Nestled on the shores of Lake Zurich, the medieval town of Rapperswil emerged through centuries as both a strategic stronghold and a symbolic theatre of war. Dominating the skyline, Rapperswil Castle stood as a fortress controlling vital routes across the lake and surrounding territories, witnessing conflicts from feudal struggles to the upheavals of the Napoleonic era.
The castle became a focal point of regional conflict during the turbulent struggles between rival noble families and expanding confederate powers. In 1350, much of the town surrounding the fortress was devastated by fire during periods of violent unrest, leaving large sections of Rapperswil destroyed while the castle endured as a symbol of authority and survival. Rebuilt in stone and strengthened over time, the fortress came to embody both destruction and resilience. Centuries later, the castle gained a new layer of historical meaning through its association with Tadeusz Kościuszko, an urn with his heart was kept in the grounds of Rapperswil castle for 110 years before finally being brought to Poland in 1927 .
It is now in Warsaw Royal Castle where it miraculously survived its destruction in WW2 after which the castle was completely rebuilt. His brain is buried in Zuchwil Cemetery near Solothurn, Switzerland where he spent his final years and his embalmed body lies in a sarcophagus in Krakow Cathedral in Poland reflecting the fractured and partioned history of his Polish homeland.
In a sense it also mirrors the fate of Chopin, a genius pianist and composer, whose heart is buried in a church in a small street in Warsaw , smuggled into Poland in the folds of his sister’s dress, far away from his burial place in a cemetery in Paris.
What is behind this fascinating, if somewhat macabre practice? And what does Kościuszko’s heart and the legacy it represents mean in historical interpretations and national narratives spanning across time and continents?
Image: View of the gate of the Polish National Museum in Rapperswil, before 1906; Mausoleum with Tadeusz Kościuszko’s heart, postcard published by Kunstverlag
Tadeusz Kościuszko (1746-1817) was a Polish military leader and statesman who became a national hero in Poland and who fought for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the struggles against Russia and Prussia and on the US side against the British in the American Revolutionary War.
His life was defined by his unwavering commitment to justice and human rights. He dedicated his American estate to the education and emancipation of African American slaves, although his will was never fully executed. In Poland, he led the 1794 Kościuszko Uprising against Russian domination and advocated for social reforms and an end to Polish serfdom.
Despite his military brilliance and political vision, Kościuszko’s efforts to preserve Polish independence were thwarted by the effects of successive partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795, which erased the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of his childhood from the map of Europe. Imprisoned in St Petersburg after the uprising, Kościuszko eventually was granted amnesty in 1796 – on the condition that he would never return to Poland.
After the Polish Uprising of 1830, many Polish exiles fled to Switzerland. Count Władysław Broel-Plater leased the disused castle in Rapperswil and, at his own expense, restored it. In 1870, he opened the Polish National Museum inside the castle, creating a cultural hub for the exiled Polish community.
Standing just before the entrance to the castle is the Freedom Column, designed by Zürich University Professor Julian Stadler. It had been erected by Count Plater, largely at his own expense, in 1868 (two years before the museum’s opening) on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bar Confederation, to commemorate Poland’s then-century-long struggle for independence. The column is topped by an eagle, while the base bears, among other things, the Latin inscription, “Magna res libertas” (“A great thing is liberty”) and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth coat-of-arms featuring the Polish Eagle and the Lithuanian Vytis (in Polish, Pogoń).
To Poles, Kościuszko became a saint-like figure. Portraits of him adorned the drawing-rooms in many Polish houses and for several generations in partitioned Poland, children were named Tadeusz as a manifestation of their parents’ patriotism.
Kościuszko has spent the last years of his life living in Solothurn, Switzerland where he died in 1817 at the age of 71 after falling ill from falling off his horse into a cold stream.
Before his death, Kościuszko had asked for his heart to be left with his favourite student, Tadea Emilia Zeltner – the daughter of the Swiss family in whose house he had spent his final years. The heart was initially kept in a metal urn in Solothurn before it was tranferred to Verese, near Lugano, where for the next several decades it was kept in an ‘unlocked urn’ in a private garden before being given to the newly opened Polish Museum. Giuseppe Verdi , one of the greatest and most influential Italian opera composers—basically the giant of 19th-century opera was was friends with the Morosini family who had been very close to Kościuszko in his final years.
