Archives – Studium

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Archives of the Polish Dominican Province

In the Middle Ages, the friars preachers kept archives in chests, and manuscripts of deceased monks in monastery libraries. From the end of the 16th century, successive general chapters instructed the friars to safely store privileges, bulls and records of trials, to write down sources for the history of the province and to create inventories of goods, duplicates of which were to be sent to the central archive of the province. Until 1937, this archive was located in the monastery library (although not always, thanks to which it survived the monastery fire of 1850), later it was moved to a separate warehouse.

The Archives of the Polish Province of Dominicans took its current form in 1947. Its collections included archives of the Kraków convent, monasteries from the eastern borderlands and existing monasteries of the Polish province of the Order. The Archives have unique documents concerning the history of the Order and the history of Poland and neighbouring countries. Of particular value are parchment documents with seals dated from 1227 to the end of the 19th century. They include copies of 13th-century papal bulls, as well as diplomas issued by Polish rulers, including: St. queen Jadwiga with the majestic seal, Władysław Jagiełło, Władysław III of Varna, Casimir IV Jagiellon. These collections together number over 11 thousand catalogued manuscripts. Inventories and catalogues are available in printed or electronic versions in the Archives lectorium.

The work in the archive is currently focused on inventorying the archival legacy of the brothers and re-organizing and developing monastery and provincial records. In 2018, the archive was one of the first church institutions in Poland to begin implementing the Integrated Archival Information System (ZoSIA). Descriptions of units – receiving new numerical reference numbers – are gradually made available on the website: https://www.szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl.

For many years, the Archive has regularly used external funding, including programs of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the Head Office of State Archives (Support for Archival Activities). Thanks to the grants, it was possible to carry out protective conservation of a significant part of the collection of Krakow parchment documents and modern library manuscripts, as well as conservation, digitization and description of photographic negatives of Adam Studziński OP. Thanks to these long-term projects, the documents can be widely shared, including in digital form on the Internet.