The personality of every human being is a complex puzzle,
a mystery which psychologists and philosophers strive to solve, although they
are never able to do so completely.The human organism as a result of its
uniqueness creates around itself a specificaura, which just like electric
charges attracts or repels individuals belonging to the samespecies. A famous
biologist, a Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carrel in his excellent book “A human
being – an unknown creature”, says that “Individuality is one of the basic
features of a man. It does not consist solely in a specific appearance of body
and mind”. An example of such a personality and individuality was Professor
Konstanty Stecki, whose 120th birth anniversary and the 80th anniversary of
professorship we are celebrating this year. Twenty seven years after his death
is a period of more than one generation, thus his successes and achievements may
have been sunk into oblivion. However, we must remember that he was an
outstanding personality, attracting everybody as a magnet, was undoubtedly a
charismatic figure. Short, of slight build, extremely modest, joyous, he devoted
all his life to the search for objective scientific truth in many fields. He was
one of the most outstanding Polish naturalists of the 20th century. It may
rightfully be said that he was a truly Renaissance man, for apart from the
widely understood botany, in which dendrology, floristics or forestry
predominated, he was also involved in nature conservation, ethnography of the
Polish mountainous regions, numismatics in terms of nature motifs, biographical
writings, photography, tourism and literature.
Konstanty Marian Mścisław Stecki was born on 29 July 1885 in Hrubieszów and
from his childhood he was growing up in a family with nationalist and community
service traditions. His father was a doctor committed to community service,
probably the first representative of the Polish medical circles who at his own
cost took a group of peasants from the Lubelszczyzna region bitten by rabid dogs
to be vaccinated by Louis Pasteur in Paris. As a secondary school student
Konstanty Stecki in 1902 had to leave his school in Siedlce for his
participation in demonstrations of solidarity directed against teaching religion
classes in Russian in the Congress Kingdom of Poland, in response to similar
strikes in the town of Września in the Poznan province under Prussian rule. He
was transferred to a secondary school in Łódz, where on 7 June 1904 he passed
the final examinations. In that school he belonged to “X”, a secret
organization gathering students from several schools, and he distributed an
illegal magazine, “Wspólnymi siłami” [Joined forces]. In the years
1904-1907 he was studying at the Agricultural College, the Faculty of Philosophy
at the Jagiellonian University, and next until 1909 he was studying botany under
the supervision of Professor Edward Janczewski. Already at that time he
published his first scientific paper on fungi from the Rymanów Zdrój region.
In the years 1910-1923 he lived and worked in Zakopane as a teacher of biology
in secondary schools. At the same time he was conducting research on the flora
of the Tatra Mountains, he was supervising the construction of a rock garden, he
was a custodian of the nature department at the Dr. T. Chałubiński Tatra
Mountains Museum, and he was exploring caves in the Tatras together with the
Zwoliński brothers. In June 1920 he took his doctorate at the Jagiellonian
University for his dissertation on The variability of flowers in Tatra mountain
crocus (1922). In the time he spent in Zakopane Konstanty Stecki gathered a
collection of original folk mountaineer art – pictures painted on glass, which
he donated to the Tatra Mountain Museum and published in an article entitled
Folk paintings on glass from the area around the Tatra Mountains (1921). In the
same time he was a poet and published Triolety tatrzańskie [Tatra triolets]
(1923), a collection of fifty poems of specific literary form describing nature
of the mountains.
