1. Emilia Plater raised a small unit, participated in several engagements in present-day Lithuania, and received the rank of captain in the Polish insurgent forces.
30 Facts About Emilia Plater
1. 2.
Emilia Plater was a leader in an uprising and her story became widely publicized and inspired a number of works of art and literature.
3.
Emilia Plater has been venerated by Polish artists and by the nation at large as a symbol of women fighting for the national cause.
4.
Emilia Plater has been referred to as the Lithuanian or Polish Joan of Arc.
5.
Emilia Plater is described as either Polish, Polish-Lithuanian or Lithuanian.
6.
Emilia Plater's parents, Count Franciszek Ksawery Plater and Anna von der Mohl, divorced in 1815 when she was nine years old.
7.
Emilia Plater-Zyberk served as vice-governor of the Vilna Governorate under governor Franciszek Ksawery Drucki-Lubecki.
8.
Emilia Plater's tutors included Wilhelm von Dalwig, captain and military engineer working on the Daugavpils Fortress.
9.
Emilia Plater was fascinated by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, who she could read in the original German language.
10.
Emilia Plater was raised in an environment that valued the history of Poland, and her literary heroes included Princess Wanda and Adam Mickiewicz's Grazyna.
11.
Emilia Plater admired Laskarina Bouboulina, a woman who became one of the icons of the Greek uprising against the Ottomans, Polish fighter Anna Dorota Chrzanowska, as well as Joan of Arc.
12.
Emilia Plater was deeply interested in Ruthenian and Belarusian folk culture and had contacts and friends in the Filaret Association.
13.
Emilia Plater's mother died a year later; her father remarried and refused to even meet his daughter.
14.
Emilia Plater cut her hair, prepared a uniform for herself and organized and equipped a group of volunteers.
15.
Emilia Plater's unit was composed of roughly 280 infantry, 60 cavalry and several hundred peasants armed with war scythes.
16.
Emilia Plater allegedly replied that she had no intention of taking off her uniform until her fatherland was fully liberated.
17.
Emilia Plater's decision was accepted and she was made a commanding officer of the 1st Company of the Lithuanian 25th Infantry Regiment.
18.
Emilia Plater was promoted to the rank of captain, the highest rank awarded to a woman at that time.
19.
Emilia Plater's unit was in charge of protecting the baggage train with supplies.
20.
Emilia Plater vocally criticized that decision, refused to follow orders and instead decided to try to break through to Warsaw and continue the fight.
21.
However, after separating from the main force, accompanied by Maria Raszanowicz and her cousin Cezary Emilia Plater, she became seriously ill.
22.
Emilia Plater was buried in the small town of Kapciamiestis near Lazdijai.
23.
Emilia Plater had to be rescued at Kaunas, though accounts vary.
24.
The first poem about Emilia Plater was composed by Konstanty Gaszynski in June 1831.
25.
Emilia Plater was featured as a role model in the Woman in the Nineteenth Century by the women's rights advocate Margaret Fuller.
26.
Emilia Plater became the theme of paintings by several artists of the epoch, among them Hippolyte Bellange, Achille Deveria, Philipp Veit, and Wojciech Kossak.
27.
Emilia Plater has been depicted on the 50 zloty in 1940.
28.
Emilia Plater was depicted on the Second Polish Republic's 20 zloty note.
29.
Emilia Plater is a patron of 14 schools in Poland and several in Lithuania.
30.
Artistic and historical exhibitions commemorating Emilia Plater have been taking place in Belarus, although her figure remains largely ignored by the official state ideology of the Lukashenko regime.