On 26 February 1846 an Austrian detachment under Ludwig von Benedek, joined by armed peasants from the surrounding villages, routed a column of Polish insurgents at Gdów, a small town on the Raba river southeast of Kraków. It is usually described as the only real battle of the Kraków Uprising. The fighting itself lasted only minutes. What followed at the cemetery wall, where the insurgents' scythemen surrendered and were then killed, made Gdów one of the darkest episodes of the Galician peasant revolt of 1846.
An uprising and a peasant revolt
In February 1846 Polish conspirators planned a rising in all three partitions of Poland, but it broke out on a larger scale only in the Free City of Kraków. On 21 February the insurgents forced the Austrian garrison out of the city and set up a National Government, with Jan Tyssowski as dictator. Its manifesto promised the peasants the land they farmed, without compensation to the nobility.1
The countryside did not follow. In western Galicia, the Austrian province around Kraków, peasants burdened by serfdom turned not against Austria but against the Polish landowners, attacking manor houses and killing nobles, estate officials and sometimes priests. Polish sources hold that the Austrian authorities incited the revolt. The death toll is uncertain. The Polish Ministry of Education's learning platform gives more than 1,000 dead, about 200 of them landowners or leaseholders, the Museum of Polish History speaks of thousands of noblemen killed, and a curator of the National Museum in Kraków gives 1,000 to 2,000 dead among the Polish landed gentry and 430 manor houses laid waste. The Tarnów district was hit hardest.2
Surprise on the Raba
A small insurgent column under Colonel Jakub Suchorzewski operated southeast of Kraków. On 24 February Suchorzewski, acting for the National Government, was in Wieliczka, where he handed local power to an official named as district commissioner. Many of his men were scythemen. On 26 February the column was at Gdów, where its men were resting in the inn after the march.3
Benedek came up with an Austrian detachment, and armed peasants joined his troops. According to the local history portal of the Pontifical University of John Paul II, the Austrians had better weapons and more men, and above all were ready to fight, while the insurgents were caught resting. Only a few shots were fired in defense. Their commander, Suchorzewski, fled, taking the insurgent treasury with him.4
Killing at the cemetery wall
Only a dozen or so insurgent horsemen got through to Kraków with the news. The scythemen were pressed against the cemetery wall by the peasant bands. A contemporary account quoted by the Gdów municipality says they tried desperately to defend themselves, then lost hope, threw their scythes to the ground and begged for mercy, and were cut down by the peasants. According to a curator of the National Museum in Kraków, about half of the 154 dead were murdered by the peasants who supported Benedek's troops, and 59 prisoners were held for 48 hours without food in the cellars of the Wieliczka town hall.5
The bodies of the 154 dead insurgents were thrown into pits on the pasture beside the cemetery. The Gdów municipality records that the Austrian losses amounted to one horse wounded in the leg. The local history portal stresses that this was not a simple attack of peasants on their own lords. The peasants of Gdów fled into the woods with their landowner and took no part, and the killers came from other villages and killed peasant insurgents as well as nobles.6
After Gdów
The uprising collapsed within days. Edward Dembowski, the radical who tried to win the peasants over, was killed by Austrian troops on 27 February while leading a procession out of Kraków. On 3 March Tyssowski gave up power, and Austrian and Russian troops entered the city. On 16 November 1846 the Free City lost its autonomy and was annexed to Austria. Benedek, who according to Britannica distinguished himself in Galicia in 1846, rose to field marshal and commanded the Austrian army defeated at Königgrätz in 1866.7
Over the mass grave in the Gdów cemetery now rises a mound crowned by Wojciech Samek's monument of the grieving Rachel. The Gdów municipality dates the unveiling of the monument to 1906, while a curator of the National Museum in Kraków writes that the mound was raised in 1906 and the monument set up in 1916. The battle is often set beside the hopeful image of peasant scythemen fighting for Poland at Racławice in 1794. Gdów showed how far that image had faded in 1846, when peasants who had little reason to trust the nobility were turned against an uprising that promised to free them.8
Also on this day
- 1943: Operation Ochsenkopf. Axis forces in Tunisia launched an offensive against the British First Army to seize Medjez el Bab, Béja and the position called Hunt's Gap.