From October 1923 Konstanty Stecki took the position of an assistant professor
at the newly founded Department of Forestry Botany, the Faculty of Agriculture
and Forestry of the Poznań University, which he created, as the first thing
gathering a dendrological collection for teaching purposes. At that time the
second period of his life started, connected with the city of Poznań, which
lasted until his death. In April 1924 he qualified as a university lecturer in
forestry botany for his dissertations in plant associations in the Tatra
Mountains: Roślinność Tatr – drzewa i krzewy regli [Vegetation of the
Tatras – trees and shrubs of the montane forests] (1923) and Roślinność
Tatr – roślinność zielna regli [Vegetation of the Tatras – herbaceous
vegetation of the montane belts] (1923). On 1 September 1925 he was appointed
associate professor. After the death of Professor Rudolf Boettner (1923), Stecki
was appointed a custodian of the Dendrological Garden established in the Sołacz
district of Poznań in the former mansion park, where he collected trees and
shrubs from various European arboreta, especially during his trip to Berlin (Dahlem),
Liège and Brussels in 1926. Until the beginning of World War II in 1939
the Sołacz dendrological garden collection included over 900 taxa. In the
academic years 1933-1935 Konstanty Stecki was the dean of the Faculty of
Agriculture and Forestry of the Poznań University. In 1935 botany departments
were reorganized and starting from 1 April 1936 he was the head of the
Department of General Botany and Phytopathology. In August 1938 he was appointed
full professor. The outbreak of the World War II found Konstanty Stecki in
Zakopane, in his estate. There he worked from 1941 to mid-December 1942 as a
forest worker at the local forest inspectorate, using field work as an occasion
to collect botanical materials, which he subsequently published after the war.
Forewarned of his looming arrest by the Gestapo for helping people illegally
crossing the border to the Czech Republic, he secretly left Zakopane and went to
Kraków. Starting from February 1943 he worked as a secretary at the Ujscie
Ruskie forest inspectorate near the village of Ropa in the Gorlice district. In
April 1945 he returned to Poznan and started working at his former employment at
the Department of General Botany and Phytopathology, which he rebuilt within the
period of two years after the destruction of war. In May 1945 he was already
teaching. In 1947 the Department of Phytopathology was separated from this
Department, leaving to Konstanty Stecki the Department of General Botany, at
that time still belonging to the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, the Poznań
University and after changes starting from October 1951 at the Faculty of
Agriculture of the Higher School of Agriculture. In the academic years 1952/1953
he was a vice-dean and in the years 1953-1956 a dean of the Faculty of
Agriculture of this university. In spite of his reaching retirement age,
Konstanty Stecki was still the head of the department and a lecturer, which he
continued to do until retiring on 30 September 1960.
Konstanty Stecki was the author or co-author of about 180 publications,
including 12 books. Under his supervision over 120 Master’s theses and around
a dozen doctoral dissertations were prepared. His students included later
professors, e.g. Stanisław Kościelny (1901-1973), Józef Goetz (1903-1951),
Teofil Wojterski (1922-1991) and Stanisław Król (1923-2001).
He had special achievements in the development of forestry botany: dendrology,
phytogeography, phytosociology, floristics and phytoecology. All these fields
from the time he worked in Zakopane were focused on the conservation and
biocenosis nature preservation. In spite of his retirement he continued to do
research publishing at that time four valuable books. Under his supervision a
joint handbook Botanika dla Wyższych Szkół Rolniczych [Botany for Higher
Agricultural Schools] was published (1966), in which he included three chapters
of his writing. The handbook was followed by his other books: Tatry [The Tatra
Mountains] (1968), Wspomnienia zakopiańskie [Memoirs from Zakopane]
(1910-1923, 1976), and Osobliwości, piękno i geneza krajobrazu Polski [Places
of interest, beauty and genesis of the Polish landscape] (1978). Konstanty
Stecki was very active in numerous scientific and social organizations, among
which only several include the Tatra Society from 1910, the Physiographical
Commission of the Academy of Sciences from 1911, the Department of Mathematics
and Natural Sciences of the Poznań Society of Friends of Sciences from 1929.
From 1961 he was an honorary member of the Polish Botanical Society and from
1966 of the Polish Forestry Society. He was never a member of any political
party. He received numerous state and social decorations. He died on 4 October
1978 in Poznań and was buried at the Saint John Vianney Sołacz Cemetery.
Steciana for naturalists – botanists is a unique personality and a noble
individual, which may be a guiding star and a model to follow in all our
scientific activity, social service and love for our country. With this brief
and modest homage we wish to pay tribute to the outstanding botanist and
pedagogue at the occasion of the 120th anniversary of his birth and the 27th
anniversary of his death after along, fruitful life of service to science and
the society.
