Juliusz Słowacki in the Holy Land in 1837

ABSTRACT

The Polish poet Juliusz Słowacki (1809–1849) travelled through Palestine between 2 January and 27 January 1837, from El-Arish on the southern border with Egypt, at that time quarantined owing to plague, to the area around Lake Tiberias in the north, which had just been devastated by a strong earthquake. A detailed analysis of the itinerary of this pilgrimage has made it possible to establish new circumstances and topographical facts. The poet’s recently discovered personal diary (Raptularz Wschodni) contains hitherto unknown observations and drawings by the author himself. Together with his other travel notes and recollections in his letters, they constitute an invaluable basis for a new account of how and where he wandered, and where he stayed and spent the night. The published accounts of other 19th-century travellers in Palestine have helped establish further details: three Polish Roman Catholic priests, two French intellectuals, and the English aristocrat and globetrotter G. Robinson, as well as site views by D. Roberts. The traditional and often erroneous identification and dating of the sites visited by Słowacki have been verified on the basis of scientific historical and archaeological research as well as the author's own observations in situ in Israel and her interviews with Franciscan archivists. As far as the extensive modern Polish literature on this journey concerns, the novelty here lies in identifying features in three of Slowacki’s drawings and determining the places where the poet stayed in the Franciscan hospices in Ramla, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth.

KEYWORDS:

• Słowacki
• Holy Land
• Palestine
• Jerusalem
• loca sancta
• 19th-century travellers

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Maria Kalinowska for her kind invitation to join the project for a collective study and edition of Juliusz Słowacki’s diary Raptularz Wschodni, supported by the Polish National Science Centre, Project No. 2014/15/B/HS2/01360. I wish to thank also Professor Martin Dodsworth who helpfully read and corrected the final version of the text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In fact, the history of what happened to the material borrowed from Warsaw libraries in Krzemieniec after the Germans entered the town in June 1941, is very complicated. Today one can only hypothesise as to when and by what route Słowacki's diary ended up in Moscow, where it was not catalogued until 2001 (Makowska 2019a; Głębocki 2019a).

2 Canto I: ‘Crosses of Golgotha’ (stanza 16) – Słowacki 2019, vol. II, 279; ‘Christ’s Cross’ and ‘Olivet’ (stanza 27) – Słowacki 2019, vol. II, 282.

3 Robinson is also the author of another account of a trip to the Orient: Three Years in the East, covering the years 1829–1830, 1831 and 1832, published in Paris as well as London in 1837.

4 The wide access along the street between these structures, with the distinctive gap in the wall around the Old City, did not appear until 1898, for the ceremonious entry of the German Emperor Wilhelm II.

5 Within the 16th-century defensive walls, Jerusalem was and still is divided into four districts: Christian in the north-west – the biggest; Muslim district in the north-east; Jewish in the south, and the smallest; Armenian district in the south-west; cf. Mann 1855, vol. II, 194.

6 For Słowacki’s familiarity with the works of Chateaubriand and Lamartine, cf. Kulczycka 2012, 31–36; 2013, 24–27.

7 Cf. Urszula Makowska (2019b, 491), who holds a similar view.

8 For more on the history of the Franciscan monastery in Jerusalem, cf. Klimas 2014, 32–55.

9 The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was and still is inaccessible from dusk till dawn; its main door is locked from the inside, and the key is passed outside the complex through a small window located high up, into the care of a representative of a Turkish family chosen centuries ago.

10 This 19th-century chapel replaced the earlier Holy Sepulchre shrine known from many iconographic sources, including a lithograph depicting the plan of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the 17th-century Antwerp edition of Mikołaj K. Radziwiłł’s account of his journey to the Holy Land (1962, Fig. after p. 80).

11 It gave ‘rise to scenes (if we may credit the accounts of travellers) lamentable to the cause and interests of religion’ — Robinson, 1837, 49. Cf. Lamartine 1837, vol. II, 163–64.

12 E.g., at the Pantheon in Rome and the Asklepieion of Pergamon, cf. Robinson 183, 46; and before then, Radziwiłł 1962, 112, 114.

13 For a description of the complex in Słowacki’s time, cf. Robinson 1837, 43–54. For more about the complex’s history and archaeological research, cf. above all: Wilkinson J. 1971, 83–97; Corbo 1981–1982 passim; Kroll 1990, 381–405.

14 Similarly gloomy thoughts on the view of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, and especially the Valley of Josaphat, were recorded by Alphonse de Lamartine 1837, vol. II, 143–45.

15 An oil painting with such a view, by Edward Lear (1812–1888), painted in 1865, is housed at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

16 Cf. Lamartine 1837, vol. II, 212–13. Today researchers estimate the olive trees in Gethsemane to be 900 years old — O’Leary 2012.

17 Hołowiński 1853, 504–20; cf. Kulczycka 2012, 273–93; Kulczycka 2013, 43–46, 51–56.

18 Brenk 1981, 227–29; Kroll 1990, 52–65; Bianchi, Campana, Fichera 2016; Brandt 2021, 154–62.

19 English text retrieved 2022-01-17 from https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings%202%3A19-22&version=NIV

20 For his palaeographic assistance with reading Słowacki’s manuscript, my thanks are due to Adam Łukaszewicz, the author of an analysis of Słowacki’s journey across Egypt in the same Diary (Łukaszewicz 2019a, 2019b).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Polish National Science Centre, Project No. 2014/15/B/HS2/01360.

Notes on contributors

Elżbieta Jastrzębowska

Elżbieta Jastrzębowska obtained the MA in Classical Archaeology at Warsaw University. She has participated in excavations at Margidunum (England), Marzabotto (Italy), Palmyra (Syria), Ptolemais (Lybia), and Sussita (Israel). Specialising in Late Antique and Early Christian Archaeology at the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology in Rome and at the University of Freiburg (Germany) where she graduated with a PhD. She worked in 1972–1974 at the Catholic University in Lublin, from 1990 to 2004 at the Institute of Archaeology, at the University of Warsaw, from 2005 to 2009 as the director of the Polish Academy of Science in Rome. From 2009 to 2016 she was back at the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Warsaw, from 2017 to 2021 at the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures of the Polish Academy of Science. She has travelled extensively to enhance her knowledge of Roman archaeological sites and has conducted research in the best scientific libraries in Italy, France, England, Germany, Spain, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Syria, and Israel.