Jakub Szela, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetJakub Szela
Polish revolutionary
Date of Birth: 21-Jul-1787
Place of Birth: Smarżowa, Podkarpackie Voivodeship, Poland
Date of Death: 01-Jan-1866
Profession: farmer
Zodiac Sign: Cancer 
About Jakub Szela
- Jakub Szela (was born 14 July 1787, Smarzowa, in Galicia - died 21 April 1860, Dealul Ederii, in Bukovina, now Romania) was a Polish leader of a peasant uprising against the Polish gentry in Galicia in 1846; directed against manorial property and oppression (for example, the manorial prisons) and rising against serfdom; scores of manors were attacked and their inhabitants murdered.
- Galician, mainly Polish, peasants killed ca.
- 1000 noblemen and destroyed ca.
- 500 manors in 1846. He represented his village in an extended conflict with its unjust lord and was arrested and lashed several times.
- During the 1846 rebellion, instigated by Vienna, Szela became the leader of the Galician peasants, destroyed a number of manors, and killed, among others, the family of his lord, though he is reported to have saved the children.
- Szela tried to organize an all-Galician peasant uprising, with the main slogan of corvee refusal.
- The rebellious villages were pacified by the Austrian Army.
- After pacification of the rebellious villages by the Austrian Army, Szela was briefly arrested, and then resettled to Bukovina, where he was given a land grant by the Austrian government in Bukovina.
- He is also said to have received a medal from the Austrian government, an event reported as fact by Magosci et al.
- but played down as only a "Polish rumor" by Wolff.Szela was portrayed sympathetically by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, a Czech-born Austrian writer who had serfs before 1848, in her short story “Jakob Szela” in Dorf- und Schlossgeschichten (1883).
- The massacre of the gentry in 1846 was the historical memory that haunted Stanislaw Wyspianski's play The Wedding.
- He was also featured in a recent Monika Strzepka and Pawel Demirski’s play “In the Name of Jakub S.”.
Read more at Wikipedia