weapon. He performed with various theatrical groups and worked as a playwright. During this time, his talent for language blossomed, and he learned as many as 12 foreign languages, nine of which he used extensively as pope.

priesthoodOn finishing his studies at the seminary in Kraków, Wojtyła was ordained as a priest on All Saints’ Day, 1 November 1946, by the Archbishop of Kraków, Cardinal Sapieha. Sapieha sent Wojtyła to Rome's Pontifical International Athenaeum Angelicum, the future  Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum  to study under the French Dominican Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange beginning on 26 November 1946. Wojtyła earned a licence in July 1947, passed his doctoral exam on 14 June 1948, and successfully defended his doctoral thesis entitled Doctrina de fide apud S. Ioannem a Cruce in philosophy on 19 June 1948. The Angelicum preserves the original copy of Wojtyła's typewritten thesis. Among other courses at the Angelicum, Wojtyła studied Hebrew with the Dutch Dominican Peter G. Duncker, author of the Compendium grammaticae linguae hebraicae biblicae.

Jan Matejko

He was a Polish painter known for paintings of notable historical Polish political and military events. His most famous works include oil on canvas paintings like ”Battle of Grunwald”, paintings of numerous other battles and court scenes, and a gallery of Polish kings. He is counted among the most famous Polish painters.

Jan Matejko Biography

Matejko was born on June 24, 1838 in the Kraków. His father, Franciszek Ksawery Matejko a Czech from the village of Roudnice, was a graduate of the Hradec Králové school who later became a tutor and music teacher. He first worked for the Wodzicki family in Kościelniki, Poland, then moved to Kraków, where he married the half-German, half-Polish Joanna Karolina Rossberg. Jan was the ninth child of eleven that his parents had. He grew up in a kamienica building on Floriańska Street. After the death of his mother in 1845, Jan and his siblings were cared for by his maternal aunt, Anna Zamojska. At a young age he witnessed the Kraków revolution of 1846 and the 1848 siege of Kraków by the Austrians, the two events which ended the existence of the Free City of Kraków. His two older brothers served in them under General Józef Bem; one died and the other was forced into exile.

Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin, was a Romantic Polish composer. A child prodigy, Chopin was born in what was then the Duchy of Warsaw. He grew up in Warsaw, which after 1815 became part of Congress Poland, and there completed his musical education and composed many of his works before leaving Poland, aged 20, less than a month before the outbreak of the November 1830 Uprising.At the age of 21 he settled in Paris. During the remaining 18 years of his life, he gave only some 30 public performances, preferring the more intimate atmosphere of the salon; he supported himself by selling his compositions and as a sought-after piano teacher, and gained renown as a leading virtuoso of his generation. He formed a friendship with Franz Liszt and was admired by many of his musical contemporaries, including Robert Schumann. After a failed engagement with a Polish girl, from 1837 to 1847 he maintained an often troubled relationship with the French writer George Sand. A brief and unhappy visit with Sand to Majorca in 1838–39 was one of his most productive periods of composition. In his last years, he was financially supported by his admirer Jane Stirling, who also arranged for him to visit Scotland in 1848. Through most of his life, Chopin suffered from poor health; he died in Paris in 1849, probably of tuberculosis.

