Ethnographer, researcher of Kurpie region and founder of the Kurpie Museum in Nowogród Adam Chętnik was the patron of 2015 in the Podlaskie Voivodeship.
During the 9th Festival in Waniewo, the Słopiewnie Music Society presented an exhibition entitled “Adam Chętnik – the work of a lifetime”, which allowed the audience to become familiar with the works of the outstanding ethnographer and creator of the Kurpie Open-Air Museum in Nowogród and the North Mazovian Museum in Łomża. The exhibition presented posters and publications promoting the nine subsequent editions of the Festival.
A fragment of Zbigniew Nasiadko’s publication entitled “Nowogród” published by the National Publishing Agency in 1977 and 1979 (total circulation 35 thousand copies)
The Life’s Work of Adam Chętnik
… only remained under the cemetery wall.A lonely wanderer wants to rest next to him, let him repeat to me the past of this land.
Tadeusz Gicgier
It is impossible to be in Nowogród, the Kurpie Forest, Łomża and Ostrołęka without coming across this surname. Adam Chętnik – an activist – regionalist, publicist and scholar, an inquisitive researcher of the history and culture of the Kurpie region, was himself a co-creator of the history of this region. He was an ambassador of Kurpie in Polish science, an expert in the problems and a promoter of the traditional folk culture of this corner of our country.
He was born in Nowogród on December 20, 1885. He was the son of a local carpenter and musician, Wincenty Chętnik. The family, which had been in this area for 300 years, was at that time among those who led in the social and cultural life of the town. He graduated from elementary school in Nowogród. Raised in a large family, the oldest Adam, as a teenager, tried various ways of earning a living. He helped his father with carpentry and joinery, worked for a land surveyor, was a municipal writer, and independently acquired skills in bookbinding, sheet metal and joinery. Helping his family, he finished a four-grade State Gymnasium in Łomża. In 1903, he founded the first Polish library in Nowogród, and taught children from nearby villages in secret classes. In 1908, he went to Warsaw for pedagogical courses, which he completed with an exam in St. Petersburg. From the moment of his departure, information about the Kurpie Forest, Nowogród and the problems of the region signed with his name began to appear in Warsaw magazines – “Zorzy”, “Drużyna” and “Ziemia”. It was then that Adam Chętnik’s interests – tourism, ethnography and history – crystallized. In 1916, his first scientific work – “Chata Kurpiowska” was published.
During World War I, he returned to Nowogród. A wonderful stage of his activity from this period was the years immediately after the war, when the fate of Masuria and Warmia was decided. At that time he was active in the Masurian People’s Union. He worked with great dedication in the Masurian Plebiscite Committee. In Nowogród at that time he published the magazine “Goniec Pograniczny” – for the Masurians and Kurpie. As an activist of the People’s National Union he was a member of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland from the Łomża Land in the years 1923-27. He gradually gave up political activity, devoting himself to scientific and research work and the organization of the Museum in his native Nowogród.
“The world is changing,” wrote Adam Chętnik at that time. “How quickly the last monuments of Kurpie carpentry and joinery are disappearing, the wooden decorations of cottages, the ornaments on the gables of houses, the beautifully carved entrance gates to rural farmsteads with intricately set roofs with beautiful carpenter’s drawing lines. The old Kurpie cranes at wells are declining, watermills and windmills are falling silent and falling asleep, the original treadmills, ingenious because they were constructed exclusively from wood, are dying out, the fulling mills are freezing without movement. Old cottages, granaries with arcades, barns, barns and farm buildings are rotting and falling apart. The patina-covered shrines with sorrowful saints, works of often high artistic value by anonymous creators – folk sculptors, are decaying along the roads.”
To save in a rapidly changing world what is most beautiful, most valuable in folk culture – this was Chętnik’s goal until the last days of his life. Already in 1919, he purchased 1/3 ha of land on the Narew River for the purpose of a Museum. In its construction and arrangement, he was helped by his closest family and the most enlightened residents of Nowogród – farmers, craftsmen, fishermen – members of the branch of the Polish Tourist Society, which was established in Nowogród. Characteristic of the relations at that time was the fact that the City Council refused to transfer free and unused land on the Narew River to the Museum. And after its establishment, the city authorities imposed taxes on this institution. The exhibits for the Museum were acquired and collected by its creator in the following way: “I knew the area around the Narew well, then I walked and traveled around the area a lot due to my occupations for a living. Ethnographic specimens had to be bought or exchanged for new things needed on the farm or in the workshop. For this purpose I carried with me various tools, scissors, chisels, gimlets, pincers, etc. Exchanging them for old things of a historical nature… Since hired carts were expensive, they were hard to come by during field work, so for a few years I bought a horse and acquired a cart and a sleigh so that I would have freedom of movement when traveling and could transport exhibits.” The Kurpie Museum was opened in June 1927. It was one of the first open-air museums in Poland, interestingly designed and arranged. Adam Chętnik expands it, completes the library, helps organize the Scientific Research Station of the Middle Narew, founded in Nowogród in 1933.
Thanks to Chętnik, this small town was a publishing center known throughout the country before the war. In addition to the magazines published here after World War I for Kurpie and Mazury – “Gość Puszczański” and “Goniec Pograniczny” and works published as part of the “Library of the Borderland of Prussia”, a series of books from the so-called “Czytelnia Nadnarwiańska” was published in Nowogród. In total, 12 works from this series were published – including several monographic ones, concerning the cities of Łomża, Nowogród and the regional centres of Kurpie – Myszyniec and Dąbrówka.
In September 1939, the Kurpie Museum in Nowogród ceased to exist, and with it the research and publishing centre. Adam Chętnik was hiding in Warsaw. Tireless in gaining knowledge, during the occupation he continued his ethnographic studies at secret lectures and seminars at the University of Warsaw. He obtained his master’s degree during the occupation. After the war, at the age of over 60, he obtained higher academic degrees – a doctorate at the University of Poznań for his previously published work – “Pożywy Kurpiów”, and soon an associate professor of humanities. He did not give up on recreating the achievements of his life, which had been destroyed by the war. First of all, he organized the Regional Museum in Łomża, which was opened in 1948. He later worked at the Museum of Folk Cultures in Warsaw and was the curator of the amber department at the Museum of the Earth. He lectured at the University of Poznań, but he never parted ways with Nowogród. He spent every free moment here, paying local fisherman Edmund Kamiński out of his own pocket, who looked after the Museum grounds until construction began.
After retiring, doc. dr Adam Chętnik worked on a voluntary basis as an expert in museums in Łomża and Nowogród. Towards the end of his life, he devoted himself entirely to the work he had begun several decades ago.
Doc. dr Adam Chętnik – a wonderful figure of a social activist, patriot and scholar. He died in Warsaw in 1967. He is buried in Nowogród, in his native land, to which he devoted his beautiful and hard-working life.
In 1977, the Museum in Nowogród was given the name Adam Chętnik Ethnographic Park of North-Eastern Mazovia.