Solothurn · St. Petersburg · Monticello
The evening of October 15, 1817, ten o’clock at night. In a second-floor room of the townhouse at Gurzelngasse 12 in Solothurn, a seventy-one-year-old man is dying with two wounds that never healed. Soon, when the news reaches St. Petersburg, Alexander I, Emperor of Russia and King of Poland, consents to the return of the remains to Poland and bears the cost of their transport. Later still — by transatlantic packet, in the depth of winter — the word reaches Monticello, and Thomas Jefferson, who as early as 1798, in a letter to Horatio Gates, had distilled the meaning of Kościuszko’s life in words that after 1817 would become his epitaph: “He is as pure a son of liberty as I have ever known.” Thus begins the heritage. Not a biography, but an echo.
Wawel
March 28, 1818. After five months of the body’s safekeeping in the crypt of the Jesuit church in Solothurn, after diplomatic negotiations conducted by Polish émigrés in Geneva and Paris, after the personal decision of Alexander I (the emperor treats the translation as a conciliatory gesture toward Polish public opinion in the Kingdom of Poland), the cortège sets out. The route leads through Ulm, then by barge down the Danube to Vienna, and from there overland to Cracow — a two-week journey, under military honors at every border. On the evening of April 11, 1818, the procession reaches Cracow. The streets of Cracow are empty — everyone is along the route. The coffin rests for more than two months in the collegiate church of St. Florian. On June 23, 1818, the ceremonial interment in the crypt beneath St. Leonard’s Chapel in Wawel Cathedral — among the tombs of the kings of Poland and of Stephen Báthory. Kościuszko rests beside Prince Józef Poniatowski, laid there a year earlier — the first two uncrowned national heroes in the royal necropolis.
Not the whole body travels to Cracow, however. The Naczelnik’s entrails remain at Zuchwil near Solothurn, where in a monument rises over them. The heart stays with Emilia Zeltner (Morosini) at Vezia; from it is kept by the Polish Museum in Rapperswil, in , amid the commemorations, it is brought to Warsaw, and since it has rested in the chapel of the rebuilt Royal Castle. The body at Wawel, the heart in Warsaw, the entrails in Switzerland — the heritage begins with geography.
1820–1823 · The Mound
Three years after the burial, on October 16, 1820, the third anniversary of the Naczelnik’s death, on Sikornik Hill above the western edge of Cracow, farmers, apprentices, burghers, and students of the Cracow Academy begin to raise the mound. The initiative comes from the Senate of the Free City of Cracow, but the execution is grassroots — civic. Into the mound go urns of earth from the battlefields: from Racławice, Maciejowice, and Dubienka, and also from the American fields on which the Naczelnik fought. In the autumn of 1823 the mound — some thirty-four meters tall, seventy-three meters in diameter at the base — is complete. It is the tallest and most enduring monument to the Revolution that civic hands have ever raised in Europe.
The American part of the legacy ends differently. The dispute over the Naczelnik’s estate comes four times before the Supreme Court of the United States — in Armstrong v. Lear ( and ), Estho v. Lear (), and Ennis v. Smith (). The Court holds that the will of was revoked by the Solothurn will of , and that the fund passes to the descendants of Kościuszko’s sisters. Not a cent goes toward buying the freedom of slaves.
Romanticism · the matrix of the Uprising
The generation of the Great Emigration — émigrés of the November Uprising of 1830–31 who settled in Paris, Brussels, London, and Constantinople — fashions Kościuszko into the first classic of Polish political Romanticism. Adam Mickiewicz, in Book I of Pan Tadeusz (1834), describing the portraits on the walls of the manor at Soplicowo, writes:
Here Kościuszko, in his Cracow coat, with eyes raised to heaven, holds his sword in both hands; such was he when he swore on the altar steps that with this sword he would drive the three powers out of Poland, or fall upon it himself.
Tu Kościuszko w czamarce krakowskiej, z oczyma / Podniesionymi w niebo, miecz oburącz trzyma; / Takim był, gdy przysięgał na stopniach ołtarzów, / Że tym mieczem wypędzi z Polski trzech mocarzów, / Albo sam na nim padnie.
Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz, Book I, 1834
Juliusz Słowacki, in Beniowski, grants Kościuszko the status of mythic father of two continents. Cyprian Norwid, the most profound of the three bards, in Vade-Mecum (1865–66) sees in him the personal model of the doer — as distinct from the dreamers of Polish Messianism. In the work of the later Stanisław Wyspiański, the scythemen’s myth still resounds in the peasant scythes of The Wedding (Wesele, 1901): the Uprising becomes the political matrix of every subsequent Polish rising — the November Uprising, the January Uprising, the independence struggle, and later the Home Army and Solidarity.
