Two Faces of the Bystrzejowice Estate in the Second Half of the 19th Century – the Property of the Order of Bernardine Nuns and the Post-Convent Estate in the Russians’ Hands

Abstract

As a result of the tsarist policy against the Roman Catholic Church, further fuelled by Polish-Russian fighting during the January Uprising, in the mid-1860s land belonging to monasteries and parishes was seized for the benefit of the treasury of the Kingdom of Poland. The property belonging to the monastery of the Bernardine Nuns in Lublin, part of which was the landed property in Bystrzejowice, also shared this fate. In the mid-1870s, another significant change of ownership took place, carried out on the basis of regulations issued in 1871. In the following years, the estates were purchased and then, in various circumstances, transferred to successive persons of Russian origin, which was one of the conditions of the above-mentioned regulations. However, the long-standing Russian supervision of the estates was terminated at the beginning of the 20^th century, which was associated with the slow end of the era of landed gentry domination and Russian rule in the Polish lands. The issues of the confiscation process and subsequent purchase of the Bystrzejowice estate, as well as the detailed reflection of this problem in the archival materials, formed the basis for a broader presentation of the problem of the history of the clerical property in the Vistula Land in the second half of the 19^th century.