Szafarnia

Fryderyk Chopin was invited to spend his first holidays outside Warsaw and Żelazowa Wola by Ignacy Dziewanowski and his son Dominik. Little Fryderyk got acquainted with traditions and customs of the Polish village as well as composed his first mazurkas and edited “Kuryer Szafarski”, a unique local paper, which served as letters to his parents. The paper contained local news (from Szafarnia) as well as foreign news (from the vicinities of Szafarnia) and it was edited four times in 1824.

In the half of the 18th century Szafarnia used to be a so-called “rumunek”, i.e. a forest glade in the Sokołów Primeval Forest inhabited by a couple of peasant families, which extended the glade area belonging to owners of Płonne by felling trees. The village name was mentioned for the first time in the Prussian tax cadastre prepared in 1773. After the death of Juliusz Dziewanowski (†1772), the village of Płonne was passed over to his third son Dominik (1759 – 1827). In 1792 Szafarnia was separated from Płonne and it was taken over by Jan, Dominik’s elder brother (1755 – 1815).

After Jan’s death, Szafarnia was passed over to his son Juliusz Ignacy (1779 – 1854) and in 1838 to Dominik vel Domuś, his grandson (1811 – 1881) and a friend of Fryderyk from the secondary school in Warsaw and the boarding school kept by the Chopin family. Domuś’s father was not only an owner of Szafarnia, but the nearby villages of Płonka and Bocheniec as well. The old wooden manor house of the Dziewanowski family, which Chopin used to visit, originally stood deep in today’s park and it was dismantled in 1910. The present brick palace dates back to the second half of the 19th century.

It houses the Chopin Centre, including a concert hall and a small museum. The edifice is surrounded by the park with the area of 3.6 ha with its six natural monuments (such as “Chopin’s Lime Tree”, 4 oaks of the Dziewanowski Family and a pear tree). During Chopin’s visit to Szafarnia in the years 1824 – 1825, there had probably already existed a well-preserved outbuilding located in the north-east side of the park.  In 1842, Ludwika, Chopin’s sister, stayed in Ciechocinek for treatment purposes for the period of 2 months and, afterwards, she visited Dominik and Józefa Dziewanowska nee Romocka in Szafarnia, where she stayed for a couple of days.