Symbolika roku jubileuszowego Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego
Symbolism of the Jagiellonian University's jubilee

"the goat's horn" or "the day of atonement throughout your lands"

Summary/Abstract: The habit of celebrating jubilees highlights not only the importance of the specific enterprise, but also its holiness, and dates back to the biblical tradition. We owe our current use of the word "jubilee," in Hebrew "goat's horn" ( ל וֵֹ בי , yôbel, in Polish: "kozi róg"), to the first translation of the Bible into Latin, so-called Vulgata, where we can find the general rules for the "jubilee year." In 2014 the Jagiellonian University celebrated its thirteenth "Pentecost," meaning "holy year," since the initiative of King Casimir the Great to establish a university in Krakow as a new foothold of Western thought in Eastern Europe. The course of history was hereby significantly changed in this part of the world. The University played a substantial role in the history of Poland, especially following the loss of independence in the 18th Century. The Jagiellonian University was an important part of the events of 1864 and 1900, bursts of both university and national self-expression in the face of Austro-Hungarian domination. The celebrations of the renewed Krakow Academy in 1900 became a pretext to demonstrate wider national unity across the partitions. In this way the Polish notion of "kozi róg" developed its metaphorical sense. Today the history of the Jagiellonian University can be understood as a model of institutional continuity for modern Poland, liberated from the yoke of "national" and "real" socialisms in 1989, in the middle of the road to the first jubilee of a once again free and democratic state.

• Details
• Contents