Draft:Kazimierz Bulas

• Comment: Each Wikipedia has her own different policies and guidelines even on article's notability . That an article exists in the French Wikipedia doesn't mean it can pass here. However, your draft doesn't meet WP:GNG. Safari Scribe^{Edits! Talk!} 16:25, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

---

Kazimierz Bulas (born February 17, 1903, in Wadowice, died September 26, 1970, in Houston) was a Polish scholar, classical archaeologist, researcher of ancient Greek art, polyglot, and translator. He was the creator of Greek-language radio broadcasts from Poland, a lecturer at Jagiellonian University, and a professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University. From 1947, he lived in the West, first in Italy and later in the United States, where he co-authored a two-volume Polish-English dictionary published by the Kościuszko Foundation.

Biography

Kazimierz Bulas graduated from the State Gymnasium in Wadowice in 1921. In the fall of that year, he began studying classical archaeology and ancient history at the Faculty of Philosophy of Jagiellonian University. In 1923, while still a student, he was hired as a junior assistant in the department of Professor Piotr Bieńkowski. He also pursued additional studies in France and Italy. He completed his coursework on July 4, 1925, and then returned to Italy to work on his doctorate, which he received on June 24, 1927, for his dissertation Ancient Illustrations of the Iliad. During his studies, he mastered several foreign languages, including Lithuanian and Turkish.

From 1927 to 1929, he worked as an assistant at the university, a teacher of Greek and Latin at the St. Jacek Gymnasium, and a librarian at the Polish-Italian Society. In September 1929, he went abroad for further studies, funded by a National Culture Fund scholarship. He spent two semesters in Berlin and later in Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Turkey, before becoming an intern at the École Française d'Athènes in 1930–1931, where he learned Modern Greek. Upon returning to Kraków, on October 1, 1931, he became a senior assistant. In 1935, he earned his habilitation based on the thesis Chronology of Attic Grave Stelae of the Archaic Period. On October 1, 1936, he was appointed an adjunct professor. As part of his research, he participated in cataloging ancient ceramics from Polish collections, under the international Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum project, sponsored by the Polish Academy of Learning. In 1932, he published his findings on the classification and chronology of miniature vessels with characteristic decoration, dating them to the early 4th century BCE. A year later, he released a pioneering academic textbook, Greek Ceramics.

Starting in 1931, Bulas taught Modern Greek at Jagiellonian University. He also prepared and hosted a series of talks on contemporary Greece for Radio Kraków and wrote columns on similar topics for the Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny and its supplements. In 1932, he was appointed Honorary Consul of Greece in Kraków. Soon after, he prepared and hosted monthly Greek-language radio broadcasts on Radio Katowice. These were groundbreaking, as Greece had no radio stations of its own at the time, which gained him considerable popularity in that country. He was a guest at the inauguration of an airline route to Thessaloniki in 1936 and the dedication of a street named Polish Street in that city in March 1937. In April 1937, he was part of the Jagiellonian University delegation celebrating the centennial of the National University of Kapodistrias in Athens, where he was awarded the Gold Cross of the Order of the Phoenix. Between 1936 and 1938, he delivered lectures in Athens and Thessaloniki on the cultural ties between Poland and Greece. He was also a translator of Modern Greek literature into Polish, translating, among others, plays by Spiros Melas, with whom he shared a personal friendship. In 1937, he accompanied the playwright during his visit to Poland, during which Melas presented the mayor of Kraków with an urn containing soil from the cemetery of Greek fighters in Missolonghi, destined for the Piłsudski Mound.

On November 6, 1939, Bulas was arrested during Sonderaktion Krakau. He was transported to Wrocław, then to Sachsenhausen and Dachau. He was released from the camp on April 12, 1940, partly due to interventions by the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs and members of the German Archaeological Institute. After returning to Kraków, he survived by giving foreign language lessons and doing translations. After the war, he resumed his academic career as an assistant professor in the department of Professor Stanisław Gąsiorowski. In October 1945, he was transferred to Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, where he took over the chair of classical archaeology as an associate professor. In 1947, he moved to Rome, where for three years he directed the Polish Academy of Learning’s scientific station. From 1950 to 1951, he worked at the Hertziana Library. He then emigrated with his family to the United States, settling in Houston, where he worked at the Rice University Library. In collaboration with two American Slavists, Francis J. Whitfield and Lawrence L. Thomas, he co-authored a two-volume Polish-English and English-Polish dictionary, published as The Kościuszko Foundation Dictionary. He died in Houston on September 26, 1970.