White Lady from the “Sourcebook series”

Started in 2020, Sourcebook is an ever-growing archive of non-normative Polish women’s history. As Liliana Zeic puts it, ft is a project for queer femininity and lesbianism, for Gomorrahites and followers of Sappho, for different thoughts about queer and separatism, and for the angst of love. I want all of this to stick to you and be stuck to you, and not to be forgotten again so soon. One such forgotten, or erased, story is the relationship between Maria Konopnicka {1842- 191 O) – novelist, poet, author of Rota [The Oath] – and Maria Dulębianka – painter and activist for women’s political rights. From the time they met (around 1886), they were practically inseparable, living together in a manor house in Żarnowiec, given to the writer as a gift from the nation on the occasion of a jubilee of her work in 1902. lt is said to have been haunted by the White Lady, who used to ring a bell at midnight, as Krzysztof Tomasik reports in his book Homobiografie [Homobiographies]; later it was said that it was Konopnicka sitting on Dulębianka’s shoulders, both covered with a sheet, who rang a bell hanging on an oak tree. And ring the bell they did – not to keep the story going, but to scare away those with an appetite for the flowers and vegetables grown by them. In the photograph entitled White Lady, Zeic also refers to the eustom of covering damaged walls with spruce branches to hide the traces of dilapidation, which impoverished noblemen resorted to. When Dulębianka died, she was buried in Konopnicka’s grave in the Lychakiv Cemetery in Lviv, as the latter had requested in her last will. However, after just eight years, the joint grave of two women began to bother others, the memory of the poet’s will faded, and Dulębianka’s body was moved to the Cemetery of the Defenders of Lviv.