"The Constitution of 3 May 1791" is the title of an open-air exhibition prepared by the Polish History Museum in Warsaw and the Lithuanian Institute of History in Vilnius. Yesterday, the exhibition was assembled in front of the St Peter and St Paul Cathedral in Kamianets-Podilskyi in Ukraine, where its festive opening took place.
The event was attended by the Consul General of the Republic of Poland in Vinnytsia Damian Ciarciński, Director of the Polish Institute in Kyiv Robert Czyżewski, Deputy Director of the Polish History Museum Anna Piekarska, parson of the St Peter and St Paul Cathedral in Kamianets-Podilskyi Father Roman Twaróg, Director of the Kamianets Fortress Aleksander Zaremba, Director of the Khotyn Fortress Elżbieta Bujnowska, Director of the Humanitarian Policy Department of the City Council in Kamianets-Podilskyi Dmytro Nazarenko, as well as representatives of local organisations of the Polish diaspora. The exhibition’s patron is Małgorzata Gosiewska, Deputy Speaker of the Polish Sejm.
The viewer has been given the opportunity to become familiar with what impacted the shape of the Law on Government, as the Constitution was officially called: on the one hand the dynamic development of public thought and bold reforms of selected areas of public life, and on the other the difficult political situation inside the country and in the international context. The exhibition also shows the pride and joy accompanying the adoption of the pioneering legal act, the enthusiastic reaction of the foreign press to it as well as the power the memory of the Constitution of 3 May 1791 gave the residents of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the dreary times of the partitions and later under communist rule after the Second World War. The authors have selected the most typical cultural texts illustrating the phenomena showcased in the exhibition: paintings and literary works, prints of the period as well as photographs. In the Ukrainian-language version of the exhibition, more attention has been given to the themes related to the situation of the Greek Catholic and Orthodox Churches as well as the 1792 Polish–Russian war and the Partition Sejm in Grodno.
After the official part, Wojciech Kalwat, a co-author of the exhibition script and the head of the Cultural Projects and International Cooperation Department of the Polish History Museum, offered a round tour of the exposition.
Available in Polish and Ukrainian, the 28-panel exhibition is waiting for the viewers in Kamianets-Podilskyi until the end of June.