ks Leopold Jan Szersznik
Leopold Jan Šerąník * 1747, † 1814,
He was born the son of Jan Antoni Szersznik, a local government official and Joanna Alojzja, the daughter of the long-serving mayor of Cieszyn, Leopold Gottlieb Polzer. His mother was an educated woman who died prematurely. Szersznik attended the Jesuit Gymnasium and continued his studies at the Jesuit University in Olomouc. There he joined the Jesuits (the Society of Jesus), and continued his education at Jesuit colleges in Brno, Březnice and Prague. He was employed to catalogue the manuscripts of the Jesuit Library in Prague – the Clementinum – also becoming on friendly terms with scholars who mainly identified with Czech nationalism. While living in Prague he published his first academic works.
After the Jesuits were suppressed he returned to his home town of Cieszyn in 1776, finding work as a teacher of rhetoric and poetry in the Cieszyn Gymnasium. In 1787 he became the school’s headmaster, and in 1804 – the inspector of all Catholic elementary schools in Cieszyn Silesia. Educating young people (he wrote several school textbooks) in the spirit of the Enlightenment, of which he himself was an advocate, became the most important aspect of Szersznik’s work for the rest of his life. He nonetheless served his fellow townspeople using other skills and talents, supervising the rebuilding of Cieszyn after the fire of 1789, establishing a botanical garden in his own gardens in the Freistadt suburb and being active in the Town Council. He was the first person in Cieszyn to carry out research in almost all the fields of science at that time; from mineralogy and prehistory to linguistic studies. In 1810 he published a lexicon of artists and scholars associated with Cieszyn Silesia, still relevant today. Apart from that he published several lesser works, while the rest remained in the form of manuscripts.
In 1802 Szersznik made available to the people of Cieszyn – but above all gymnasium pupils – his museum collections, which had taken many years to be assembled, and his book collection numbering over ten thousand volumes. He also established and financed a foundation for their upkeep. It was the first public museum in Silesia and the Austrian Monarchy. Today his collections of artefacts are kept in the Museum of Cieszyn Silesia, and his book collection forms the basis of the Cieszyn Historical Library.