Krakowskie Przedmieście, Warsaw

The statue took ten years to arrive

The monument was Stanisław Staszic's idea. It was commissioned in 1820 from the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen in Rome, and Staszic paid for half of it himself; a public collection raised the rest.

The work dragged on. Thorvaldsen's plaster model of the astronomer reached Warsaw only in 1827, and the bronze was cast in the city by the founders Jan Gregoire and Sebastian Norblin. Staszic did not live to see it finished, and part of his estate went to complete it.

It was to stand in front of the Staszic Palace, a pale classicist building of the 1820s and the seat of the Society of Friends of Learning.

The Mass was never said

On 11 May 1830 a crowd gathered on Krakowskie Przedmieście and walked with musicians and singers to Holy Cross church, across the street, to open the day with a Mass ordered in advance. There was no Mass. "What was our surprise," Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz reported, "when we did not find the Mass we had ordered."

So Niemcewicz stood on the pedestal himself and gave a short speech. The veil fell, the band struck up a hymn, and by his account the cheering tore the air.

The crowd saw a seated bronze Copernicus holding a compass in his right hand and an armillary sphere in his left. The black pedestal carried gilded inscriptions, in Latin Nicolao Copernico grata patria, from a grateful fatherland, and in Polish Mikołajowi Kopernikowi rodacy, from his countrymen. It stood on a low grassy mound inside an iron railing, kept until 1928 to 1931.

Warsaw's last spring before the rising

Warsaw was then the capital of a Kingdom of Poland ruled by the Russian tsar. Young Fryderyk Chopin lived a few hundred metres up the same street; whether he watched the unveiling is not known. In November he left Warsaw for good, and that same month the November Uprising broke out.

Polish pupils study 1830 as a turning point, the year of Chopin's farewell and of the rising.

The inscription Warsaw took back

The monument is one of the best-known landmarks of the Royal Route, and part of its fame comes from the German occupation. In 1940 the Germans covered both inscriptions with new plaques, one of them in German, "to the great astronomer Nikolaus Kopernikus". The sculptor Maksymilian Potrawiak, working for the city, greased the screws so they would come off easily.

On 11 February 1942 Maciej Aleksy Dawidowski, known as Alek, of the Wawer minor-sabotage organisation, removed the German plaque. On 25 May 1943, the 400th anniversary of Copernicus's death, three young poets laid a wreath at the statue; a German patrol opened fire, and Wacław Bojarski was mortally wounded.

After the Warsaw Uprising the statue was taken away, probably as scrap metal. It was found at a scrapyard in Hajduki Nyskie and set back on its pedestal on 22 July 1945. Since 2007 a model of the solar system has been laid into the paving around it.

Sources

• Wikipedia (pl): Pomnik Mikołaja Kopernika w Warszawie
• muzhp.pl
• moniuszko200.pl
• Wikipedia (en): Staszic Palace