Folklore Archive
The archive is located in the Folklore and Social Culture Department of the Ethnographic Museum in Toruń. It gathers primarily materials illustrating the verbal folklore of the ethnographic regions comprising the present-day Kujawsko-Pomorskie Province (formerly Bydgoszcz), i.e. Chełmno Land, Dobrzyń Land, Kuyavia, Pałuki and Kociewie. There are also less numerous records from other regions, e.g. Kashubia, Wielkopolska, Lemko Region. Most of the material was acquired in the 1950s and 1960s, thanks to six folklore competitions organised by the Toruń Branch of the Polish Folklore Society, the Ethnographic Museum in Toruń (until 1959 the Ethnographic Department of the Municipal Museum in Toruń) and the Polish Radio in Bydgoszcz. The addressees of the competitions were the inhabitants of the above-mentioned regions, primarily people from villages, who were asked to write down fairy tales, legends, songs, proverbs, descriptions of rituals, superstitions, fortune-telling and magical procedures. As a leaflet promoting one of the competitions wrote: ‘the collection of this kind of material is particularly urgent, as it is lost irretrievably with the death of old people, and it is very valuable because it illustrates our past, the formation of human thought, views on the world and life, artistic talents, etc.’ – along these lines, the organisers appealed for the oldest, “no inventing” and conscientious people to be approached first, asking them to write down or dictate their childhood memories to someone. As this was happening in the 1950s, the information obtained in this way could even relate to the second half of the 19th century.
In all competitions, 198 participants took part, among whom – in addition to individual collectors – there were also schools, clubs, libraries. They collected around 6,500 items of literature, folk knowledge, descriptions of customs. Nearly 350 items were fairy tales, legends and folk tales. Of all the material in the competition, it is the collection of fairy tales that is particularly interesting. These are mainly fairy tales from Kuyavia, but also from Pałuki, Krajna, Kociewie, Chełmno Land and even Lemko. The collection includes comic and novella tales (e.g. by Henryk Kotłowski from the Wloclawek area), magic tales (e.g. by Feliks Paczkowski and Aldona Paczkowska from Wloclawek), local tales (e.g. by Piotr Jasiek from Krajna).
The most numerous is the collection of songs and ditties and proverbs. Among the most interesting texts are four novels by Leokadia Boniewicz, a folk writer from Toruń, describing Chełmno and Kuyavia villages at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The archive also contains materials in the field of folk knowledge and descriptions of customs, among which the most valuable are the records of Zofia Strawińska from Pałuki and Wiktoria Stańczak from Kuya
A separate collection consists of autobiographical stories submitted for the competition “Description of one’s life in the twentieth century”, organised by the Toruń Cultural Association for inhabitants and people connected with the lands of the Kuyavian-Pomeranian region. The works submitted to the Ethnographic Museum in Toruń in 2004, apart from their personal and historical content, contain a wealth of interesting information on everyday life, celebrations and the celebration of the ritual year between the wars and in communist Poland.
