Kremenets Lyceum

Kremenets Lyceum [Кременецький ліцей; Kremenets'kyi litsei]. (Photo: Kremenets Lyceum complex.) A Polish higher school in Kremenets, formed in 1819 out of the local gymnasium, which had been established in 1805 by Tadeusz Czacki to serve as a university for the young nobles of the Kyiv region, Podilia, and Volhynia. The reorganization of the school into a lyceum did not entail any significant change in its program. It offered a general education consisting of four one-year grades (languages, mathematics, geography, calligraphy) and three upper two-year grades (languages, theology, history, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, botany, physics, chemistry, mineralogy, civil architecture, and technology). Besides Polish, which was the language of instruction, Russian, Latin, and German were taught (English and Greek were optional). The lyceum had a large library and several natural science collections. Members of its faculty, such as Antoni Andrzejowski and Willibald Besser, did some important research on the fauna and flora in Right-Bank Ukraine. Most of the students were Poles: in 1821 only 34 of the 600 enrolled students were Ukrainian. Because many of the lyceum students took part in the Polish Insurrection of 1830–1, the authorities closed the school and in 1832 transferred its library, collections, and faculty to Kyiv, where they became the foundation on which Kyiv University was established. In the 1920s another lyceum was established in Kremenets by the Polish authorities. It was a secondary-school complex consisting of a teachers' seminary, gymnasium, and vocational schools.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1989).]