2025: Our Year in Review

Stowarzyszenie Gromada Łętownia has just completed its first year of activity. In this post, we would like to look back at our work this year and briefly outline our plans for 2026.

Our work in 2025

Establishing the association

At the turn of 2024 and 2025, our founding members met to formally establish Stowarzyszenie Gromada Łętownia. Eight people attended:

• Zbigniew Bryl
• Mateusz Ciszczoń
• Alicja Kowalcze
• Iwona Kowalcze
• Stanisław Kowalcze
• Tomasz Kowalcze
• Andrzej Wicher
• Robert Wojtaszek

As founding members, we formally adopted the association’s Statutes, passed our first resolutions and elected the management board and audit committee. On 8 January 2025, we were officially entered into Poland’s National Court Register, receiving KRS number 0001147873.

Soon afterwards, Damian Nosidlak, a member of Jordanów Municipal Council, also joined us.

We would like to express our deep gratitude to Robert Wojtaszek for the training and help in preparing the Statutes and all the documentation.

We also thank Dominik Pawłowski for his legal support during the registration process.

Our website

Shortly afterwards, we launched our website at letownia.org. It brings together the key information about Gromada Łętownia’s work: contact details, an introduction to the association, our projects, news and more.

Visual identity

The association’s visual identity was also developed at the beginning of the year.

Our name, Gromada Łętownia, refers both to historical units of local government (from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century) and to a group of people — which is what we, as Łętownia’s residents, are. In Polish, a gromada gwiazd is also a cluster of stars gathered in a small area of the sky.

Our logo, a typographical symbol called an asterism, consists of three stars arranged in a triangle. It refers to our name and its association with a star cluster. The symbol complements our motto: “People — Place — Time”. This triad defines our interests and activities.

We thank Rafał Franiuk for the logo’s final visual form. He developed our original idea and used the shape of the stars on the vault of Łętownia’s church.

Disappearing Trades

In March, two short films we had been working on since 2024 had their premiere. They are the first two instalments of “Ginące zawody” (Disappearing Trades), a series documenting occupations and activities once commonly practised in Łętownia and the surrounding region.

The first film introduced the work of blacksmith Andrzej Hanusiak. The second featured Edward Gościej, who spoke about carpentry and guided viewers around one of Łętownia’s older houses, in the Szwajcowa area.

The screening was followed by a conversation with the subjects of both films, hosted by Stanisław Kowalcze and Mateusz Ciszczoń.

The premiere was a considerable success and attracted great interest. On YouTube, the two films have already been viewed almost 200,000 times!

We thank Andrzej Hanusiak and Edward Gościej for taking part, and the entire Stowarzyszenie Gromada Łętownia team for helping at every stage of production and organising the premiere.

Cleaning up Łętownia

In April, at Iwona Kowalcze’s initiative, several dozen volunteers covered almost the whole village, collecting litter from roadsides, ditches, forests and other public places.

Together we collected dozens of bags of various kinds of rubbish, making our shared surroundings significantly cleaner.

Special thanks for taking part go to Łętownia’s Volunteer Fire Brigade, the cub scouts and the scouts.

Łętownia. Genius loci 1365–2026

The end of the year was devoted to publishing and promoting Bartłomiej Bart Dyrcz’s “Łętownia. Genius loci 1365–2025”.

The author spent more than two years working on this popular history, with many people involved in the process, including members of our association.

Across 560 pages, more than twenty thematic sections take readers from the village’s foundation in the fourteenth century through the parish’s development and the history of landowning families to the everyday lives of Łętownia’s peasants. This portrait of the past draws on original documents, parish records, municipal resolutions and chronicles.

Thousands of entries in death registers, hundreds of pages of council minutes and over 400 archival and contemporary photographs create a mosaic: a vivid story of place, people, time and faith, of everything that has shaped and continues to shape the heart of Łętownia.

With great joy and pride, Stowarzyszenie Gromada Łętownia became the official publisher of this book, which received ISBN 978-83-978157-0-4.

A major launch event was organised on 23 November. The sports hall at Łętownia’s school hosted an evening featuring a performance by the Gronie regional ensemble from Łętownia, the official presentation of the book and a conversation with its author, followed by a concert by Happy Big Band, led by Mirosław Kaszuba, with soloists Anna Kamyk and Kamil Kołodziejczyk, who comes from Łętownia.

More than five hundred people attended, and most of the print run had been distributed by the end of the year.

We warmly thank the author for his research into Łętownia’s past and everyone involved in creating and publishing the book and organising the launch.

Special thanks go to Kazimierz Hanusiak and Fundacja Davis, whose great generosity funded the publication and the launch evening.

Our plans for 2026

Although we are still preparing our programme for the coming year, we would already like to share a glimpse of what lies ahead and our excitement about it.

New members

In 2026, we want to grow our community and begin admitting new members to Stowarzyszenie Gromada Łętownia. We hope this will help us deliver our projects more effectively and support the many people who want to get involved locally.

More Disappearing Trades

We plan to produce further films in the Disappearing Trades series. The popularity of the first two shows just how important it is to care for fading traditions and history.

Our ancestors’ medicine

During the summer, we plan to hold one or more nature and herbal workshops. On nature walks, we will discover the richness of our local environment, then use the plants we gather to prepare infusions, ointments and other remedies.

Our inspiration is traditional medicine, practised by our ancestors for centuries.

A digital memory room

In the coming year, we want to begin a wide-ranging project to collect, archive and share valuable resources such as old photographs, documents and recordings.

Alongside collecting and digitising these materials, we want to create a platform serving as a digital memory room, accessible to everyone.

For 2026, we wish you peace, kindness and success in all your endeavours. Let us bridge divisions, resolve conflicts and work together for a better tomorrow.