Childhood

Chopin was born in Żelazowa Wola, 46 kilometres west of Warsaw, in what was then the Duchy of Warsaw, a Polish state established by Napoleon. The parish baptismal record gives his birthday as 22 February 1810, and cites his given names in the Latin form Fridericus Franciscus; in Polish, he was Fryderyk Franciszek. The composer and his family used the birth-date 1 March; according to his letter of 16 January 1833 to the chairman of the Société historique et littéraire polonaise (Polish Literary Society) in Paris, he was "born 1 March 1810 at the village of Żelazowa Wola in the Province of Mazowsze." The date of 1 March is now "more frequently regarded as correct."Chopin's father, Nicolas Chopin, was a Frenchman from Lorraine who had emigrated to Poland in 1787 at the age of sixteen. Nicolas tutored children of the Polish aristocracy, and in 1806 married Justyna Krzyżanowska, a poor relation of the Skarbeks, one of the families for whom he worked.] Fryderyk Chopin was baptized on Easter Sunday, 23 April 1810, in the same church where his parents had married, in Brochów. His eighteen-year-old godfather, for whom he was named, was Fryderyk Skarbek, a pupil of Nicolas Chopin. Fryderyk was the couple's second child and only son; he had an elder sister, Ludwika, and two younger sisters, Izabela and Emilia.In October 1810, six months after Chopin's birth, the family moved to Warsaw, where his father acquired a post teaching French at the Warsaw Lyceum, then housed in the Saxon Palace. Chopin's father played the flute and violin;[9] his mother played the piano and gave lessons to boys in the boarding house that the Chopins kept. Even in early childhood, Chopin was slight of build and prone to illnesses.Chopin may have had some piano instruction from his mother, but his first professional music tutor, from 1816 to 1821, was the Czech Wojciech Żywny. His elder sister Ludwika also took lessons from Żywny, and occasionally played duets with her brother. The seven-year-old Chopin began giving public concerts, and in 1817 he composed two polonaises, in G minor and B-flat major. His next work, a polonaise in A-flat major of 1821, dedicated to Żywny, is his earliest surviving musical manuscript.During this period, Chopin was sometimes invited to the Belweder Palace as playmate to the son of Russian Poland's ruler, Grand Duke Constantine; he played the piano for the Duke and composed a march for him. Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, in his dramatic eclogue, "Nasze Przebiegi" ("Our Discourses", 1818), attested to "little Chopin's" popularity.

Adam Bernard Mickiewicz was a Polish national poet, dramatist, essayist, publicist, translator, professor of Slavic literature, and political activist. A principal figure in Polish Romanticism, he is counted one of Poland's "Three Bards" and is widely regarded as Poland's greatest poet. He is also considered one of the greatest Slavic and European poets and has been dubbed a "Slavic bard". A leading Romantic dramatist, he has been compared in Poland and Europe to Byron and Goethe.His most known works include the poetic drama Dziady, national epic poem Pan Tadeusz, and sonnets. His other influential works include Konrad Wallenrod and Grażyna. All these served as inspiration for uprisings against the three imperial powers that had partitioned the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth out of existence.Mickiewicz was born in the Russian-partitioned territories of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which had been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and was active in the struggle to win independence for his home region. After, as a consequence, spending five years exiled to central Russia, in 1829 he succeeded in leaving the Russian Empire and, like many of his compatriots, lived out the rest of his life abroad. He settled first in Rome, then in Paris, where for a little over three years he lectured on Slavic literature at the Collège de France. He died, probably of cholera, at Istanbul in the Ottoman Empire, where he had gone to help organize Polish and Jewish forces to fight Russia in the Crimean War.

Adam Mickiewicz was born 24 December 1798, either at his paternal uncle's estate in Zaosie (now Zavosse) near Navahrudak (in Polish, Nowogródek) in what was then part of the Russian Empire and is now Belarus. The region was on the periphery of Lithuania proper and had been part of theGrand Duchyof Lithuania until the Third Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The area had earlier been inhabited by ethnicLithuanians, but by the time of his birth it was largely Belarusian-populated. Its upper class, including Mickiewicz's family, were either Polish or Polonized.The poet's father, Mikołaj Mickiewicz, a lawyer, was a member of the Polish nobility (szlachta) and bore the hereditary Poraj coat-of-arms; Adam's mother was Barbara Mickiewicz, née Majewska. Adam was the second-born son in the family.Mickiewicz spent his childhood in Navahrudak, initially taught by his mother and private tutors. From 1807 to 1815 he attended a Dominican school following a curriculum that had been designed by the now-defunct Polish Commission for National Education, which had been the world's first ministry of education.He was a mediocre student, although active in games, theatricals, and the like.In September 1815, Mickiewicz enrolled at the Imperial University of Vilnius, studying to be a teacher. After graduating, under the terms of his government scholarship, he taught secondary school at Kaunas from 1819 to 1823.In 1818, in the Polish-language Tygodnik Wileński, he published his first poem, "Zima miejska„. The next few years would see a maturing of his style from sentimentalism/neoclassicism to romanticism, first in his poetry anthologies published in Vilnius in 1822 and 1823; these anthologies included the poem "Grażyna" and the first-published parts (II and IV) of his major work, Dziady (Forefathers' Eve). By 1820 he had already finished another major romantic poem, "Oda do młodości" ("Ode to Youth"), but it was considered to be too patriotic and revolutionary for publication and would not appear officially for many years.About the summer of 1820, Mickiewicz met the love of his life, Maryla Wereszczakówna. They were unable to marry due to his family's poverty and relatively low social status; in addition, she was already engaged to Count Wawrzyniec Puttkamer, whom she would marry in 1821.

