History

Relatively little is known about Sieciechowice and the manor house. According to Jan Długosz, in the Middle Ages, the bishop of Kraków, Iwon Odrowąż donated the village to a monastery in Imbramowice. In 1312, one of the owners of the village, Petrycy Brandysz, funded a parish church in Sieciechowice dedicated to St Andrew. From the mid-14th century, the village belonged to the Toporczyk family. At the turn of the 15th century, part of the village belonged to Mikołaj Pieniążek. In 1506 he bequeathed the manor and grange in Sieciechowice to Krystyn Minocki. At the end of the 18th century, Sieciechowice was owned by Antoni Bobrownicki (a sword-bearer from Radom and Kraków-based military commander) and in the 19th and early 20th century by the Kęszycki family.

After the death of Helena Kęszycka née Rey (1907), Stanisław Maria Rey, of the Oksza coat of arms, inherited most of the property in Sieciechowice (900 ha). After his arrival in Sieciechowice as manager in 1918, he began the renovation and modernisation of the property after the war damages. In the same year, Stanisław Rey married Jadwiga Branicka of the Korczak coat of arms, the daughter of Ksawery from Wilanów and Anna Potocki from Krzeszowice.

During WW2, Leon Krzeczunowicz was the manager of the Sieciechowice estate. He became a legendary hero of the underground struggle against the occupant (nicknamed Express). He was an excellent rider, horse lover and breeder, and a great farmer. After arriving in Sieciechowice, together with Karol Tarnowski, he founded a paramilitary organisation of landowners called Uprawa (or Shield). Its main goal was to provide aid to the underground Home Army units. They raised funds, provided shelter to the wanted, bought out detainees, organised medical assistance, for example, by setting up small infirmaries in estate buildings. The manager of Sieciechowice remained an active underground activist until he was captured in an ambush near Kraków on 1 August 1944. Taken to the Dora extermination camp in the Harz Mountains, he died while attempting to escape on 19 March 1945.

The Sieciechowice estate was a popular employment destination for the landowners’ youth from the Poznań region, and a safe harbour for refugees, and fugitives. At the end of the war, about 50 people were hiding there.

After WW2, the property was parcelled out. The manor became the property of the state and served as a primary school, an animal clinic, and a kindergarten. The annexes that were still there at that time were used as lodgings for teachers. The wooden part of the manor house was demolished in the 1980s.

The former owners, the Rey family, left for France shortly after the war and settled in Montrésor Castle owned by Stanisław Rey’s wife; the descendants of the Rey, Potocki and Branicki families still live there.

Description

The newer part of the manor house, which has survived to this day, is a brick, two-storey building on a square-like plan. Its architectural decorations were elegant cornices: under the eaves and between the windows. The windows are distributed regularly and closed in a semicircle; the window sills are decorated with panels repeating the decorative motif from the cornices. Today, all door and window openings are secured with solid wooden shutters.

From the north side, all openings are walled up. The façade shows traces of the no longer existing wooden part. On the south side, the entrance is preceded by a brick porch. The porch is slightly raised in relation to the ground level. It is a concrete slab supported by six brick pillars, four at the front and two touching the wall.

The older part, which no longer exists today, was a one-storey, wooden log structure built on a rectangular plan. The central-axis entrances from the front and from the garden led through porches with arcades resting on pillars. Above them, there were mansard rooms with triangular tops.

The façades had lesen divisions, between them windows with segmental arches, similarly to the entrance arcades. The whole edifice was covered by a mansard roof with dormers. During the extension of the manor house, a wooden manager’s house, stables and granaries were built (none of them survived).

The manor house was surrounded by a landscape park made up of three parts: the park proper with dedicated space for horse riding lessons, a vegetable garden, and a fish breeding section (ponds).

The manor house and the surrounding greenery are very neglected. The manor house is available from the outside. All openings are bricked up or obscured by wooden shutters. Access is hindered by the lavish greenery around. The site is practically invisible from the road.

Author of the note Grzegorz Młynarczyk, Regional Branch of the National Institute of Cultural Heritage in Kraków 07/2015

Bibliography

• K. Kutrzebianka Powiat Olkuski. Katalog zabytków sztuki w Polsce. Województwo krakowskie/pod red. Jerzego Szablowskiego; vol. 12), Warszawa 1953, pp. 32-33.
• P. Libicki, Dwory i pałace wiejskie w Małopolsce i na Podkarpaciu, Poznań 2012, pp. 407-408.