Mieczysław Potocki

Mieczysław Potocki (1810-1878), a Polish nobleman, was not a scientist and had no historical or artistic education; however, in 1863-1878 he became the first active conservator of ancient monuments in Eastern Galicia and Lviv. His extensive and long-term activity can be described as organizational rather than expert and scientific; besides, it was also rather unsystematic. For a long time, researchers engaged in art studies considered him only cursorily, if at all. In the 21st century, however, interest in his person is only growing, articles and monographs about him being published (e.g. Gronek, 2021; Łopatkiewicz, 2022).

A large part of Mieczysław Potocki’s correspondence as a monument conservator has been preserved in Lviv. Behind it, a person can be seen for whom the conservation of antiquity became a vocation rather than a profession; a nobleman for whom, above all, it was necessary to preserve the traces of the abolished Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which could be wiped off from the face of the earth due to the aggressive policy of the Russian Empire or due to human indifference. Potocki organized actions to save buildings as best he could, trying to involve everyone he could. His methods were not always appreciated, but no one denied his tenacity. Despite the fact that he was appointed a conservator by the Viennese imperial court’s Central Commission for the Protection of Monuments, the latter had little control over his activities.

Mieczysław Potocki was born in Lviv; for more than two decades, however, he lived on the outskirts of Galicia, in the village of Kotsiubynchyky located on the bank of the Zbruch river. Only for the last six years of his life did he move to Lviv, where he lived at ul. Ochronek (now vul. Konyskoho) 8, in a villa that no longer exists today.

Perhaps Mieczysław Potocki would never have taken up antiquities if it had not been for an accident. In August 1848, a tall unusual statue was extracted from the Zbruch river in the village of Lychkivtsi, next to his estate. The "god" fell into the hands of Potocki, who decided to install it in a prominent place in his village of Kotsiubynchyky. However, the local villagers threatened to smash the statue as an idol in this case. Soon he came across an appeal from the Scientific Society in Kraków, which functioned at the Jagiełłonian University, about the establishment of a historical and archaeological section there. The appeal also called for ancient finds to be reported to the Society. In November 1850, Mieczysław Potocki sent a letter in which he carefully described the circumstances of the find and the appearance of the statue and shared his thoughts about it. After consulting Nestor’s Primary Chronicle and the work by Polish historian Adam Naruszewicz, he identified the statue as an image of the Slavic god Svitovyd, who was revered in pre-Christian times; therefore, according to his calculations, it had lain in the river silt for at least nine centuries.

The statue described by Potocki caused a sensation in Kraków. In April 1851, Teofil Żebrawski, a delegate of the Scientific Society, arrived in Kotsiubynchyky. He inspected the statue and spent several days studying the surrounding Podillya region. He ordered the find to be transported to Kraków, where it soon took a prominent place at the Jagiełłonian University.

The grateful Scientific Society accepted Mieczysław Potocki as a correspondent (non-local member). After the Svitovyd, he occasionally communicated via correspondence about other finds from Podillya and kept sending objects and texts. At the turn of the 1850s, there were no institutions similar to Kraków’s Scientific Society in Lviv, so the Svitovyd had no chance of finding itself in Lviv at that time. Probably this case became later the key reason of Mieczysław Potocki managing to become the official conservator of ancient monuments.

Mieczysław Potocki was born in Lviv in 1810 and studied law at the University of Warsaw. There he took part in the January Uprising, serving as an officer in the Battle of Ostrołuka and being awarded the gold Order of Virtuti Militari. After the failure of the uprising, he emigrated to the West and returned to Galicia in the 1840s. Here he confirmed his nobility and received the lowest aristocratic title of knight (Poczet szlachty, 1857, 203). In the future, he typically signed as Mieczysław Ritter von Potok-Potocki, "Knight from Potok." The title allowed him to participate in the advisory Estate Diet in Lviv; however, there is no evidence that he joined it.

In 1846, Potocki sold his native village of Vitsyn (now Smerekivka) in what is now the Zolochiv Rayon and bought Kotsiubynchyky instead. Perhaps he moved there in order to live closer to the family of his wife Kłotylda (née Horodyska). Here, near the Zbruch river, he lived most of the rest of his life, and after Potocki's death in 1878, the village was inherited by his son Władysław. According to data from 1870, 1,090 people lived in Kotsiubynchyky (Orzechowski, 1872), among whom Greek Catholics outnumbered Roman Catholics five times. Mieczysław Potocki joined the Agricultural Society and the Credit Land Society and participated in the activities of their branches in Husiatyn. As the Gazeta Lwowska reported, he took care of the "moral education of his old subjects", committing to give the village community a plot of land as a gift for the construction of a school, to allocate funds for building materials, to financially support the teacher, and to give clothes or useful books to the most diligent students (GL, 1858, No. 104, p. 413).