His endorsement helped persuade the Morosinich daughters to agree to donate Kościuszko’s heart to the Polish cause. In particular, Verdi wrote to Anetta Morosini, daughter of Emilia Zeltner-Morosini encouraging her to let the relic be placed “in its native niche” — meaning a place where Poles could honour it properly. i.e in the Polish Museum in Rapperswil.
As a result of those efforts, the heart of Tadeusz Kościuszko was brought to the Polish Museum at Rapperswil in 1895 and placed in a special mausoleum there.
Kościuszko’s dual burial reflected both his personal wish for a free Poland and a deep-rooted cultural practice of honoring the spiritual essence of great figures.
In “Death is Only the Beginning” Mikolaj Glinski writes how according to Christian tradition, the heart was considered the seat of the soul. Thus, in the Polish sepulchral tradition, an urn containing a heart was sometimes referred to as the ‘tomb of the soul’ (grób duszy). The burial sites – most often located in churches – were seen not only as places of commemoration, but also of great spiritual power.
Also noteworthy is the Christian custom to worship Jesus heart. According to Aristotle, more than three hundred years after his birth, Church fixed the privileged role of the heart in spite of all other organs. Jewish Torah, as well as Bible, incentivised the idea that heart was the real representation of human consciousness, location of emotional life, as well as of intelligence and wisdom. According to this symbolic relevance, in almost all the holy places, there are saint’s representations with their heart in hands: St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Gertrude the Great or St. Catherine of Siena are, maybe, the more illustrated.
In Europe, as it happened already in Egypt many centuries before, some artists and sovereigns chose to store separately their heart to better protect it from decay and erosion. Over time, seven hundred hearts were extracted from bodies. This is a practice that started in twelfth century, but the greatest concentration of the phenomenon was between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century, with a peak of one hundred and ninety hearts in the seventeenth century .
In Poland, the tradition, at first also reserved for saints and kings, was soon transformed by the changing political situation of the country. First it extended to members of the nobility, but eventually went on to also include Polish statesmen, poets and artists – namely, people whose lives and work was considered essential to the survival of the nation.
How did Polish culture survive to create another democratic nation? Václav Havel once observed that, ‘I am convinced that the deepest roots of that we now call human rights lies somewhere beyond us, and above us; something deeper than the world of human covenants – in a realm that I would, for simplicity’s sake, describe as metaphysical.’
Indeed the struggle for the basic recognition of universal human rights as well as a right to democratic nation continues centuries after Kościuszko’s death with the battle for his heart and the legacy it represents still ongoing.
With every major Polish town containing at least one street named after him his legacy in neighbouring Belarus, his actual birthplace , is more complex.
For decades Lukashenko’s government in Belarus relied on Soviet interpretation of history while Belarusian opposition has always seen its future as an independent European nation with its past tied to Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, rather than Russia.
He is therefore celebrated as a national hero in Belarus only among circles of the independent Belarusian opposition. Its members commemorate Kościuszko’s birthday annually at his family manor in Merachoushchyna, Belarus.
While Switzerland had been spared major world wars the culture wars are raging here as well and the waves go high. After one such battle initiated by the local politician and newspaper owner Polish Museum has been evicted from Rapperswil Castle on 1 of May, 2020. In a petition signed by 2000 people Bruno Hug argued that Poland has no special relationship to Switzerland and the castle should instead be used for showcasing Swiss history. “ Polish Museum or Polish history hardly interests anyone in the region” he said.
During WWII, around 13,000 Polish soldiers, remnants of the French Army, were interned in Switzerland, with Rapperswil becoming a key cultural hub. The Polish Museum oversaw educational and cultural life in camps, offering training, and fostering community, with many internees later contributing to Swiss society and the Museum’s rebirth. Under the article about the museum’s last day one of the Swiss readers wrote : “As a descendant of one of those interned soldiers this really breaks my heart. Bruno Hug argues that it’s not local history – well he’s eradicating a part of mine and of many others”….
Kościuszko’s legacy meanwhile continues to span across time and continents.
