Andrzej Ciechanowiecki

Early life

Andrzej Stanislaw Ciechanowiecki was born in Warsaw in 1924, the only child of Andrzej Ciechanowiecki, a Polish diplomat, and Matilda "Tilly" Maria, Countess Osiecimska-Hutten-Czapska, a prominent figure in the elite social circles of pre-war Warsaw. On his father's side, he came from an impoverished Masovian szlachta noble and senatorial family, established in Belarus, and who had recently lost their landed estates as a result of the Treaty of Riga in 1921. He had spent his early childhood in Budapest, where his father died at the early age of 37 while working at the Polish embassy, obliging the family to return to Warsaw. There he attended the Mikołaj Rey Primary School followed by the Stefan Batory Gimnazjum & Liceum. The household came to be dominated by his widowed mother and maternal grandmother and their social connections.

Academic pursuits

Returning to Kraków, he took up his doctoral thesis and also worked on other research projects. He was a consultant at the Wawel Castle Museum and also a curator at the Castle Museum in Łańcut. His academic interests concentrated on the history of furniture and later on Kraków Baroque silver, as well as on the culture of the former Commonwealth of Poland. In 1958 he won a travel scholarship from the Ford Foundation and the British Council, leaving the country on 22 July of that year, presumably, not thinking that it would mean a 19-year break with his homeland. He did, however, take the precaution of bringing with him all his materials relating to his research, the subject of his doctoral thesis. Later he completed another thesis at University of Tübingen, Germany.