Mieczysław Potocki could live the life of an ordinary small landowner in a distant province, but this was not enough for him. Having learned about the establishment of the Central Commission for the Protection of Monuments, he definitely wanted to join its activities. However, was he ready for what it meant to be a monument conservator?

Founded in 1850, the Imperial and Royal Central Commission for Research and Care for Architectural Monuments (k.k. Central-Commission für Erforschung und Erhaltung der Baudenkmale) started functioning in 1853. Its main idea was the protection of ancient monuments on the territory of the entire Habsburg empire, initially only architectural ones. The institution operated under the patronage of Emperor Francis Joseph and was initially subordinated to the Ministry of Commerce, Trades and Public Construction. It had to act through conservators appointed in various cities of the empire. The conservators were entrusted with the obligation to search for ancient monuments in the territories assigned to them, to document the objects according to the provided form, to ensure that they were not damaged or destroyed and, in some cases, to organize the restoration of those objects. The conservators had to become mediators between the Central Commission in Vienna and institutions and individuals on the ground, to cooperate with the press and to "awaken" interest in antiquities among the population in every way. It was assumed that the conservators would do all this for free, out of their own enthusiasm.

Mieczysław Potocki learned about the Central Commission a year after its foundation. On February 22, 1854, he received a letter from Emil Dworzak, the deputy head of the Chortkiv District (Czortkower Kreisbehörde), with a proposal to nominate him as conservator of this district (CDIAL 616/1/1:1). The Chortkiv District was then one of the twelve districts subordinated to Lviv, until it was changed by the new administrative division of the province in 1867. Potocki was enthusiastic about the idea, but he did not receive the appointment as the idea was not supported or ignored by the Governor's Office (from where the nomination should have been forwarded to the Central Commission). In 1856, another person was nominated in Lviv — Franciszek Stroński, professor of philosophy and head of the library of the Francis I University. The latter never undertook the protection of monuments.

The vacancy of a conservator opened in 1860 after Franciszek Stroński was formally dismissed and left Lviv. However, several more years passed, until Potocki finally received the desired title. In 1861, he turned to the Governor’s Office, explaining his desire to become a conservator, unchanged since 1854. Two years later, he was nominated at the request of the then governor of Galicia, Alexander von Mensdorff-Pouilly (CDIAL 616/1/1:12).

According to the procedure, after such a nomination, the Central Commission had to recommend the candidate to the ministry. In that year, the Ministry of State (Internal Affairs) was in charge of this field. However, Mieczysław Potocki was given the title of correspondent, not conservator, and this fact confused him, because he did not understand its meaning and asked for an explanation (CDIAL 616/1/1:15). The Central Commission envisioned correspondents as an auxiliary force for the conservators, who, moreover, were not burdened with duties, having only the right to collect materials about monuments and to send them to the conservator or to the Commission. Perhaps the Central Commission decided to put Potocki on a kind of probationary period.

Mieczysław Potocki was finally approved as a conservator in April of the following year, 1864. He received his nomination diploma and official seal after another delay, in early September. He was bitterly disappointed by this, as evidenced by his words addressed to the Governor’s Office:

(...) This diploma will remain forever in my family as a very sweet and honourable memorial object (...) No matter how sweet the impression was (...) on the other hand, I have to admit with regret that the way it was presented does not agree at all with the height of dignity to which this diploma corresponds, nor with the outstanding honour with which I am endowed. I thought that the document (...) should at least have been handed to me personally by the Head of the District, but it happened differently: it was merely brought to me by a government servant together with other government papers, which before reaching me passed through several hands. What's more, the Head, as if he wanted to spice up this moment of pleasantness for me with bitterness, sent as his messenger the same servant who had once made a scandal in my house; it was in this matter that I was recently forced to file a complaint with the High Imperial and Royal Governor’s Office.

