Maria Kinga Świdzińska

A scientist and a horse breeder. Since 1974, she researched English Thoroughbreds in Golejewko; her papers are very valuable. In 1981, she defended her doctoral thesis concerning estimation of Thoroughbred stallions.

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She was born on 6 August 1935.

Maria Kinga Świdzińska was born in Cracow as a daughter of Ignacy and Anna Potocki. She spent her cheerful childhood with her three brothers at her mother’s estate Izdebki and in Rymanów Zdrój, a health resort belonging to fer grandfather Jan Potocki.

After outbreak of war, the family bilked Germans into Volhynia but, due to Bolshevik Army attack, they returned to Rymanów located then in General Guberniya.

The period of the World War II was enormously difficult for the family. From the beginning of German occupation, Anna and Ignacy conducted underground activity. At their villa in Rymanów, they conducted a point of Polish officers smuggling across the border.

The most difficult period started in 1941 as a result of one of employees’ denunciation that Ignacy Potocki hid a hunting weapon. Ignacy, under sentence of death, has hidden under a changed name for four years in Solska Forest where he still conducted underground activity while rescuing, among others, refugees from the camp in Zwierzyniec.

Anna Potocka moved with her children to Izdebki where her home was in effect a repository for hiding conspirators, Home Army officers and people with judgments of death. Only in 1944, Anna left with her children to Łuczanowice, her brother’s estate; her brother Andrzej Mycielski was a law professor. Other there, she met his husband at last. When the soviet troops were occupying Cracow, the family lived in the city and Anna ran a private canteen to earn a living.

After the war, Ignacy Potocki who was a balneologist, went to Lower Silesia looking for employment; he began his career from a position of a driver. The family, while avoiding arrest in the Stalinist period by a miracle, lived in Szczawno Zdrój where Ignacy was employed already as a balneologist in 1950.

Maria Kinga Świdzińska touched horses closer right here, in the Stallions’ Depot in Książ. She started equestrian education here. At that time, after she watched the movie “Great award”, her fascination of horses was such a huge that she decided to breed horses. (…)


Read more… (click to go to Polish Digital Equestrian Library)

Author of the text: Katarzyna Głuszek