Sadki. An unassuming village (though the seat of the municipality) on National Route 10 from Bydgoszcz to Piła. It might seem like no big deal—just one of hundreds of such towns in our province. And yet, it’s not quite like that… Sadki and its immediate surroundings hide a fascinating, yet little-known, rich history, interwoven with the splendor of both secular and sacred architecture of the highest order, as well as figures from the pantheon of national heroes.

One such gem is the parish church of St. Adalbert. In its current form, it is a late Baroque church, built through the efforts of parish priest Wawrzyniec Brzeziński between 1748 and 1767 and funded by Count Wojciech Bniński of nearby Samostrzel. Previously, several wooden parish churches stood on this same site, and a cemetery had been in use in the surrounding area since the late Middle Ages. Inside the church are crypts where members of the prominent and distinguished Bniński family from nearby Samostrzel are buried. Another crypt is located outside the church. In 1861, Major Józef Patrycy Garczyński was buried there—a great Pole, a cadet at the Officer Cadet School in Warsaw, a member of the Wysocki Conspiracy, a participant in the November Night, a soldier who fought in 14 battles of the November Uprising, a recipient of the Gold Cross of the Order of Virtuti Militari, a conspirator in the 1846 plot, a prisoner at Berlin’s Moabit Prison, and one of the principal commanders of the 1848 Greater Poland Uprising.

The discovery of the buried and forgotten crypt of Maj. Garczyński was made in the fall of 2024 by Bydgoszcz-based archaeologist Robert Grochowski, who, during the event and based on his research, will discuss the history of Sadki and the figure of the major within the broader context of the history of Kujawy and Greater Poland.

Illustration: Crypts in the St. Adalbert Parish Church in Sadki, photo by Maciej Kulesza

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XCVIII "Encounter with History" at Hoffman's: Sadki. The Great History of Small Towns—a lecture by Robert Grochowski

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