Liberum voveo!

Come on To the English. Mr. Prime Minister will send a report and we, here on land, will have tomorrow A clear overview of the current situation On the section of the "eastern flank" we live in. Just be a little careful with the political rituals. 

In a country so saturated with the power of poetic imagination, it is easy to become a part of a myth and spend a very long time among the sharp shadows of fog. Even if a person thinks (that he thinks) pragmatically and uses his rights. 

Boris Johnson/PAP/EPA/ANDY RAIN like our MP from Upita.   

Professor Joachim Śliwa, looking for a mummy (as you know, an Egyptologist must) compiled a very informative and emblematic posthumous story of a "MP from Upita" (today: the village of Upyté, less than 300 people, as many as in one skyscraper), who was the first in the history of the Republic of Poland to break the Sejm. Today we would say that Władysław Wiktoryn Siciński, coat of arms Prawdzic, Calvinist, deputy from the Upice district, who on Saturday, March 9, 1652 loudly said: "I do not allow prolongation" was an extremely effective influencer.

We won't find out why he said that, of course, just like that. Entrepreneurs, people of action, businessmen who believe that the economy is the only thing that unites us, let them think that it was some urgent business that made Siciński return to Żmudź, that he had to urgently plant something, plow, speed up or brew. On Monday, March 11, the Marshal of Lviv, Andrzej Maksymilian Fredro: "(...) twice called the district of Upice, thinking that the Sicin protest would withdraw, but the deputy had already left Warsaw. So the Marshal announced the dissolution of the Sejm to the assembled and the king and then there was an ominous cry from one of the senators to Siciński: "I think he was lost!" (Another, more rhetorical version: "You probably didn't come out of hell, who made such a misfortune! To which the present replied: Amen! Amen!” (Quoted by: J. Plum The Mummy of Cziczinskas or "the corpse of the Upice deputy", [in:] From the "Troglodytenland" in the Reich of the Scheherezade. Festschrift für Piotr O. School for 70 years, hg. M. Długosz, Berlin 2014, ss. 295-309). Siciński was fine until his death, he was elected a deputy to the Sejm in 1659, he signed a peace treaty with Sweden in Oliwa. He died around 1672 and for a while everything was fine. 

Without naivety, the Sejm is a political spectacle, there is no shortage of voices that "(...) the breakup of the Sejm in 1652 was in the hands of both the opposition and the royal party. Siciński's rather unexpected opposition can be considered a favor he gave to the general public by embodying feelings that no one else had the courage to demonstrate so openly" (ibid., p. 301). Only "(...) in later times, when the Sejm began to break again and again, when all the misfortunes of Poland were attributed to liberum veto, only then was the memory of the deputy from Upita unearthed" (Ibid., p. 300).

This is where myth and mythological imagination appear. Well, the Polish (ok, Żmudzka) land itself did not want to accept Siciński's remains. "Any attempts to provide him with any burial failed, because the earth was to throw him out of its interior seven times, not wanting to accept such a wicked man." (J. Plum, Op. cit., p. 303). In December 1859 (No. 15), a report by (Władysław Malaszewski) describing Siciński's corpse stored in the drink was published in "Tygodnik Ilustrowany". "You see a yellow body, as if fossilized, a straight, tall figure, arms folded crosswise, legs stretched out. The skull is bald and yellow, thick clumps of gray hair at the back, closed, convex eyes, (...) lips above which there are clumps of whiskers, somehow proudly weaned off, the whole face bears traces of beauty. Siciński's body was placed in a special chest in the church around the middle of the 19th century, and was not finally buried until 1864. Professor Śliwa is probably right to guess that the body of the deputy (who was supposed to die suddenly, from lightning strikes) was buried in the crypt of the congregation in Upit. The Calvinist church collapsed in Upita around the middle of the 18th century and then Siciński's embalmed corpse was probably found, which, surrounded by a bad reputation, began a spectacular and turbulent "own life" in the role of the folk "specter of Upita". 

Adam Mickiewicz printed a poem in St. Petersburg in 1829 Popas in Upit (Subtitled: "A real event"): “There stood/Scarad, ancient body. /Long and black legs stick out like stilts,/His hands broken crosswise, face deeply thinned. /(...) The face of even the actual face does not lose its expression, (...); Wildness, disfiguring the face of the living criminals,/It seems to have frozen from his face so far,/So far the treacherous joy in the mouth smiles,/The robber anger in the forehead, above the eyebrows of pride (...)”(A. Mickiewicz, Poems, Works, t. I, Warsaw 1998, p. 191).