Ignacy Żegota Pauli was one of the first to record and publish the folk legend of the flying Tatars. During his travels, this researcher arrived in Wiśnicz in 1840, where he heard a fascinating tale about Turkish or Tatar prisoners who — allegedly — escaped from the castle using improvised wings. This legend reappeared in the 1880s thanks to Mateusz Gralewski in his article entitled “The Legend of the Three Crosses near Wiśnicz.” Another researcher of regional history — Kazimierz Kaczmarczyk — also collected stories about these events at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The distinguished ethnographer Tadeusz Seweryn revived this folk narrative by including it in his 1958 work entitled “Roadside Shrines and Crosses in Poland,” giving the legend a cult-like dimension. He also fired the imagination of numerous readers and, consequently, tourists who went to Wiśnicz to see these columns with their own eyes.
Legend is the worst of historical sources, but it is nonetheless a source. Let us therefore take a closer look at it. Hetman Stanisław Lubomirski, lord of the Wiśnicz estates, upon returning from a successful campaign “against the Turk” from Khotin in the year of our Lord 1621, brought with him not only noble spoils but also numerous prisoners, who turned out to be Tatars or Turks. He also found them employment, driving them to build a monastery complex as a kind of votive offering of gratitude. These prisoners, longing for their homelands and suffering from slave labor, decided to escape. Given the distance, the only realistic way to achieve their goal was to take to the air, like the mythical Icarus or the birds that migrate south at the end of every summer. Allegedly, six of these prisoners decided to construct wings and try to soar into the skies. Unfortunately, their flight did not last long, as the stern lord ordered his men to shoot at the escapees, using blessed bullets as ammunition. Soon the unfortunate men fell to the ground, and the places of their fall were marked by the local people as “aviators’ columns.”
This otherwise interesting legend probably arose at a time when the true motives guiding the founders of the columns had already been forgotten, and the Latin in which the inscriptions serving to explore this knowledge were written was known only to a few. It must be admitted, however, that this legend is based on facts, at least as far as the presence of Tatar and Turkish prisoners in Wiśnicz is concerned.
