Maria Konopnicka, Warsaw

Before you is Maria Konopnicka’s monument: sculptor Stanisław Kulon made this seated figure from syenite and placed her on a low plinth in the Saxon Garden. Konopnicka herself was a poet, novelist, and writer for young readers, as well as a campaigner for women’s rights and Poland’s independence. What makes this memorial especially moving is its origin.

Pupils at Primary School number eleven in Kalisz launched the idea, and a children’s magazine carried their appeal to a far wider audience. Donations arrived from children across Poland, eventually reaching about six hundred thousand zlotys. Kulon won the sculpture competition, and the monument was unveiled on the twenty-second of May, nineteen sixty-six, just before the anniversary of Konopnicka’s birth.

Read the lettering on the plinth: its main dedication gives the monument to Konopnicka from children. Other inscriptions preserve both the unveiling date and the children’s fundraising, alongside the magazine’s editors and the Maria Konopnicka Association. This is a public tribute whose stone surface also holds a record of young people deciding that a writer and activist deserved a lasting place in Warsaw’s park.