In the US his belief in “ liberty for all, and not to the few and the rich alone,” exemplified by his outrage at Thomas Jefferson’s slave ownership and efforts to free enslaved people, directly contrasted with the slave-holding elite, even among the fellow revolutionaries. Kosciuszko wrote a will in 1798 for his money to be used to buy back the freedom of black slaves and to organize schools for them and asked Jefferson to execute his will. This met many difficulties and his wishes remained mostly unfulfilled with the money ultimately going to European heirs, symbolizing a broader failure of early American ideals to confront slavery fully.
Two towns are named after him in the US, including Kosciusko, Mississipi, the birthplace of Oprah Winfrey and New York City has two bridges named in his honour.
In the height of the Black Lives Matter protests anti-racist and anti-Trump slogans appeared on the base of the statue of Tadeusz Kościuszko in Washington, D.C. A correspondent with the Polish radio station RMF tweeted: “The statue of Tadeusz Kościuszko in front of the White House has been vandalised. It is difficult to call them people fighting for their rights when they do not respect THE HERO OF BOTH NATIONS. I was standing there, unable to do anything . What a tragedy.”
The Polish ambassador to the United States tweeted that he was “disgusted and appalled by the acts of vandalism.”
But in his last will, Kościuszko wished for his American wealth—mainly the military salary that the federal government still owed him—to be used for the liberation and education of enslaved black people.
According to Gary B. Nash, Kościuszko’s biographer, the will was not an act of charity, but a declaration of a particular social philosophy. Kościuszko envisioned an America in which black people could find their place as citizens. Such a stance was extraordinary even among the abolitionists, who for a long time remained ambivalent on the question of full citizenship of freed black slaves. Slavery remained part of the American political system until the introduction, in December 1864, of the Thirteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth (1869) and the Fifteenth (1870) Amendments granted black people citizenship and black men the right to vote. But over the next hundred years the authorities in charge of a number of states did all they could to limit the actual rights of the black population.
In Poland, two philosophers who focus on the tradition of popular resistance—Łukasz Moll and Michał Pospiszyl—have drafted a petition addressed to the Polish government, urging it to make sure that the inscriptions remain part of the statue, as an expression of the demands of black people in contemporary America. The authors wrote: “We are certain that had Kościuszko been resurrected, he would himself write Black Lives Matter in big bold letters across his statue.”
His name also sits on top of Australian highest mountain. The mountain was named in 1840, long after his death, by Polish explorer Paul Strzelecki who was inspired by Kościuszko’s ideals. The naming is now at the centre of discussions about Indigenous recognition and the cultural significance of the Snowy Mountains for the Ngarigo people.
In his book Kościuszko: The Incredible Life of the Man Behind the Mountain Anthony Sharwood highlights the cultural significance of the Snowy Mountains for the Ngarigo people. He explores their ancient customs, their displacement during European colonisation, and their perspectives on the future of the mountain’s name. He explores how names shape our understanding of history and identity, asking whether Kościuszko’s name should remain on the mountain or be replaced with an Indigenous names used by different Indigenous clans, such as Kunama Namadgi and Tar Gan Gil. He also considers what Kościuszko himself might have wanted. His nuanced approach reflects the complexity of the question without reducing it to a simplified culture war but instead reflecting on the layers of history and the meanings carried with it.
Maria Sorensen, an art curator, writer and researcher
MA Cultural Critique
ZHdK Zurich University of the Arts
Bibliography
Sharwood, Anthony Kościuszko: The Incredible Life of the Man Behind the Mountain, 2024
Arthur Badach, Anna Piotrowska The Polish Museum in Rapperswil , Warszawa-Rapperswil, 2008
Glinski, Mikolaj Death is Only the Beginning: The Restless Hearts, Bodies & Ashes of the Polish Dead (Oct 29 2020)
Melania, Borgo The heart burial and the history of an emblematic organ” Medicina Historica 2017; Vol. 1, N. 1: 35-40
Lisa, Kasmach Tadeusz Kosciuszko and The Un-Soviet Heroes of Belarus ( October 20, 2017)
Jakub, Majmurek “Kościuszko Knew That Black Lives Matter” (June 25, 2020)