25 years of the Vilnius Club of Vagabonds

25 years ago, on February 13^th 1990, a group of Polish enthusiasts in Lithuania, mostly students of the Vilnius universities, established the Vilnius Club of Vagabonds.

The originators of the restoration of the club were Michał Kleczkowski and Elwira Ostrowska, and the first club members were sought through a newspaper ad. Currently, there are about 30 people involved in the organization.

KWW is one of the largest Polish youth organizations in the Vilnius region. The term ‘youth’ doesn’t really fit here, as the Vagabonds us the term , young at heart’, and therefore members of the club  are not only 20-year-olds, but also 40-year-olds and older.

The archetype of the present organization was founded in the distant year of 1923. The founders were students of the Stefan Batory University. Then, there were a lot of known and prominent personalities in the club: well-known historian, essayist and journalist Paweł Jasienica (actually Lech Beynar, whose  nickname was “Bachus”), the aide of legendary Łupaszko  and one of the victims of the March 68; future Nobel Prize winner and one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, Czeslaw Milosz (“Ja-yo”), a poet Teodor Bujnicki (“Amorek”), sentenced to death by the underground Home Army court for collaborating with the Soviets, and Stefan Jędrychowski (“Robespierre”), one of the PRL leading politicians.