Piłsudski (family)

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Piłsudski coat of arms
Piłsudski coat of arms

The Piłsudski family is a family of nobility that originated in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and increased in notability under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Second Polish Republic.

The family can be described as Polonized Lithuanian nobility that thus became transformed into Polish nobility (szlachta);[1] it has been called either a Polish noble family or a Polonized Lithuanian noble family. Its most famous member was Józef Piłsudski, described variously as a Pole[2] or as Polonized-Lithuanian.[3][4]

The Piłsudskis date back to pagan times in Lithuania and are recorded from the 13th century.[5]

The family took its name in 1539 from the Samogitian village of Pilsūdai, now in Lithuania's Tauragė district, where the family ancestor, the Starost of Upytė, Baltramiejus Ginvilas (Polish: Bartłomiej Ginwiłł), established himslelf.[6] [7]

The earliest notable members of the family include Roch Mikołaj Piłsudski (late 16th – early 17th century), Stolnik of Vaŭkavysk. His marriage to Magłorzata Pancerzyńska—whose brother, Karol Pancerzyński, was Bishop of Vilnius—raised the wealth and prestige of the Piłsudski family.

The family also became related through several marriages to the Billewicz, another prominent and wealthy noble family. In 1863 Józef Piłsudski, senior, married Maria Billewicz; one of their children, Józef Piłsudski the younger, would become the famous Polish hero and dictator, and the most celebrated member of the family.[1] Józef Piłsudski's closest and most prominent relatives included his three brothers—Adam Piłsudski, a politician; Bronisław Piłsudski, a noted ethnographer; Jan Piłsudski, a lawyer and politician—and his daughter Wanda Piłsudska, who remained in England after World War II, practicing psychiatry, then in 1990 returned permanently to Poland, where she died in 2001.

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Wacław Jędrzejewicz, Janusz Cisek, Kalendarium Życia Józefa Piłsudskiego (Calendar of the Life of Józef Piłsudski), Zaklad Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1994, ISBN 8304041146, pp. 11-12.
  2. ^ Jerzy Jan Lerski, Historical Dictionary of Poland, 966-1945, Greenwood Press, 1996, ISBN 0313260079, Google Print, p.449
  3. ^ [1]. Encyclopædia Britannica online. "The Polish head of state, Marshal Józef Piłsudski, who stemmed from a Polonized Lithuanian noble family, drove the Red Army out of Vilnius in April 1919".
  4. ^ Robert Bideleux, Ian Jeffries. A History of Eastern Europe Crisis and Change. Retrieved on October 3, 2007.
  5. ^ Wysocki, Wiesław Jan. "Konterfekt rodu Piłsudskich" (in Polish). Nasza Gazeta (5; 494). 
  6. ^ NaszaGazeta
  7. ^ Nasz Czas

[edit] See also

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