2024-04-23
Most probably after 80 years the Kórnik Castle will regain the horse pannier of the king Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki. The relic has been secured as evidence in a criminal case since 2013.
The pannier was made of velvet-covered leather and fancy gilded silver hardware. The relic is dated to around 1670 and is a fragment of a larger piece of equipment - a saddle (it consisted of two satchels). The saddle came to the collection in Kórnik in 1868 thanks to Jan Działyński (1829-1880), who bought it in Lviv through Maria née Sanguszka Potocka. This armour went missing during the Second World War, after being taken by the Germans to an exhibition at the Kaiser Friedrich-Museum in Poznań. Fortunately, just after the war the curator Józef Orański found the item in Dresden and brought it to Poland. Unfortunately, the relic returned to its homeland without the pannier.
In 2013, a certain art historian approached the Wawel Royal Castle and offered to sell the Museum's lost pannier for the sum of twenty-two thousand euros. He represented Elizabeth Sturm, owner of an art gallery in Vienna, who had acquired the satchel as an inheritance from her father Czesław Bednarczyk. This Warsaw antiquarian, who went to Vienna in 1960, was to buy it from a Swedish antiquarian.
At Wawel Castle, the museum workers notified the public prosecutor's office, which returned the monument to the institution for safekeeping. In 2020, the investigation was discontinued. However, the return of the pannier to Kórnik may be delayed for a few more years, as the Director of the Library expects a civil lawsuit from Elizabeth Sturm.