Ludgard Piotr Grocholski (Odessa 5/18 XII 1884 – Kraków 9 IV 1954), social and cultural activist in Ukraine, heraldist, poet, and publicist. He was born as the son of Ludgard Bernard (1840–1908) and Maria Michalina from the Rohoziński family, coat of arms Leliwa (1853–1893). His father was successively the owner of Woronowica, lost after the January Uprising of 1863, and later the heir of Błudnik, Pustomyt, Szabelnik, Rybalcza, and Królewszczyzna. He came from the Tereszkowski line of the Grocholski family after the sword-bearer Franciszek Ksawery in Woronowica, registered in the noble books of the Podolian Governorate. By the decision of the Department of Heraldry of the Russian Empire on 12 VI 1908, he was confirmed in the count title. He was to inherit Rybalcza and Królewszczyzna from his father, and after his uncle Władysław (1841–1920), he became the successor of Tereszki.
He completed secondary school in Odessa and studied at the law faculty of the local university, and then pursued supplementary studies at the philosophical and agricultural faculties of the universities in Kraków and Lwów. Initially, he was a delegate of the Society for the Protection of Monuments of the Past in Warsaw, and then a collaborator of Aleksander Lednicki as the head of this Society in Kyiv. During World War I, he served as president of the Executive Committee and vice-president of the Polish Society for the Protection of Monuments of the Past in Ruthenia. He was a co-founder and active member of the board of the Polish Society for Assistance to War Victims, including the Department of Protection of Cultural and Artistic Monuments of this Society, and the president of the Polish Society of the Aleksander Jabłonowski Scientific Library in Kyiv. These institutions provided assistance to local Poles affected by the war, as well as Polish refugees, and saved cultural and artistic monuments on Ukrainian territory. He also joined the government administration of the Ukrainian Republic and became the head of the Kyiv department in the Ministry of Polish Affairs in Ukraine and the department of culture and art in the Secretariat for Nationalities. He cooperated with Naczpol and the Polish Military Organization in Kyiv. He founded, edited, and published the magazine “Muzeum Polskie” in Kyiv in 1917, dedicated to the history and monuments of art and culture. Additionally, he was a member of the Circle of Writers and Journalists in Kyiv and the Directorate of the Fine Arts Society in Lwów in 1917–1918.
In November 1918, he volunteered for the Civic Guard in Lwów and distinguished himself in the fight on the First Section, and then became the Chief Commander of the Civic Militia. He was then to defend the homeland against Bolshevik forces in the ranks of the Volunteer Army with the rank of officer. His last public function was the dignity of Delegate of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland for Eastern Małopolska.
In his journalistic activity, apart from historical-genealogical issues, he referred to Polish-Ukrainian cooperation, which he tried to patronize in Kyiv during World War I and the revolution. For a time, along with a small group of landowners and Ruthenian nobility, he associated with the Ukrainian movement, which he eventually abandoned. He published political, historical, and heraldic articles in the press of Odessa, Kyiv, Lwów, Kraków, and Warsaw: in “Czas”, “Dziennik Kijowski”, “Gazeta Poranna”, “Gazeta Wieczorna”, “Kłosy Ukraińskie”, “Kurier Lwowski”, “Miesięcznik Heraldyczny”, “Przewodnik Bibliograficzny”, “Sprawa Polska”, “Tygodnik Ilustrowany”, “Tygodnik Odeski”, “Wiadomości Bibliograficzne” and “Zjednoczenie”.
He was awarded the Cross of Valor for his stance during the defense of Lwów, a number of commemorative badges, such as the Lwów Defense Star “Orlęta”, Lwów Defense Cross with Swords, First Section Badge, and the honorary Cross of Merit for the protection of Polish monuments and property in 1915–1920. He belonged to the Association of Lwów Defenders from November 1918 and the International Veteran Organization (FIDAC). Among foreign decorations, he held the Commandery of the Knightly Order of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the Grand Cross of Justice of the Knightly Order of St. Lazarus of Jerusalem, and the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Gregory of Burgundy. He collaborated and belonged to many foreign organizations and associations, such as the Papal Tiberian Academy, Real Sociedad Hispano-Americana de Genealogie y Heráldica, Collegio Araldico in Rome, Collège Héraldique de France, Conseil des Héraldistes de France, Institut Héraldique International in Paris, Unione Cavalleresca, the Heraldic Society “Adler” in Vienna, Gotiska Gyllene Gripen in Gothenburg, and Skandinaviska Slakt Studie Samfundet in Stockholm. He participated in the International Heraldic Congress in Barcelona in 1929.