The letter remained unsent. However, it gives us an idea of how Mieczysław Potocki understood the conservator’s responsibilities: for him, it was the duty of his social estate, that is, the aristocracy. In its programme texts, the Central Commission stated that the protection of monuments should become a patriotic duty of all educated citizens. The liberalization that took place in the Austrian Empire in the 1860s, when more and more burghers came to power (Bürger-Regierung), relegated the aristocracy to the background. Therefore, the appointment of Mieczysław Potocki as conservator took place during a dynamic transitional period. As a representative of the Galician Podillya’s nobility, Potocki saw his role in preserving the memory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, its glorious past and the "pre-Austrian" history of his native land. He called Eastern Galicia, his conservator’s district, exclusively "the eastern part of our province", avoiding the name introduced by the Habsburgs. According to the views of the Central Commission, this was a fully authorized expression of local patriotism. In his letters, the conservator often emphasized his gratitude to the monarch thanks to whose will the honouring of one’s own history became possible, now and then contrasting it with the situation of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Poland, subjects of the Russian tsar.

As Matthew Rampley notes, in its early days the Central Commission often appointed conservators on the basis of perceived political reliability rather than professionalism. Mieczysław Potocki, with his emphasized loyalty to the authorities, illustrates this tendency. Organizational abilities were also more than once valued by the Commission more than systematic knowledge of art history; the researcher cites the example of the first president of the Commission, Karl von Czoernig, a bureaucrat and a long-time head of the government’s Statistical Commission (Rampley, 2015, 188-189, 194).

According to the instructions approved by the Central Commission in 1853, even in the absence of a conservator in some place, his role was to be performed by engineers, employees of the District Administrations (Kreis-Ingenieure). At that time, there were 12 employees of this kind in Eastern Galicia. These political administrations were subordinate to the Governor’s Office and the Tax Administration in Lviv and were middle-level authorities that had a supervisory and administrative function; they also collected taxes. Their construction departments, consisting of an engineer and several assistants, monitored all types of construction in the district, issued permits, observed the implementation of regulations, and in the case of construction with the use of government funds, designed projects and conducted construction (Allerhöchste Bestimmungen, 14 September 1852). Very often, however, they were not specialists in the field of architecture, being experts primarily in the construction of roads as it was explained to Mieczysław Potocki, in particular, in a letter from the Galician Provincial Department in the early 1870s (ЛНББУ 26/1/1:50). On the one hand, this situation was related to education as the Technical Academy, functioning in Lviv from 1844, had a general technical faculty that only briefly included architecture, most of the students being focused on employment on the railways. On the other hand, the demand for architecture in Eastern Galicia in the mid-19th century was not significant; in cases of large-scale expensive constructions, well-known architects from the West, particularly from Vienna, were invited.

Therefore, the Central Commission, through the Ministry of Commerce, Trades and Public Construction, issued somewhat unrealistic demands for the district engineers. From that time on they had to search for and document ancient buildings in a way that would not harm their main job, that is, actually, in their off-hours and free of charge (Instruction für Baubeamten, 24/04/1853). The Commission instructed the engineers carefully how to draw buildings and their layouts, façades and details, but they were mostly unwilling to work overtime, so the conservator could not rely on them.

Mieczysław Potocki persistently made requests to all district administrations to send him information on the presence of ancient objects in their territories, hoping for their cooperation. Although the governor sent them additional orders and reminders of their duty to cooperate with the conservator, they often chose to ignore them. Potocki repeatedly complained to the Governor’s Office and later to the Central Commission, that the current system was ineffective and needed changes. According to the instructions for the conservators, he had the right to propose improvements and so he did, but his opinion was not considered in Vienna, as evidenced by his correspondence with the president of the Central Commission, Josef Alexander baron von Helfert (e.g. CDIAL 616/1/2: 13-16, 616/1/2:68-69).

In the 1860s, only a few ancient objects in Galicia were generally known; to find more, it was necessary to travel and search. Vienna and Lviv were connected by a railway in 1861, but most places could only be reached by horse. The Central Commission offered to reimburse the funds spent on inspection trips post factum. Potocki emphasized the disadvantage of this approach as correspondence could go from the nearest post office in Husiatyn to Vienna and back for weeks, and the conservator could not be sure that his expenses would be considered worth the reimbursement. He claimed that he was unable to travel alone and asked for funds in advance so that he could use post horses. He was refused.

The first buildings that Potocki offered to the Central Commission as Galicia’s landmarks had been known to him earlier. For example, a baroque church in Horodenka, which was built in the mid-18th century by the magnate Mikołaj Potocki. He also reported the Basilian monastery, which had recently been destroyed by fire, in the village of Vitsyn owned by his father earlier; he had previously written a description of this monastery and a respective report for the Scientific Society in Kraków. Another object, which he tried to preserve even before his nomination as conservator (from 1859), were the ruins of the fortress in the Trenches of the Holy Trinity. However, these and other buildings were not considered worthy of attention by the Central Commission. The first object proposed by Potocki, whose restoration was finally supported by the Commission, was a Gothic church in the town of Krosno, halfway between Lviv and Kraków. In the 1860s, it was the territory of Eastern Galicia.

