At the Kubicki Arcades of the Royal Castle, Deputy Prime Minister Prof. Piotr Gliński, Minister of Culture and National Heritage, honored fourteen outstanding representatives of traditional culture with the Oskar Kolberg Award “For Merits to Folk Culture.” The laureates received Oskar Kolberg Medals, designed by Anna Jarnuszkiewicz, and commemorative diplomas.
In the 45th edition, the Oskar Kolberg Award went to Zofia Tarasiewicz – a folk singer and promoter of the heritage of the Czadca highlanders, ritual traditions, visual arts and culinary traditions.
The artist has been associated with Bolesławiec for forty years. She is the daughter of Polish re-emigrants from Bukovina (today, Bukovina is divided into a northern part belonging to Ukraine and a southern part belonging to Romania), who settled in Zbylutów near Lwówek Śląski in 1946.
Her repertoire includes songs she learned, among others, from her grandfather Michał Irski, who served in 1918 as personal orderly to Marshal Józef Piłsudski.
Henryk Dumin from the Karkonosze Museum in Jelenia Góra:
Zofia Tarasiewicz remains one of the first singers from the Czadca highlanders whose individuality and high vocal standard drew attention to the rich resources of the old song repertoire preserved in the memory of this group. Her repertoire includes numerous conscription songs, orphan songs, courtship songs and ballads. Their original performance style deserves attention, as it continues an authentic tradition derived from her Czadca ancestral homeland, through Bukovina and all the way to Lower Silesia. Documentation of Zofia Tarasiewicz’s songs is held in the archives of the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw and the Karkonosze Museum.
Some of her songs were published in the well-known Muzyka Źródeł phonographic series (Volume 26) of Polish Radio’s Programme II. The singer continues to search for other songs she has not yet sung, which remain in the memory of Polish re-emigrant families from Bukovina.
Zofia Tarasiewicz received the award in Category I – for creators in the fields of visual arts and musical and dance folklore. The Oskar Kolberg Award aims to distinguish and honor individuals, groups, cultural institutions and non-governmental organizations for outstanding achievements and artistic output in folk culture. The award identifies and promotes the best achievements in contemporary folk creativity, establishes models and contributes to consolidating the high position of folk art in national culture.
The award’s patron is Oskar Kolberg – an ethnographer, folklorist and composer who created the largest 19th-century body of ethnographic sources for studying the folk culture of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. He was the author of the series of monographs “The People and Ethnographic Images,” which laid the foundations for modern cultural sciences (ethnography, ethnology, folkloristics and ethnomusicology) and remain an inspiration for scholarly and artistic work to this day.
The competition is carried out by the Institute of Music and Dance in cooperation with the Museum of the Radom Countryside in Radom and its branch, the O. Kolberg Museum in Przysucha. The financial awards are funded by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage and the Self-Government of the Masovian Voivodeship.