See also: Adam Mickiewicz, sa vie et son oeuvre Ladislas Mickiewicz Nouvelle Librairie Parisienne, 1888 - 382 pages A good source for Armand Lévy letters and descriprions of Istanbul.
Mavi Boncuk |
Adam Bernard Mickiewicz (b. 24 December 1798 Zaosie, Lithuania Governorate, Russian Empire– 26 November 1855 Constantinople, Ottoman Empire) was a Polish poet, dramatist, essayist, publicist, translator, professor of Slavic literature, and political activist. He is regarded as national poet in Poland, Lithuania and Belarus.
On 31 July 1832 he arrived in Paris and became active in many Polish émigré groups and published articles. On 22 July 1834, in Paris, he married Celina Szymanowska[1].
Mickiewicz welcomed the Crimean War of 1853-1856, which he hoped would lead to a new European order including a restored independent Poland. Polish émigrés associated with the Hôtel Lambert persuaded him to become active again in politics] Soon after the Crimean War broke out (October 1853), the French government entrusted him with a diplomatic mission. He left Paris on 11 September 1855, arriving in Constantinople, in the Ottoman Empire, on 22 September.
There, working with Michał Czajkowski (Sadyk Pasha)[2], he began organizing Polish forces to fight under Ottoman command against Russia. With his friend Armand Lévy[3] he also set about organizing a Jewish legion. He returned ill from a trip to a military camp to his apartment on Yenişehir Street in the Pera (now Beyoğlu) district of Constantinople and died on 26 November 1855. Though Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński and others have speculated that political enemies might have poisoned Mickiewicz, there is no proof of this, and he probably contracted cholera, which claimed other lives there at the time.[
Mickiewicz's remains were transported to France, boarding ship on 31 December 1855, and were buried at Montmorency, Val-d'Oise, on 21 January 1861.
In 1890 they were disinterred, moved to Austrian Poland, and on 4 July entombed in the crypts of Kraków's Wawel Cathedral, a place of final repose for a number of persons important to Poland's political and cultural history.
Mickiewicz's temporary grave under his Istanbul apartment, now an Adam Mickiewicz Museum (Polish: Muzeum Adama Mickiewicza, Turkish: Adam Mickiewicz Müzesi) 
The house museum dedicated to the life of Adam Mickiewicz, renowned Polish poet is located in the district of Beyoğlu, on the European side of Istanbul, Turkey. Serdar Ömer Caddesi, Tatlı Badem Sokak nr 23, Beyoğlu
The house was renovated after a fire in 1870. The museum was opened in 1955 with the help of the Museum of Literature in Warsaw. The crypt where Mickiewicz was temporarily buried for the period of one month is located in the basement.The museum houses some manuscripts of Adam Mickiewicz, historical documents and paintings.
[1] Celina Szymanowska, daughter of Mickiewicz's late friend the pianist Maria Agata Szymanowska, married the 14-years-older Adam Mickiewicz in Paris on 22 July 1834. The couple had six children: daughters Maria and Helena; and four sons, Władysław Mickiewicz (1838–1926), Józef Mickiewicz (1850–1938), Aleksander Mickiewicz and Jan Mickiewicz.Celina roused the dislike of other Polish émigrés, including the Romantic poet Zygmunt Krasiński. She was accused of extravagance, poor cooking skills, a desire to dominate her husband, and mental instability.
In 1838 Celina declared herself a prophet, an incarnation of the Mother of God, and redeemer of Poland, of Polish émigrés and of the Jews. She also claimed to possess a power to heal, which she said she had successfully applied to the gravely ill Adolf Zaleski.
For a time, Adam Mickiewicz cared for his wife himself; but marital discord and Celina's mental illness drove him to attempt suicide on 17 or 18 December 1838 by jumping out a window.
When he found that Celina's mental state was getting worse, Mickiewicz had her committed to a mental hospital at Vanves, where she underwent sleep-deprivation, cold-water and mental-shock therapies.
Celina was freed from the hospital by Andrzej Towiański, who claimed to have miraculously cured her. She believed his assurances that she had regained her mental health, and to the end of her life she remained under his influence and that of the Circle of God's Cause (Koło Sprawy Bożej).
Upon her death in 1855, she was interred at Paris' Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Exhumed, her remains were transferred to Les Champeaux Cemetery at Montmorency. The Mickiewicz family tomb exists there to the present day.
After Celina's death and the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1855, Adam Mickiewicz left his under-age children in Paris and went to Istanbul, Turkey, to organize legions to fight for Poland's independence from the Russian Empire.
[2] Michał Czajkowski (Polish spelling), or Mykhailo Chaikovsky (Ukrainian spelling), or Sadyk Pasha (Turkish: Mehmet Sadık Paşa) was born 19 September 1804 in Halchyn, near the town of Berdychiv in the Province of Volhynia, in right-bank Ukraine, which had been annexed to the Russian Empire at the end of the eighteenth century. He died on 18 January 1886, in Borky, in central Ukraine. He was a Polish writer on Cossack themes (Ukrainian school in Polish literature) and a political emigre who worked both for the resurrection of Poland and also for the reestablishment of a Cossack Ukraine.During his French period, Czajkowski briefly collaborated with the radically oriented Polish Democratic Society, and then with the moderate Confederation of the Polish People, before going over to the conservative Polish emigre faction led by Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski called the "Hotel Lambert," after the Prince's residence in Paris. At Czartoryski's bidding, Czajkowski went to Turkey where he was active in Bosnia and Serbia and supported anti-Russian activities in the Caucasus. In the years following the unsuccessful revolutions of 1848, he helped arrange for political asylum for refugee Polish and Hungarian revolutionaries. Russian and Austrian efforts to have him extradited back to his homeland, and conflicts with Paris led to his eventual conversion to Islam and his new name "Sadyk Pasha". He thereupon organized an Ottoman Cossack Brigade to fight against the Russians. His Ottoman Cossack unit actually saw some action in the Balkans during the Crimean War but never got to invade Ukraine from the south which was the original intention of its organizers.
Although Czajkowski returned from the war with honours and was able to live a comfortable life in Turkey, his restless nature could never be completely satisfied. His differences with the Hotel Lambert had steadily increased over the years and he was becoming more and more estranged from the Polish political emigration. He was also frustrated by the failure of his larger Cossack project. In 1872, the Russian government offered him an amnesty, and in part under the influence of his third wife, a young Greek girl, he accepted the Russian offer, converted to Orthodoxy, returned to Ukraine and chose to live in Kiev. During this period he wrote his very extensive memoirs. His young wife proved unfaithful, however, and in 1886 a dispirited Czajkowski took his own life. One of his sons, Ladislas (Władysław) Czaykowski/Muzaffer Pasha, became governor in Mount-Lebanon in 1902.
[3] Armand Lévy (12 March 1827 – 23 March 1891) was a French lawyer and journalist. Lévy was an anti-clericalist, a freemason, a republican and a socialist who supported the 1848 Revolution and the Paris Commune. Born in a Roman Catholic family, but with a Jewish grand-father, he was passionate about the Jewish cause. He fought alongside his illustrious friends, such as Adam Mickiewicz, Ion Brătianu and Camillo Cavour, for the independence of Poland and Romania, and for the unification of Italy.