On the one hand, Mieczysław Potocki was really not an expert in history and art and made no secret of this.  On the other hand, he either did not know or underestimated the fact that the Central Commission was above all interested in medieval monuments. The Central Commission’s official documents, its charter and instructions for conservators, correspondents and construction officials indicated a single limitation: objects built no later than the mid-18th century could be considered ancient. However, in practice it was different. Among the papers of the Governor’s Office (CDIAL 146/68/1946), there is a text by Gustav Heider, Rudolf Eitelberger and Josef Hiser entitled "Prospect. Medieval Art Monuments of the Austrian Empire", which was sent to Lviv in 1856 and which fell into the hands of the first conservator, Franciszek Stroński. This text determined the priority of the medieval monuments in the activities of the Central Commission. The extent to which Potocki was familiar with it is not known.

According to this "Prospect", Vienna wanted to compile a comprehensive picture of medieval monuments all over the Habsburg Empire, so each crown province had to participate. In the Central Commission’s view, Austria was backward compared to Germany and France, both of which had long documented their medieval heritage; this backwardness was to be removed (Eitelberger, 1856, No. 1, p.1-2).

It should be supposed that it was the rarity of medieval architecture in the eastern part of Galicia and in Lviv in particular that caused the Central Commission’s lack of interest in Galicia in the 1850s and 1860s. In turn, Mieczysław Potocki began to constantly repeat the thesis about the province’s scarcity of historic monuments, to emphasize and to eloquently explain the desolation of these lands due to the wars resulting from Mongol and Tatar attacks. Not everyone agreed with this interpretation: for example, Antoni Schneider, a local historian from Lviv, liked to refute it. Nevertheless, this view of things remained influential. Later the successors of the conservator used the same theses about "poverty" or "deprivation" of the province over and over again.

The Central Commission announced its goals and issued briefly formulated instructions, which Potocki (with his legal education) condemned as non-specific and vague in discussions with his colleague Karol Rogawski. The Commission did not offer any training either for conservators or for restorers (architects, sculptors, painters). Mieczysław Potocki could glean more detailed practical information from a brochure published by the Kraków Scientific Society in 1850. Along with the short appeal, which prompted him to announce the discovery of the Svitovyd idol, it contained almost 30 pages of explanations telling which objects should be paid attention to, how to recognize them and what to describe. The simple language of the presentation, without any theorizing, shows that the Scientific Society was aimed at literate people interested in antiquity, who were not specialists in this field.

Having founded the institute of monument conservators, the Central Commission, however, had only a minimal influence on what and how Mieczysław Potocki did. The Commission created the situation, but it did not support his ideas, did not finance projects (except for Krosne) and did not follow his work. It is significant that between 1869 and 1874 Potocki did not report to the Commission at all, and it, in turn, did not remind him about the reports. So, despite the conservator's declared loyalty, in reality contacts between him and the Central Commission were minimal for a long time. Potocki chose monuments at his own discretion, guided by the ideas of the Scientific Society and people from the Ossolineum.

Mieczysław Potocki became the only conservator of a large district, so compiling a list of ancient monuments was an insurmountable task for him; later the so-called Grono Konserwatorskie (Polish for, Board of Conservators), consisting of more than a dozen people, would not be able to start an inventory in the 1890s, 1900s and 1910s. He needed help and looked for it at the  Ossoliński National Institute  in Lviv and among the numerous members of the Agricultural Society, appealing to his fellow citizens through newspapers. He did not ask for help from Kraków institutions.

At the time when Potocki began his conservator’s activities, there was no institution in Lviv dealing with issues of ancient monuments. An important action, however, took place in 1861, when the Ossoliński National Institute, under the leadership of historian August Bielowski, organized an  exhibition of antiquities . It was generally Polish scholars who worked on it, immediately focusing on the application of scientific methods in research and on the creation of national history. Taking similar exhibitions in Warsaw (1856) and Kraków (1858) as their model, they largely aimed to include Lviv and the territory of the so-called Red Ruthenia in the common narrative of Polish history. As a result of the exhibition, a small museum of ancient objects appeared at the Ossolineum.

