Knut-Olof Falk in press articles - part 1

Probably many of you have heard about the great friend of Poland from Sweden, Knutt-Olof Falk? He was born in 1906 in Hammars Glasbruk in the province of Narke in Sweden. Already as a student of the University of Uppsala, he became interested in Slavic and Baltic languages. In 1931 he started studying Polish in Warsaw. In 1933-34 he was a teacher of the Swedish language at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He then attended the classes of outstanding Polish linguists, including Kazimierz Nitsch and Tadeusz Lehr-Spławiński. In the following years he began field studies in the Suwalki region. He specialized in toponomastics, i.e. the science of place names. He stayed in our areas in the spring and summer of 1934, and in the summer of 1936 and 1937. He enriched his field research with research in archives and libraries, looking for materials about the Suwałki Region and making photocopies of them. It is thanks to him that in the form of very good quality photocopies, priceless documents have survived, the originals of which were destroyed during World War II, together with others from the Krasiński Library. In 1938, the Polish-Swedish Scientific Society was established at the University of Stockholm. It published the newsletter 'Svio-Polonica'. It was in this letter that K. O. Falk published an article in Polish in 1939, an elaboration of the oldest Lake District Register. At the University of Uppsala, Falk collaborated and made friends with Zbigniew Folewski, a Polish linguist and Polish language teacher.

W 1941 roku został doktorem na Uniwersytecie w Uppsala, jego dwutomowa praca doktorska miała tytuł: “Wody wigierskie i huciańskie. Studium toponomastyczne” i zawierała unikalne fotografie materiałów źródłowych z Biblioteki Krasińskich, które zostały zniszczone w czasie II Wojny Światowej. Praca wydana w języku polskim, spotkała się z ostrym protestem hitlerowskich Niemiec, co łączyło się z wystawieniem noty dyplomatycznej do rządu Szwecji. Nic jednak nie wskórali. Z tej pracy korzystali po wojnie chyba wszyscy polscy regionaliści, interesujący się historią Suwalszczyzny i Augustowszczyzny. Niestety, w Polsce jest tylko kilka egzemplarzy tej książki. W tym jeden egz. jest własnością naszego stowarzyszenia.