Poland’s last male hermit dies

A Polish monk who spent the last 23 years of his life living in seclusion and was the last man in Poland to be officially recognised as a hermit by the Catholic Church has died.

Elizeusz Janikowski had lived a solitary life at a hermitage (pictured above) without running water or electricity atop Cierniak Hill in the Kłodzko Valley in southwestern Poland.

He passed away on Saturday morning at the age of 69 after a long illness, confirmed the parish of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Czerwona Woda.

During a rare interview about his life in 2010, Jankowski told blogger Zbigniew Piotrowicz that “it is not possible to go to a hermitage right away. I had been preparing for this decision for many years”.

“I completed gardening school and worked briefly in the profession. In fact, I always liked solitary life,” he explained. “For the next few years, I lived in monasteries in Zakopane, Przemyśl, Kraków and Częstochowa. I also worked as a carer for the disabled. At some point, I decided to follow my heart and opted for an eremtical life.”

Janikowski’s daily schedule involved getting up at 3 a.m. for prayers, reading, meditation and the rosary. He would then spend the day working at the chapel and hermitage, as well as carrying water from a spring on the other side of the hill.

“I also make icons. In the afternoon I write. I describe the hermit life; I jot down my thoughts,” he told Piotrowicz.

Janikowski was the eleventh such hermit to reside at the hermitage on Cierniak Hill, carrying on a tradition that began in 1853, when Ernö Haucke moved into the chapel there five years after it was built. It was later extended into a hermitage, which was renovated in the 1990s.

According to the Polish Catholic News Agency (KAI), there are now only eight hermits living in Poland, all of them female. In 2018 there were four female hermits and two male hermits, including Janikowski. The other male hermit, Leszek Niewiadomski, died in 2020.

Main image credit: Merlin/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 3.0)

Anna Hackett

Anna Hackett is an assistant editor at Notes from Poland. She is a recent graduate of European Studies from Trinity College Dublin and has had previous journalistic experience with the Irish Independent News & Media group.