In general, the Ossolineum was almost the only platform for scholarly and scientific discussions in Lviv at that time. The institution was frequented not only by historians or philologists, but also by mathematicians and natural scientists, and not only by the Poles but also by the Ruthenians. In 1856, the vice-curator Maurycy Dzieduszycki, reporting on the activities of the Institute, called Mieczysław Potocki "one of our most ardent friends" (Dodatek tygodniowy do GL, 1856, Nr. 42), whose communication with the Ossolineum director, August Bielowski, was very close and friendly. Despite this close connection, Dzieduszycki did not consider Potocki as a potential monument conservator at all. As an employee of the Governor's Office, in 1856 Dzieduszycki was appointed a referent in the search for a conservator, and it was thanks to him that Franciszek Stroński was appointed in Lviv (CDIAL 148/68/1946). It should be supposed that the reason was that Mieczysław Potocki was not a scholar, while Stroński was a professor of philosophy and worked in a library, including with ancient manuscripts and old prints.

It was on the basis of the Ossolineum that the first discussions about the need for institutional protection of monuments in Lviv took place. It was also there that Mieczysław Potocki established cooperation with  Wincenty Pol  and  Fr. Ivan Stupnytskyi . At his request, the Central Commission approved both as correspondents for Lviv in 1865; together with them, Potocki began the first restoration projects in the city. His later correspondents, Kazimierz Stadnicki and Antoni Schneider, were also affiliated with the Ossolineum.

In October 1865, in the Ossolineum, Mieczysław Potocki delivered a public report about his first achievements as a monument conservator. In the summer of 1864 and 1865, he travelled all over Galicia, inspected villages and towns and collected information about monuments. In planning his travels, he was partially helped by information sent to him by several members of the Agricultural Society. In July 1864, he asked the Society leadership to send out an appeal to its members with questions about the presence of ancient objects in their land holdings.

The main trend of the Agricultural Society’s activity was the development of agriculture and, after 1848, overcoming the consequences of the corvee labour abolition; by no means it was the study of antiquity. However, Potocki addressed the representatives of the nobility as a circle of people like himself, hoping for their understanding, education and sense of duty to preserve the memory of the past centuries and the ancient Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He also referred to the January Uprising, which continued in the form of a guerrilla war and was brutally suppressed by the Russian army at that time. 

"Dear committee! At a time when the enemy, intoxicated by its triumph, is exterminating our nationality and destroying all the monuments of our past in our brotherly lands with all possible zeal and barbarism, I received with real pleasure the message that the High E. and R. Ministry of the Interior has appointed me the Conservator of buildings and ancient monuments in the eastern part of our province. [...] Each of us knows and feels only too well that it is our sacred duty to keep and preserve these venerable remains of our past for next generations." поколінь.

The appeal contained questions about the presence of ancient buildings in the estates of the Society members; this short questionnaire was reprinted by the Gazeta Narodowa in Lviv on March 4, 1865, as well as by some other periodicals. The most popular Lviv newspaper of that time expressed the values of Polish landowners in the province. Through it, Potocki later addressed his compatriots with announcements more than once.

However, Mieczysław Potocki was disappointed, because despite the Society having hundreds of members, he received only about a dozen answers. Several people who reported monuments to him did not accept his invitation for further cooperation. Among them was Henryk Skrzyński, the Roman Caholic parish priest in the village of Ustrobna, who nevertheless was involved in the restoration works in Krosno. The candidacy of others, such as Michał Olexiński, the elderly owner of the village of Tartakiv near Sokal, was not approved by the Central Commission, although Potocki praised him as a diligent amateur of antiquity who provided "detailed historical descriptions" of monuments in the Zhovkva district. After reading the appeal reprinted in the newspaper Czas (Kraków),  Józef Sermak , a lawyer from Przemyśl, responded to Mieczysław Potocki, thus starting a long cooperation between the two in 1865-1874.

In 1867, Potocki engaged  Leonard Horodyski , probably his relative and old colleague, as a correspondent. Such a step can be considered as a result of disappointment caused by the insignificant response to his appeal and the urgent need of assistants. Despite all the difficulties and troubles Mieczysław Potocki had to tackle as a conservator of monuments in Eastern Galicia, he did not plan to stop. He explained his attitude to another aristocrat and politician, Karol Rogawski, his conservator colleague in Western Galicia, as follows:

"...in our position, we need to make our own way, if we want to do something, we need to gain respect for ourselves. ... It seems to me that one should never, under any circumstances, refuse opportunities, if something good can be done for our land. — When the government opens up a narrow field for our activity in this direction, we should not give up but make every effort to expand it... we need to grasp the thread given to us and slowly twist it tighter each time so that it becomes a rope that cannot be torn so easily."