The greatest artifact of this cult, however, is the Racławice Panorama by Styka and Kossak — a canvas fifteen by one hundred and fourteen meters, opened in Lviv on at the National Exhibition. After 1945 it comes to Wrocław, where it is opened to the public only on . In Cracow, Marconi’s monument to the Naczelnik, cast in , is erected at Wawel in — destroyed in , recreated as a replica in ; it is a cast of this monument that will later cross the ocean, to Detroit.
American Polonia · monuments
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Kościuszko becomes the patron of a newly organizing diaspora. The first wave of Polish émigrés after the January Uprising of 1863 settles in Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Buffalo, and Cleveland — founding parishes, schools, and societies under the Naczelnik’s patronage. The first monument, however, rises before the diaspora does — at West Point (July 4, 1828, a column designed by J. H. B. Latrobe on the site of Fort Clinton, paid for by subscription among the cadets; the bronze statue was added in 1913 with funds raised by Polonia). Then follow: Chicago, Humboldt Park (1904, by the sculptor Kazimierz Chodziński), Milwaukee (1905, Gaetano Trentanove), Lafayette Square in Washington (May 11, 1910, by Antoni Popiel, bronze on a granite pedestal — unveiled in the presence of President William Howard Taft), Boston Public Garden (1927, Theo A. R. Kitson), Detroit (1978, a cast of Marconi’s Cracow monument, a gift from the city of Cracow).
One of four monuments to foreign heroes of the American War of Independence.
Lafayette Park opposite the White House, Washington, D.C. Kościuszko in the uniform of a Continental Army general, with the plan of the Saratoga fortifications in his right hand. On the pedestal: at the front, an American eagle defending the flag; at the rear, a Polish eagle fighting a serpent; at the sides, two figural groups — Kościuszko freeing a Continental Army soldier, and Kościuszko in Polish uniform with a scytheman.
The two side groups are a visual cipher for the two biographical turns of the Naczelnik’s life — the American and the Polish. The monument is one of four on the square: Lafayette (1891), Rochambeau (1902), Kościuszko (1910), and von Steuben (1910).
The monument was funded by the Polish National Alliance, which chose the design in a competition from among twenty entries; the unveiling was performed by President William Howard Taft, who addressed a crowd of some fifteen thousand representatives of Polonia. Popiel, a sculptor of Cracow and Lviv, a pupil of the Cracow School of Fine Arts and of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, and Marconi’s assistant at the Lviv Polytechnic, died on July 7, 1910, barely two months after the unveiling — Lafayette Square remains his most renowned work.
Antoni Popiel, 1910 · National Park Service · President’s Park (White House) · Washington, D.C. Public domain.
Memory has its calendar, too. The centenary of his death, , is observed in all the partitioned lands and in the United States — across the ocean it is marked by President Wilson and by Congress. In the commemorations are accompanied by the return of the Naczelnik’s heart to Warsaw; brings the bicentenary of his birth.
Kościuszko Squadron
The Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1921. A group of American volunteer pilots arrives in war-torn Poland under the command of Major Cedric Fauntleroy and Captain Merian C. Cooper. They form the 7th Fighter Squadron of the Polish Army, called from its earliest days the Kościuszko Squadron — its insignia, designed by Elliott Chess: a red Cracow cap with a peacock feather against thirteen stripes, two crossed scythes behind it, and thirteen stars around. The squadron fights near Lviv and in the Kiev offensive of 1920. Cooper, later a Hollywood producer (his most famous film: King Kong, 1933), describes the experience in his memoirs as “a fight for the soul of Kościuszko.”
Twenty years later, in August 1940, in the heart of the Battle of Britain, at RAF Northolt outside London, the Polish No. 303 Squadron is formed — in action from August 31. Its full name: No. 303 Polish Fighter Squadron “Tadeusz Kościuszko”. The patron was chosen unanimously by the Polish refugee pilots, some of whom had served in the 7th Squadron of 1920. No. 303, operating in the Battle of Britain between August and October 1940, is statistically the best fighter squadron in the battle — it will claim one hundred and twenty-six kills, losing seven pilots. Every No. 303 Hurricane bears on its fuselage the 1919 insignia: the red Cracow cap and crossed scythes.
