The objects were handed over at the Polish-German Forum in Berlin on Wednesday, during events marking the 35th anniversary of the Polish-German Treaty of Good Neighborly Relations and Friendly Cooperation.
Poland’s Ministry of Culture and National Heritage said the return was the result of cooperation with German partners and institutions involved in restitution on both sides. Culture and National Heritage Minister Marta Cienkowska attended the ceremony.
The recovered items include a fragment of a medieval manuscript containing Gaude Mater Polonia, a hymn that has played an important role in Polish religious and national culture.
Also returned were a ring believed to have belonged to the 16th century monarch King Sigismund I the Old, and 11 miniature railway exhibits from Warsaw’s prewar Museum of Communication.
Cienkowska said the return was a continuation of a new stage in Polish-German cooperation on cultural restitution, following earlier returns of Polish-Teutonic documents and a medieval sculpture fragment from Malbork, an important medieval town and the site of the largest brick castle in Europe.
“These are objects of enormous importance, priceless for Polish culture and Polish identity, looted during World War II,” she said.
Gaude Mater Polonia, meaning "Rejoice, Mother Poland," is a 13th-century hymn honoring St. Stanislaus of Szczepanów, a medieval bishop and patron saint of Poland. It is one of the oldest works of Polish-Latin religious lyric poetry.
The recovered manuscript fragment was found at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. It probably dates from the second or third quarter of the 14th century and consists of six parchment leaves from a late medieval liturgical codex. It contains the text and musical notation of Gaude Mater Polonia.
Prewar stamps of the Płock Seminary Library survive on two of the leaves. Before World War II, the library was one of Poland’s most important historic church libraries. Its collection included more than 100 medieval manuscript codices and 422 incunabula, books printed before 1501.
The Gaude Mater Polonia fragment is believed to have been taken when, after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the occupying authorities decided to remove the library’s most valuable manuscripts and early printed books. They were reportedly transported by rail through Sierpc to Königsberg (Królewiec).
The manuscript was identified in 2023 by Paweł Figurski of the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences. It contains text variants different from the oldest complete version previously known from the Kielce antiphonary, a liturgical book containing chants. Researchers say it is probably the oldest surviving notation of the hymn.
The returned ring is believed, on the basis of historical accounts, to have belonged to Sigismund I the Old, a Jagiellonian king who ruled Poland from 1507 to 1548. It was removed from the royal tomb at Wawel Cathedral in Kraków in 1791 by Tadeusz Czacki, a Polish historian and co-founder of the Warsaw Society of Friends of Learning.
Czacki’s aim was to safeguard royal jewels, many of which were later looted by Prussian troops in 1795. The ring was among objects later entrusted to Princess Izabela Czartoryska, founder of Poland’s first historical museum, the Temple of the Sibyl in Puławy.
The items were kept in the Royal Casket, a national deposit under the care of the Czartoryski family. After the opening of the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków in 1876, the casket was moved there.
In 1939, shortly before Nazi Germany attacked Poland, the most valuable objects from the Czartoryski collection were moved to the family palace in Sieniawa, in southeastern Poland, to protect them from wartime looting.
German troops entered the town in September and plundered the palace. The gold ring of Sigismund I is believed to have been stolen then.
The ring entered the collection of the Pforzheim Jewellery Museum in 1963 through a purchase. Polish experts examined it in 2022, and documentation later confirmed it as a Polish wartime loss.
Poland filed a restitution request with the German side in March 2023. The Pforzheim City Council voted on May 12 to return the ring. The ring will now go back to MNK Czartoryski Museum in Kraków.
The 11 miniature railway objects came from the collection of Warsaw’s Railway Museum, founded in 1928.
In 1938, the institution was transformed into the Museum of Communication. By the outbreak of World War II, it had gathered more than 4,000 exhibits, including nearly 400 models, 250 charts and diagrams, more than 550 photographs, and 8,000 books.
Some objects from the prewar Warsaw collection were later identified at the German Museum of Technology in Berlin.
In 2024, an employee of Poland’s culture ministry identified 11 of them on lostart.de, a German database of cultural property lost or displaced during Nazi rule and World War II.
The railway objects will now go to Museum Station in Warsaw, which continues the tradition of collecting railway heritage linked to the prewar Museum of Communication.
The culture ministry said it is currently conducting more than 200 restitution proceedings in 18 countries. Since 2008, 915 lost cultural objects have returned to Poland.
(rt)
Source: IAR, PAP