Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Paweł Włodkowic

There was another Catholic I am really proud of: Paweł Włodkowic. He was a Catholic scholar in the XIV-XVth century. He is famous for his thesis about the peaceful coexistance of Christians and pagans. In his time Poland was a relative tolerant country, which changed only during the Vasa dynasty reign.

BTW. Once, I remember, I needed a kind of nickname to distinguish myself from other people having the same name (there are several Pawel Biernackis). Wlodkowic has influenced me a little, so that I chose a similar form to be my nickname - Fadzeyovic. It is a patronymic derived from the Russian form of my father's name, just like Wlodkowic was in his case. Such forms are not used in the contemporary Polish any more. My father's name was Tadeusz (Greek Thadeios, Russian Fadey) and I was trying to figure out how it would sound if we were influenced by the Byzantine Empire rather than Rome. We do not have the soft "d" sound in Polish, instead it is usually "dz", therefore "Fadzeyovic" rather than "Fadeyevich".

As you might expect I regret a little that we were not under the Bizantine influence. The Greeks would have allowed us to write in our own language, unlike Rome. And they would probably allow both orthodox and catholic religions (just as it was in Great Moravia), which would greatly facilitate our relationships with the Belarussians and the Ukrainians. As far I know we did nasty things due to the catholic influence, for example burning the orthodox churches and persecuting the minorities. And this happened long after Wlodkowic's death.

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