Had it not been for the magnificent material contributed by the Polish squadrons and their unsurpassed gallantry, I hesitate to say that the outcome of the Battle would have been the same.
Hugh Dowding, Air Chief Marshal RAF, Commander of Fighter Command, November 1940
The Polish People’s Republic · instrumentalization and absence
The communist army takes Kościuszko for its banner from the very first day. In the 1st Tadeusz Kościuszko Infantry Division is formed and fights that same year at Lenino; the Naczelnik’s name is also borne by Radio “Kościuszko”, and the Union of Polish Patriots invokes him as well.
The years 1945–1989. The Polish People’s Republic instrumentalizes Kościuszko selectively: it foregrounds the Uprising of 1794 as the first Polish popular revolution (Racławice with the scythemen, the Połaniec Manifesto as forerunner of the agrarian reform of the PKWN in 1944) — but falls silent on the Philadelphia testament (too American), on the Society of the Cincinnati (too aristocratic), on the correspondence with Jefferson, on the refusal of Bonaparte (Napoleon being, in the PRL’s narrative, an ally of Poland). Kościuszko becomes a peasant chieftain stripped of his transatlantic dimension. The most important Polish historiographical synthesis of that era — Wacław Tokarz, Insurekcja warszawska [The Warsaw Insurrection] (Lwów 1934, reissued under the PRL) — remains an academic touchstone, but English-language works (Haiman 1943, 1946) are unavailable in domestic libraries until 1989.
Restitution after 1989
From 1989 onward, the full picture is restored. Storozynski’s biography (2009; Polish edition Kościuszko. Książę chłopów, 2011), the complete edition of the Jefferson–Kościuszko correspondence (Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Princeton; online at Founders Online since 2010), the monumental biography by Bartłomiej Szyndler (1991, 2nd ed. 2011), the work of Beata Studziżba-Kubalska on Kościuszko memorabilia, international conferences for the 250th anniversary of his birth (1996) and the 200th anniversary of his death (2017). In the United States, National Kosciuszko Day is informally observed on February 4 (the traditional date of his birth), marked each year by the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York. In Poland, 1994 was observed as the jubilee year of the 200th anniversary of the Uprising, with the restoration of the Mound and the opening of new museums.
Return to Solothurn
On September 15, 2026, in the year of the 209th anniversary of his death, Mission Kościuszko 2026 arrives in Solothurn — an international project for the digital restitution of the Kościuszko heritage, led by the Foundation for the Virtualization of National Cultural Heritage (FWNDK) of Gorzów Wielkopolski. The aims of the mission: complete photogrammetric documentation of the Zeltner House at Gurzelngasse 12 (3D scan, IIIF zoom), digitization of the Zeltner-Kościuszko archive at the Staatsarchiv Solothurn, a photographic session of the holdings of the Kosciuszko-Museum, and a public laying of flowers at the mausoleum in Zuchwil, where the Naczelnik’s entrails have rested since 1820, with the participation of Polish, American, and Swiss delegations. The companion project: the monograph kosciuszko.world, which places Chapters I–IX in your hands — the first global trilingual (Polish-English-French) digital monograph of the hero of two nations.
What did Kościuszko do with two centuries? He became — against his own modesty — the first Polish transatlantic bridge. Without Saratoga there would have been no Franco-American treaty of 1778; without West Point, no victory of the Continental Army over the British Empire; without the Uprising, no Polish insurrectionary tradition of the nineteenth century; without the Philadelphia testament, no moral foundation for Polish abolitionism — though the testament itself, held by the Supreme Court to have been revoked, never bought the freedom of a single slave. Kościuszko is the historical point of tangency of two Enlightenments — the French and the American — inscribed within a third, the Polish, simultaneously dying and, by him, being founded anew.
And so, when on September 15, 2026 a Polish, American, and Swiss delegation stands at the mausoleum in Zuchwil, it will not be an act of remembrance of a man from the eighteenth century. It will be an act of pledging oneself to a compact that Kościuszko signed — and that every generation signs anew.
All that the Poles have shown since […] proves well enough that although we, the soldiers of this country, may perish, Poland is always immortal.
Tadeusz Kościuszko, letter to Count Louis-Philippe de Ségur, Paris, — the same letter in which he repudiates the Finis Poloniae legend
Original in French; rendered from the Polish edition: H. Mościcki (red.), Kościuszko. Listy, odezwy, wspomnienia, Warszawa 1917, pp. 118–119.
Here the monograph ends. Participation begins.