After the reorganization of the Central Commission, which was implemented in 1873, conservators began to be appointed in three sections: 1) archives, 2) architecture, 3) archeology. During the lifetime of Mieczysław Potocki, the Central Commission appointed two persons responsible for the archives of Eastern Galicia, Fr. Anton Petrushevych and Prof. Ksawery Liske. This division was one of the few concessions made by the Commission in view of the province’s multi-ethnicity: the archives, due to the language of the documents, were divided, and until 1918, when the Central Commission ceased to exist, the position of conservator of the Ruthenian (Ukrainian) archives was always held by a Ukrainian. However, there was no close communication between Petrushevych, Liske and Potocki.

In the late 1860s, criticism of the Central Commission and how little attention it paid to the province was growing in Galicia. It was expressed most articulately by  Wincenty Pol . During his lifetime, this Polish poet and geographer was recognized as a national prophet, the successor of Adam Mickiewicz, and was one of the most widely read Polish authors. Unlike his conservator peer, he was a real celebrity and enjoyed social influence.

Though Mieczysław Potocki appreciated Wincenty Pol's knowledge and experience, their views were different. Pol argued for the establishment of a monument protection institution, in particular in his public speech given in the Ossolineum in October 1864. At that time, Pol believed that such an institution should be municipal, like the Municipal Archive. Having worked together with Potocki, he experienced firsthand the non-involvement of the Central Commission, its constant refusals to finance projects, in particular, to publish the Album of Lviv’s Monuments with photographs and historical descriptions proposed by him.

In 1868, Wincenty Pol was already convinced that Galicia needed a provincial institution separate from Vienna. In March of that year, he gave a public lecture in Kraków under the auspices of the Scientific Society’s  Archaeological Section, which he co-founded in 1850. The extensive report concerned various aspects of monument protection. He called on the Kraków environment and, above all, personally Paweł Popiel, a conservative politician and the most influential person among the preservationists there, to convene a congress and to consider the establishment of an alternative institution for the preservation of monuments. Thanks to the autonomy of Galicia, the prospect of establishing a regional rather than a state-run institution was opened up. The Scientific Society was therefore included in the development of a project for such an institution, which would operate under the auspices of the Provincial Department and be financed from the provincial budget.

Mieczysław Potocki, however, opposed this way. He deliberately took a conservative position, believing that progress should be achieved slowly and cautiously; this is evidenced both by his letters to Karol Rogawski written in 1865 and his report to the Central Commission sent in 1874 (AGAD 1/388/0/-/177). A disillusioned revolutionary, who had taken part in the November Uprising, Potocki retained his fear of empires and absolutism. Even in 1876, when he was invited to join the Archaeological Society, which was founded at that time in Lviv, Potocki postponed his membership until receiving official permission from the Central Commission, although there was no need for this (LNNBU 26/1/1:68). That is, he emphasized his loyalty to the authorities.

In 1867, after the announcement of the compromise, which turned the Austrian Empire into a dualistic Austria-Hungary and granted autonomy to Galicia, Mieczysław Potocki started cooperation with the Galician Provincial Department, the executive branch of the provincial government. The Provincial Department suggested that it allocate funds for the protection of monuments within the budget of Galicia, this meaning, however, that the rather unsystematic work of the conservator had to turn into an orderly and predictable one; Potocki seemed to be not ready for a turn like this. In addition, it was necessary to present a list of what was considered to be monuments. He cautiously reported this to the Central Commission, fearing that it could put a ban on arbitrary decisions of this kind; however, baron Helfert replied that the creation of such a fund "was not only permissible but also desirable." Potocki was unwilling to push the idea further and did not want to participate in the establishment of the provincial monument protection service. He was still relying on himself and on a narrow circle of his several correspondents.

As a result, the "victory" of Mieczysław Potocki's idea can be seen: the provincial institution project was postponed when the Central Commission announced its own reorganization in the early 1870s. However, the idea was not abandoned and became relevant again twenty years later, when the Conservators' Boards was founded in Lviv and Kraków, and then again on the eve of the First World War, when the Central Commission undertook a radical reorganization of the field.

