Download Roman Aftanazy – The History of Residences in the Former Borderlands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Sudyłków (PDF)
In the 16th century, Sudyłków was part of the Zasław estate. In the 17th century, however, the local estates were already the heritage of the Aksak family of their own coat of arms, mainly settled in the Kyiv Voivodeship. The sons of Jan Aksak, the deputy voivode and then the land judge in 1670, divided their father’s considerable fortune in such a way that the town of Sudyłków and the villages of Białokrynica, Berezna, Łączyczna, and Krasnosiolka, as well as a large area of land in Ukraine, went to the younger of them, Michał.
In the mid-18th century, Sudyłków belonged to Stanisław Lubomirski, the heir of Równe and a whole series of other estates in Volhynia and Ukraine. As compensation for supporting his cause during the “Kolbuszowa transaction,” as a result of which Lubomirski received, among others, the towns of Dubno and Stepań with their villages, he gave Sudyłków to Andrzej Mikołaj Młodziejowski (1717 – 1780), the Bishop of Poznań, the Grand Chancellor of the Crown.
After his death, these estates were acquired by Jan Duklan Grocholski of the Syrokomla coat of arms (born in 1762), the Crown Hetman, captain of the national cavalry, chamberlain of King Stanisław August, married to Urszula Wisłocka. After Jan’s death, the estate was inherited by his son Rafał (born in 1798 probably in Sudyłków – died in 1848 or 1850 in Florence, unmarried). Involved in the 1831 uprising, he was forced to emigrate abroad, and his properties were confiscated by order of General Bibikov. Sudyłków was legally reclaimed from the Russian government by the son of Rafał Grocholski’s sister, Konstancja, married to the Starokonstantynów Marshal Józef Szaszkiewicz – Leonard Szaszkiewicz, who soon sold the recovered estates to the Iżycki family.
In the seventies or eighties, Jan Grocholski built a palace in Sudyłków, about which we have only two brief mentions. One of them states that this building was decorated with stone ornaments and represented the Louis XV style, according to another it was distinguished “like all contemporary ones, by exquisite taste”. Next to his residence, Grocholski also erected a small domestic chapel.
He lived in his palace for several decades until his death, but because “with stinginess and unbearable pride he wanted to erase his too fresh elevation, he was not liked in the area”.
The Sudyłków palace existed briefly, as it was consumed by fire in 1859. Shortly thereafter, T. J. Stecki visited Sudyłków and found the building without a roof. The furniture saved from the fire, several portraits of the Grocholski family, and a significant part of the library “in the greatest disarray” were then stored in some shed, at the mercy of rats and moths. The new owners of the palace did not rebuild it.
There are probably no iconographic records of Jan Grocholski’s presumably architecturally interesting residence.
Roman Aftanazy “The History of Residences in the Former Borderlands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – Volhynian Voivodeship”