Where Is Poland? | Battle of Racławice

Chapter 8

Battle of Racławice

Just like all exhibitions, the show in Lwów had its very own clou. It was the 'RacławicePanorama' – a monumental painting commissioned for the occasion, from Wojciech Kossak and Jan Styka.

Wojciech Kossak painting the Panorama, 1893/1894. Photo: national Musuem in Warsaw

Nineteenth-century virtual reality

In the nineteenth century, world exhibitions were famous for their grand enterprises which started off as their main attractions and, in later years, became their symbols. The Great Exhibition held in London in 1851 is associated with the pioneering construction of the Crystal Palace, while the Eiffel Tower was erected at the entrance of the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris. A similar role at the Lwów exhibition, as the clou and main symbol of the event, was played by the 'Racławice Panorama'.

The massive panorama commemorating the Battle of Racławice, painted as a cyclorama on the inside of a specially-built rotunda, was conceived by Jan Styka. The Battle of Racławice was one of the victories of the Kościuszko Uprising of 1794; it became a symbol of national Polish unity, with peasants armed with scythes supporting Tadeusz Kościuszko in his struggle to liberate the Polish and Lithuanian Commonwealth after the Second Partition earning a victory for the battle and carving out a place for themselves in Poland’s history books. The main hero of the legend was Bartosz Głowacki, a peasant from a village near Kraków, who used his cap to extinguish the fuse of a Russian cannon. The year 1894 marked the centenary of the battle, and the panorama was to be the main attraction at the first Polish General Exhibition.

During their research, Styka and Kossak even took a clandestine trip to the battle-site itself, just over the border with the Russian partition. They explored the topography of the site and tried to reconstruct how the troops had been positioned and how the battle might have played out. They were able to recover a few cannonballs and remains of weapons. The artists also collected any available iconography and studied museum collections to perfect their depictions of the uniforms and munitions of both armies.

The painting took a year to complete; Styka and Kossak were accompanied by a further seven artists. They used 15-metre wide canvas with a total length of 120 metres (the actual painting covers 15 by 114 metres, or 1800 square metres of canvas) and 750 kilograms of paint. The cyclorama was mounted in a specially constructed rotunda in Stryjski Park with a diameter of 38 metres.

The painting was viewed by at least 200,000 people during the exhibition, including large group of peasants, for whom the Panorama was often the very first lesson in Polish history and an invaluable experience shaping their national identity. There were also organised tours for children from rural areas across Galicia.

The painting itself can nowadays be seen in a special building in the city of Wrocław.