After World War I, he devoted himself entirely to heraldry and attempted to revive the noble movement. In 1922, he organized the Heraldic Institute in Kraków, which was later moved to Warsaw, where he served as director. Simultaneously, from 1929, he held the position of general secretary of the Heraldic College in Warsaw. As the secretary of the Miechowski Committee, he promoted the revival of the Polish branch of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. From 1930 to 1936, he edited and published the irregular monthly “Herold”. His activity in the field of heraldry is assessed inconsistently. On one hand, he defended noble traditions (including the protection of noble surnames appropriated through changes by people often of non-Polish origin) and published valuable contributions of a historical-genealogical-heraldic nature. Additionally, along with Prince Zdzisław Lubomirski and Adam Gubrynowicz, he was an initiator of the restoration of Polish knightly coats of arms in the chapel on the Vienna Kahlenberg, preserving heraldic requirements. At the same time, heraldry became a source of income for him: he profited from the trade of titles and certifying membership in the noble class to people of dubious historical lineage or legal title.
World War II caused irreparable losses in his heraldic collections and the resources of the Heraldic Institute. After the Warsaw Uprising, he found himself in Kraków, where he engaged in antiquarian trade and collaborated with the Polish Biographical Dictionary in preparing biographies of the Grocholski family. He was buried in the Rakowicki Cemetery in plot XXXII, row 3, grave 7. From his marriage in 1909 in Odessa to Janina Maria Ścibor-Marchocka, coat of arms Ostoja (1886–1980), he had an only daughter, Maria Ładysława (1919–1984), married to Stefan Ostrowski, coat of arms Korab (1910-1986). After World War I, his wife went to Paris, leading to a permanent separation between them, and Ludgard Grocholski became involved in 1924 with Wanda Zofia Piccard (1893–1967), a painter, who after the war was considered his wife and used his surname.
Tomasz Lenczewski
To the Polish Nobility Ludgard Count Grocholski
The following appeal appeared in 1930 in the periodical “Herold”, edited by Ludgard Count Grocholski.
We address you, representatives of the Noble State.
The 1921 Constitution may not have recognized nobility as a state institution, but nothing could make the de facto existing Polish nobility cease to exist. It exists in you and through you. As long as you consider yourselves nobility, as long as you are aware of the inherited tradition of duties incumbent upon you, associated with your birth, the nobility exists.
We mean the entire Polish nobility, not only its representatives, unfortunately increasingly fewer, who as landowners managed to maintain themselves on the land, but all members of the Polish nobility, wherever they are, in whatever positions they find themselves – in scientific work, in free professions, in state offices, in trade, in industry, or in any contemporary workshop, and above all those who today, just like their ancestors through the centuries, continue to perform self-sacrificing knightly service in the ranks of the army of the Most Serene Republic.
For quite independently of where the historical moment found you, independently of which camp you are in, or even which so-called social class the evolution of successive generations has led you to, everywhere and always you are the same Polish nobility, descendants of the Polish knighthood, everywhere traditions inherited from ancestors accompany you, to every work you bring the glow of their immortal fame, you bring to the Polish ear the dear sound of the same surnames, whose glory resounded in the world along with the glory of the Polish arms and the booming for centuries rustling of the wings of the Polish hussars, and together, inseparably with all this in every work, in every undertaking, you are accompanied and your minds and hearts are illuminated by the reflection of this Polish noble-knightly ideology.
