A skull, thought for over two hundred years to have belonged to Polish renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski, in fact belonged to a woman.

The revelations come after experts at the Institute of Forensic Research performed tests on the skull, leading historians to believe that it probably belonged to Kochanowski’s wife.

Tests on the skull were commissioned by Professor Franciszek Ziejka, an historian on Polish literature and former rector of Krakow’s Jagiellonian University, after he became interested in the remains of one of Poland’s most revered poets, demanding that they be moved to the Wawel cathedral in the city.

The skull has been part of the Czartoryski Museum collections since 1876, and has not only been acknowledged as a priceless artefact, but also thought of as a national treasure.

A real beauty?

Dr Andrzej Czubak from the Institute of Forensic Research performed a drawn as well as a computer-aided reconstruction of the skull, including an anthropological analysis.

“This woman was distinctively beautiful,” Czubak told the regional Dziennik Polski daily, adding that “she was chubby, round-faced with a large wide nose and had slightly slanted eyes.”

It is thought that the woman died at an age around 40, with Dr Czubak believing that she as probably around 47 when she died.

Meanwhile, Professor Ziejka believes that the woman is Kochanowski’s wife, Dorota née Podlodowska, and that she died between the ages of 40-45. “I’m now going to find evidence that it’s Dorota,” Ziejka told the daily.

Renaissance man

Jan Kochanowski is commonly regarded as Poland’s first poet to write in vernacular, although he wrote in Latin as well. Although writing in the renaissance, he is responsible for contemporary Polish literary forms.

His most commonly known work is the Laments [Treny], written in 1580 upon the death of his two-year-old daughter, Urszula. (jb)