Krzysztof Eugeniusz Penderecki is a Polish composer and conductor. The Guardian has called him Poland's greatest living composer. Among his best known works are his Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, St. Luke Passion, Polish Requiem, Anaklasis, four operas, eight symphonies and other orchestral pieces, a variety of instrumental concertos, choral settings of mainly religious texts, as well as chamber and instrumental works.Born in Dębica to a lawyer, Penderecki studied music at Jagiellonian University and the Academy of Music in Kraków. After graduating from the Academy of Music, Penderecki became a teacher at the academy and he began his career as a composer in 1959 during the Warsaw Autumn festival. His Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima for string orchestra and the choral work St. Luke Passion, have received popular acclaim. His first opera, The Devils of Loudun, was not immediately successful. Beginning in the mid-1970s, Penderecki's composing style changed, with his first violin concerto focusing on the semitone and the tritone. His choral work Polish Requiem was written in the 1980s, with Penderecki expanding it in 1993 and 2005.During his life, Penderecki has won several prestigious awards, including the Commander's Cross in 1964, the Prix Italia in 1967 and 1968, the Knight's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta in 1964, three Grammy Awards in 1987, 1998 and 2001, and the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition in 1992.

EARLY YEARSPenderecki was born in Dębica, to Tadeusz Penderecki, a lawyer, and Zofia (née Wittgeinstein). Penderecki's grandfather, Robert Berger, was a highly-talented painter and director of the local bank at the time of Penderecki's birth; Robert's father Johann moved to Dębica from Breslau (now Wrocław) in the mid-19th century. His grandmother was an Armenian from Isfahan. Penderecki used to go to Armenian Church in Kraków with her. Penderecki was the youngest of three siblings; his sister, Barbara, who was married to a mining engineer, and his older brother, Janusz, was studying law and medicine at the time of his birth. Tadeusz was a violinist and also played piano. In 1939, the Second World War broke out, and Penderecki's family moved out of their apartment as the Ministry of Food was to operate there. They lived in a house belonging to a group of evicted Polish Jews.[6] After the war, Penderecki began attending grammar school in 1946. He began studying the violin under Stanisław Darłak, Dębica's military bandmaster who organized an orchestra for the local music society after the war.[7] Upon graduating from grammar school, Penderecki moved to Kraków in 1951, where he attended Jagiellonian University. He studied violin with Stanisław Tawroszewicz and music theory with Franciszek Skołyszewski. In 1954, Penderecki entered the Academy of Music in Kraków and, having finished his studies on violin after his first year, focused enterely on composition. Penderecki's main teacher there was Artur Malawski, a composer known for his choral works and orchestral works, as well as chamber music and songs. After Malawski's death in 1957, Penderecki took further lessons with Stanisław Wiechowicz, a composer primarily known for his choral works. At the time, the 1956 overthrow of Stalinism in Poland lifted strict Communist cultural censorship and opened the door to a wave of creativity.

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, commonly known as "Witkacy", was a Polish poet, playwright, novelist, painter, photographer and philosopher.Born in Warsaw, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz was the son of painter, architect and art critic Stanisław Witkiewicz. His mother was Maria Pietrzkiewicza Witkiewiczowa. Both of his parents were born in the Samogitian region of Lithuania. His godmother was the internationally famous actress Helena Modrzejewska. Witkiewicz was reared at the family home in Zakopane. In accordance with his father's antipathy to the "servitude of the school," the boy was home-schooled and encouraged to develop his talents across a range of creative fields. Witkiewicz was close friends with Karol Szymanowski and, from childhood, with Bronisław Malinowski and Zofia Romer. Following a crisis in Witkiewicz's personal life due to the suicide of his fiancée Jadwiga Janczewska, he was invited by Malinowski to act as draftsman and photographer on a 1914 expedition to Oceania, a venture that was interrupted by the onset of World War I.

Information

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