You are not a class, but a historical state. Class differences may temporarily separate you, but the unity of the noble state, the unity of noble ideology, will always unite you in decisive moments of decisive action. True, as a separate collective you never appear, nowhere can you gather and create a concentration that, concentrating your forces, could release them. Your efforts are isolated, while all other historical states – clergy, bourgeoisie, and people, appear externally, preserving all the features of their state distinctiveness. Especially the bourgeoisie does not renounce its state traditions, and the peasant state, until recently the idol of the intelligentsia, has increasingly its own clearly popular organizations. All professions, all classes have their representative bodies, and above all, the press particularly serving their interests. If among all this, some individual or group wanted to throw the idea of organizing the nobility, it would cause the impression of a thunderbolt from a clear sky in Poland.
This is because there are those who claim that you, Polish Nobility, are only a tradition, a museum relic, that all the surnames you bear, which appear on all the pages of our history, can serve at most for memory as a reminder of wise, ancient undertakings and once brilliant military deeds, but nothing more. FALSE!! The historic memento is the venerable armor of the Chodkiewiczs and Żółkiewskis, which we view with reverence in museums, the ancient memory is the rustle of banners on fields of glory won, and hung under the ceiling of a church or museum, but you, you living people do not want to be and are not just a lifeless memento.
The deeds of your ancestors resurrect in your living life with deeds, providing evidence from Rokitna or Rarańcza, that the same blood pulses in your veins that once flowed from their wounds at Vienna or Kircholm.
You did not die, Polish nobility, in the aimless and dark existence of those old portraits on walls, you did not make the dead existence of museum relics your lot. The whole 19th century, the whole period of captivity, all the heroic impulses, heroic struggle with violence, the fight for the freedom of peoples on the barricades of the whole world, all the national uprisings finally, these are the living deeds of the living Polish nobility. And so from the dawn of independence, when the fiery banner of the holy rebellion against invaders, the revolutionary banner, was taken by the mighty hand of the descendant of Lithuanian princes, when alongside new fighters for freedom, the elite of descendants of the old knightly nobility gathered under the banners of the already independent homeland, jointly raising the edifice of the new powerful Poland. To knightly fights as well as to creative work, for the common good, you draw strength from traditions passed down to you as a legacy through the ages from ancestors.
No one believes in equality among people today. This inequality has existed since birth. Today, people are divided not according to differences and inherited rights, but according to the difference of inherited duties, and with such an approach, the role of the main core of the organizing social elite may and should fall to the nobility, especially since we do not consider it a caste-closed state, for it is not and never was.
To fulfill this role, the nobility must first of all emerge from the state of passivity, from the shameful concealment of its nobility in public life, from the lethargy in which prolonged adherence to democratic utopias has plunged it. The necessity of breaking with these utopias is all the greater because the democratic idea, for which our ancestors often died, has degenerated and today we are dealing not with democracy, but with an ochlocracy dressed in its feathers on one side, and with anti-democratic communism on the other. The Polish state needs to remind itself of the great mission and great historical role it had in the past, and thus retreat, to gain momentum forward, towards traditions. Traditions, however, are not dead in writing and print history and have their seat nowhere else but in living people and living human groups.
Such a living group with us is the nobility, the only historical state that as such preserves from generation to generation the living memory of the times of splendor and power of great-power Poland, and thus contains within itself in a potential state all that once great leaders like Batory and Żółkiewski could ignite and forge into the steel of deeds.
Every undertaking must be guided by an idea, and every idea to live needs material shapes and frames, durable and unchanging. To such shapes in a broader sense, we must include everything in which tradition and the thought of inheritance in the succession of generations both duties and ideology can be expressed, and thus: lineages, families, family connections, all external signs of solidarity, with succeeding generations, surnames, nicknames, and above all coats of arms, which are not marks without content, but full of mystical meaning ideograms of our faith, love, our aspirations, and hopes.
“Dear Zdzisław, beloved Elder of our Line,
You intend to take on the considerable task of immortalizing with your beautiful writing my story about various Grocholscis, woven around what is closest to me from them, and which I preserve, giving my work the title: “Tereszki”. …”
Received courtesy of Jan Grocholski – son of Andrzej.