House of Dr Ignacy Bielecki (Dom dr Ignacego Bieleckiego)

The story

Built in 1884–85 by the builder Walenty Kruczkowski in the Swiss-villa manner with Zakopane-style elements, this wooden house was commissioned by an oil company as worker housing — this is the Krosno oil basin, a few kilometres from Bóbrka, where the world's first oil mine opened in 1854. The company went bankrupt and the house was bought by Dr Ignacy Bielecki, for whom the street is now named.

Bielecki (1862–1963) died aged 101. He practised in Rymanów from 1890 until he was a hundred, and was district physician from 1901 to 1937 for seventeen municipalities and about fifteen thousand people. A captain in the Austro-Hungarian army, he served in the Polish-Soviet War of 1920 and worked as an underground physician under German occupation from 1939 to 1945. In 1907 he founded the local "Sokół" gymnastic society and chaired it until 1949.

The house is on the Polish register of monuments and now houses a memorial room holding Bielecki's "Rymanoviana" collection of local historical material. Archive photographs survive from 1901, the 1930s and the 1970s.

Everything that was here

• 1885–present

  House of Dr Ignacy Bielecki (Dom dr Ignacego Bieleckiego)Museum

  An oil company built it as worker housing, went bankrupt, and sold it to the town doctor — who then practised in Rymanów until he was a hundred years old.

  See the map in 1886 →

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