Dr Bogna Jakubowska has passed away

It was with disbelief and great sadness that we received the news of the passing of Dr Bogna Jakubowska, an outstanding researcher of medieval art, a well-mannered erudite person, who had been part of our castle family for 15 years. 

It is no exaggeration to say that she was a co-founder of the Castle Museum, as she started work on 1 September 1961, i.e. at a time when the structure of the institution was forming and the profile of its activities was developing. A graduate of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń (MA in historical studies and conservation), she was employed in the Department of Sculpture, Painting and Decorative Arts, running the Cabinet of Engravings and the Collection of Militaria, and from the very beginning (in organisational and family terms) she was closely connected with the International Biennial of Contemporary Exlibris, which in time became the signature event of our Museum. 

She has organised more than 30 temporary exhibitions, made more than a dozen exhibition catalogues, and has published more than 60 texts. Fascinated by the castle, and especially by the Golden Gate in the High Castle, she wrote a PhD dissertation ‘The Golden Gate of Malbork’. Apocalyptic Animals in Medieval Sculpture’, written under the supervision of Professor Lech Kalinowski at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. The thesis was published by the Castle Museum, and in recent years Dr Bogna Jakubowska has addressed this topic and subsequent publications on the Malbork monument in a very erudite, polemical form. 

Gdańsk, and in particular the post-Cistercian monastery in Oliwa, was her another great – not only scientific – passion. She had many interests, which she willingly shared with everyone interested, and was an active member of the Gdańsk Branch of the Association of Art Historians. She was a curator at the Castle Museum from 1973, and in 1976 she held the position of deputy director of the Museum for six months. 

At the end of 1976 she left the Museum and moved to the Gdansk workshop of the Institute of Polish Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences. There she fruitfully continued her scientific career, while maintaining close contacts with many of our then and subsequent employees. 

To the very end she was very interested in what was happening in Malbork, keeping her fingers firmly crossed for us, and was not prevented from doing so by the health problems that afflicted her in recent years. She’s always going to be in our memory.

The Management and Employees

of the Malbork Castle Museum