The damask tablecloth is one of the three items, besides the sugar bowl and sugar tongs (MHŻP-B/1-2) preserved from the dowry given to Ewa Kramsztyk by her grandmother Sura Rywka aka Ewa Kramsztyk née Frühling on the occasion of Ewa's wedding with Franciszek Bujak.The spouses met at Wanda Czajkowska's guesthouse, where Ewa had been staying during her studies at the Jagiellonian University, and Franciszek (also a student of the Krakow university) would visit his friends. In order to be able to get married in the Catholic rite, Ewa, originating from an assimilated Jewish family, was baptised two weeks before the wedding.
The groom came from a poor peasant family. His future university career was made possible by his father, who wanted Franciszek to study and become a priest. He was therefore sent to a gymnasium in Bochnia, and then began his studies in Kraków. Bujak never forgot his roots, devoting most of his scientific work as a professor at the Jagiellonian and Warsaw Universities as well as the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów (today Lviv, Ukraine), to the problems of the countryside; that was also the focus of his political career (as the minister of agriculture). Ewa Kramsztyk came from a completely different environment. The house of her aunt and uncle, Zygmunt Kramsztyk and Helena née Zweigbaum, who took on her and her sister's upbringing after their parents' death, was a meeting place for the then intellectual elite of Warsaw. Ewa's uncle was a friend of such prominent figures as Eliza Orzeszkowa and Tytus Chałubiński.The wedding of the bride from an assimilated Jewish family with an academician of peasant origin was then such a sensational event in Krakow that it was recorded in gossip columns in the press.
The white, rectangular damask tablecloth is decorated with a floral motif; the ornament is arranged in a rectangular shape the lines of which run along the edge of the fabric. The leaves and calyxes of flowers are directed towards the centre of the rectangle. In one of the corners, the bride's monogram 'EK' was embroidered.
Marta Frączkiewicz
