Wincenty Pol jako geograf

Wincenty Pol - a Geographer

Summary: In 1881 the ashes of Wincenty Pol - a poet and geographer - were moved from the Rakowicki Cemetery into the Tombs of the Most Luminous Poles in the Skałka Church.
W. Pol lived 65 years. The period of his maturity was the time of a rapid development of natural sciences. The European scientific world was under the influence of the talented naturalist and scientist Alexander von Humboldt and the equally talented Karol Ritter who had similar ideas. The works of both scholars were known in Poland. The department of geography, opened by Pol in 1849 at the Jagiellonian University was the second unit of this kind in Europe as well as in the world. In his interests Pol embraced almost all the issues of geography of the Polish territories. That is why he is considered a founder of the geography of Poland. The range of his scientific interests included: the methodology of geography, geomorphology, regionalisation of Poland, hydrography and climatology, the geography of plants, especially the division of the country into geo-botanical regions, zoogeography, the elements of political geography, human geography and the ethnography of Poland, trade and agricultural geography, the use of maps in the geographical synthesis, the methodics of teaching geography, regional and historical geography. Pol discovered and described the achievements of Jan Długosz in the field of the geography of Poland. Many times he gave reasons for the existence of the independent country of Poland, motivating it with the fact that the historical territory of this country is a coherent natural and spacial unit. Pol is called ‘the father of Polish geography’.

Peregrinus Cracoviensis, 2003, z.14, s. 189-204.

Instytut Geografii i Gospodarki Przestrzennej UJ

ISSN 1425-1922

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