In 1877, at the end of his life, Mieczysław Potocki joined the Archaeological Society, the first public organization in Lviv, which aimed to research and popularize the historical heritage. The society placed an image of the Svitovyd statue on its emblem, thus emphasizing the importance of Potocki's discovery and his role as a pioneer. On November 1, 1877, the conservator was elected head of the Archeology and Prehistoric Anthropology section. However, Potocki died suddenly in January 1878, without having started anything. The search for the next conservator dragged on for almost two years; finally, Count Wojciech Dzieduszycki, a nobleman from Yezupil, was chosen for this position. The latter combined the activities of the conservator and the head of the Archaeological Society, the official position and the society were to become mutually complementary.

Potocki repeated over and over again phrases like "our provincial city of Lviv is very poor in terms of monuments of our past." This statement can be considered both as an expression of the conservator’s deep conviction and as a rhetorical device. The study of the history of concepts is necessarily connected with the analysis of the contexts in which the concepts were applied. Since this statement is found primarily in the conservator’s written requests to the owners of buildings and objects to keep them unchanged, it can be considered as an argument supposed to emphasize the exclusivity of the object. For example, Mieczysław Potocki urged Prince Kalikst Poniński not to change the historical appearance of the " Royal Townhouse " during the renovation, which he had learned about from a newspaper (CDIAL 616/1/2:58). It was the first residential building in Lviv that attracted the conservator’s attention back in the summer of 1864, and subsequent conservators continued to consider it the most valuable townhouse in the city due to the fact that King Jan III Sobieski had once lived there.

In the summer of 1864, Mieczysław Potocki tried to establish contact with the Lviv magistrate. Having read in a newspaper about the planned renovation work in the  church of St. Nicholas , he shared his ideas on the value of the building, which, according to him, was built at the expense of Prince Lev in the 13th century; he also asked to coordinate all similar projects with him in the future. The magistrate agreed to cooperate, although it called the building a "wretched" and "unworthy" example of the "Byzantine style", which there was no special need to preserve (CDIAL 616/1/2:41, 54).

The first restoration project in Lviv is considered to be the action of Hipolit Stupnicki, a journalist, who found an abandoned  statue of Hetman Stanisław Jabłonowski  in 1858 and organized its restoration and installation on the street (Charewiczowa, 1938, 44). The event caused a stir; in honor of the statue, Obere Karl-Ludwig Gasse was renamed Wały Hetmańskie (now prosp. Svobody). Starting from 1864, Mieczysław Potocki acted similarly, trying to pull relatively small objects out of oblivion. Tombstones and statues, he believed, should be moved from nooks and crannies and dungeons to prominent places in churches and on streets and squares. To choose the objects, Potocki used the list of Lviv monuments, which had been compiled by Wincenty Pol. This approach, the conservator believed, would allow Lviv to be "decorated with several very valuable monuments of the past, which [the city] generally has so little" (CDIAL 616/1/5:51-52).

Potocki selected places for the objects on his own, convinced relevant institutions and people to implement his ideas, and looked for sources of funding. The Central Commission for the Protection of Monuments did not support these projects, the owners of monuments only willing to invest in them to a limited extent. Despite all the difficulties and refusals, lack of funds and failed campaigns to collect them, Mieczysław Potocki never doubted the correctness of his decisions and was determined to see the things he started to the end. Implementing these projects involved assistance from virtually all of his correspondents, including  Wincenty Pol  and  Ivan Stupnytskyi , while Potocki lived in Kotsiubynchyky and came to Lviv only occasionally. Later,  Józef Sermak  became a conscientious executor of the conservator's orders, Kazimierz Stadnicki and Antoni Schneider contributed as well. In 1872, Potocki moved to Lviv and took up these matters more directly.

All these were long-term and exhausting projects causing misunderstandings and indignation, discussions and disputes. From the moment in 1864 when the conservator drew the magistrate's attention to the statue of St. Michael and until it was finally installed on ul. Wały Hetmańskie (now prosp. Svobody), nine years passed, of which six years the damaged sculpture was kept in the magistrate's warehouse. The restoration project of tombstones shaped as statues of knights in the dungeons of the  Dominican church  also lasted for years. The process was accompanied by conflicts with the abbot of the monastery, Fr. Jarzębiński, and with the sculptor  Parys Filippi , a constant lack of funds and Józef Sermak’s personal financial losses, and even a public controversy on who was actually the initiator of the project and who put in the most effort to implement it.

