Stan prac dokumentacyjnych i ewidencyjnych założeń ogrodowych i cmentarzy w Polsce

In 1982 the Board for the Protection and Conservation of Palace and Garden Complexes overtook from the Ministry of Culture and Art the task of continuing two central campaigns taken up earlier, namely the registering of historic parks, gardens and alleys and the inventorying of historic cemeteries. Apart from its aim inherent in the name itself the Board for the Protection and Conservation of Palace and Garden Complexes has also the task set out in its statute, regarded by the Minister of Culture and Art to be the basic one, i.e. to act on behalf of the protection of cultural landscape. This is understood as an eagerness to single out ” a historic cultural landscape” as a new category of the protection of monuments next to "a historic structure” and ” a historic complex” . Therefore, both these campaigns are regarded as very important instruments in studies on cultural landscape, although they do not satisfy in full the interests in these problems. It is assumed that Poland has more than 10 thousand garden sites adjoining courts and palaces. From 1975 to 1st October 1987 the Inventorying Commission for gardens, parks and alleys discussed at its meetings 6.568 record books. Out of this number 5.936 objects were regarded by the Commission as historic, while 632 items were thought to have no historic value. In general, we may distinguish the following groups of garden settings: 1) autonomous works of garden art independent from a utility programme (residential, housing, public and others), that documentate style and taste of a given epoch, 2) settings accompanying architectonic, engineering and industrial structures, forming an integral entity of compositional thought (e.g. gardens in health resort, hospitals, factories, churches, cloisters et.c.), 3) complexes of garden establishments or arrangements of urban and rural greeneries, 4) cemetery and cult (e.g. Calvaries) gardens, 5) elements of garden arrangements (e.g. alleys, promenades, trees along roads, groups of trees and others), 6) rare specimen of living or extinct nature set into the cultural landscape. It is estimated that there are in Poland ca 20 thousand cemeteries which have a historic character. From 1985 to October 1987 the Inventorying Commission investigated at its meetings 5.711 cemetery cards. 2.950 of them were considered historic, while 2.761 — as having no historic value. According to the data obtained from District Monuments’ Conservators their records cover 7.326 Roman Catholic cemeteries, 1.864 — Lutheran, 77 — Calvinist, 437 — Orthodox church cemeteries, 398 — Jewish, 3 — Muslim and 847 — military cemeteries. A general state of documentation and registering work on gardens and cemeteries in Poland, comprising a characteristics and typology of recognized historic resources, allows us to say that in not too distant future we shall have a general picture of the resources of cultural property in those specific kinds of objects.