Later, these projects of the pioneer were overshadowed by new restorations. However, a critical mention of them by Aleksander Czołowski, an interwar-period historian and a long-time conservator, has been preserved. Commenting more broadly on the situation of the monument protection in the mid-19th century, Czołowski wrote:

"In Lviv, they really complained about the destruction of the traces of the past. In the early 19th century, the Basilian scholar Fr. Kompaniewicz complained, Wincenty Pol, Antoni Schneider, Mieczysław Potocki, Stanisław Kunasiewicz, Karol Widman and others complained, but those complaints are only material today. Material for a sad monograph about the times and people who destroyed the remains of the King Kazimierz’s High Castle, who put up St. Michael, a beautiful work of Lviv foundry, over the Poltva river, dragged the Lorencowicz’s Lion onto the Mound, decorated wells with the remains of sculptures from the old City Hall, and built the foundations of new townhouses and canal vaults from fragments of old architecture and sculptures."

Mieczysław Potocki played a role in a number of other cases. His attempt to protect the Vysoky Zamok (High Castle) Hill from the building of the  Mound of the Union of Lublin  was unsuccessful as he had no leverage over Franciszek Smolka, an influential politician, who was the initiator of this action. However, when the idea of restoring and building up the  church of St. John the Baptist  with adding a dome appeared, he managed to put an end to it. He contributed to the restoration of the  church of St. Paraskeva the Friday  and a number of other objects, helping the organizers to obtain financial support from the provincial budget. On the initiative of Antoni Schneider, he agreed with Prince Adam Sapieha to place a marble tablet on the railway bridge over vul. Zamarstynivska to honor the place considered a battlefield where a Tatar invasion was fought off in 1675 (CDIAL 616/1/6:118-119), etc.

As early as 1864, Potocki was involved in the reorganization of the Town and County Records (pol. Akta grodzkie i ziemskie), which were in the custody of the Ministry of Justice (the so-called Bernardine archive in Lviv). Access to documents for researchers was difficult; before his death, Count Aleksander Stadnicki left a large bequest to the archive in order to make the materials stored there available, but his will could not be implemented for years. The conservator was looking for ways not only to transfer the archive from the state to provincial authorities and to facilitate the work of historians, but also to renovate its premises.

The influence of Mieczysław Potocki, like any other conservator of monuments in the Habsburg period, was limited, because there was no law on the protection of monuments in the empire. Conservators could only ask the owners/administrators of buildings or other monuments not to destroy them and had no right to demand anything. At the level of Lviv, construction was regulated by the Building Statute, issued by a decree of the Governor’s Office in 1855. There were no clauses about heritage protection in it, and they did not appear in the new statute issued in 1885, in spite of all the efforts made by architects and engineers to implement them.

Despite this, Mieczysław Potocki managed to get involved in many cases both in Lviv and beyond. Many objects that became famous later — for example, the Bogorodchany iconostasis, which the next conservator Wojciech Dzieduszycki called his find and considered the most important historical and artistic monument of Eastern Galicia, — had first been noticed by Potocki. Outside of Lviv, Mieczysław Potocki often took part in the installation of memorial signs in Galicia, primarily to honour King Jan III Sobieski. He organized the restoration of the monument to the Polish general Józef Poniatowski in Leipzig, where he died in the battle against the Napoleonic troops in 1813; a similar approach was applied as to the monuments in Lviv, the work financed by the Galician Provincial Department.

The conservator kept travelling all over Galicia to discover monuments and deepened his understanding of ancient construction and art. However, he was convinced that Western art was superior to Eastern art and interpreted Ruthenian (Ukrainian) monuments in this way, believing that valuable examples among them appeared exclusively due to the stronger influence of the West.

***

Mieczysław Potocki is an example of an aristocrat and dilettante in the field of monument protection. A pioneer, he relied primarily on himself and his closest circle of associates, whom he sought at the Ossoliński National Institute, through the Economic Society and through Polish newspapers. He started trends that continued long after his death, including not trusting and relying on the Central Commission for the Protection of Monuments in Vienna, independently deciding on the worth or worthlessness of ancient objects and looking for ways to preserve and restore them. Potocki imagined the district entrusted to him as a fragment of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and considered preservation of memory primarily the duty of the nobility; while recognizing the monuments associated more with the local Ruthenians (Ukrainians) and Jews, he considered them to be less worthy; in his opinion, outstanding works could appear among them only occasionally and under the stronger influence of the West. Although his successor, Wojciech Dzieduszycki, did not agree with him on that, initiating cooperation between Ruthenian and Polish researchers and popularizing the wooden architecture of Ukrainian churches, Potocki's views were typical of subsequent monument conservators and did not disappear without a trace.

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