Ignacy Domeyko

Ignacy Domeyko or Domejko, pseudonym: Żegota (, ; 31 July 1802 – 23 January 1889) was a Polish geologist, mineralogist, educator, and founder of the University of Santiago, in Chile. Domeyko spent most of his life, and died, in his adopted country, Chile.

After a youth passed in partitioned Poland, Domeyko participated in the Polish–Russian War 1830–31. Upon Russian victory, he was exiled, spending part of his life in France (where he had gone with a fellow Philomath, Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz) before eventually settling in Chile, whose citizen he became.

He lived some 50 years in Chile and made major contributions to the study of that country's geography, geology and mineralogy. His observations on the circumstances of poverty-stricken miners and of their wealthy exploiters had a profound influence on those who would go on to shape Chile's labor movement.

Domeyko is seen as having had close ties to several countries and thus in 2002, when UNESCO organized a series of commemorations of the 200th anniversary of his birth, he was referred to as "a citizen of the world".

Life Early life

Plaque commemorating the "distinguished son of the Polish nation and eminent citizen of Chile"

Ignacy Domeyko was born in the then Russian partition of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, at Niedźwiadka Wielka Manor near Nieśwież, Minsk Governorate, Imperial Russia (now Karelichy district, Belarus). The Domeyko family held the Polish Dangiel coat of arms. Ignacy's father, Hipolit Domeyko, who was president of the local land court , died when Ignacy was seven years old; the boy's uncles then served as his guardians.

In his youth Ignacy was a subject of the Russian Empire. He had, however, been brought up in the culture of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, a multicultural state whose educated and dominant classes had spoken Polish as a lingua franca. Shortly before Domeyko's birth, the Commonwealth had been dismembered in the partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. For this reason, and because Domeyko subsequently spent most of his life in Chile, he is considered a person of national importance to Poles, Belarusians, Lithuanians, and Chileans.

Domeyko enrolled at Vilnius University, then known as the Imperial University of Vilna, in 1816 as a student of mathematics and physics. The term "Lithuanian" at that time designated any inhabitant, whatever his ethnicity, of the territories of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

In 1884 Domeyko returned for an extended visit to Europe and remained there until 1889, visiting his birthplace and other places in the former Commonwealth, as well as Paris. the mineral domeykite, the shellfish Nautilus domeykus, the dinosaur genus Domeykosaurus, the ammonite Amonites domeykanus, the asteroid 2784 Domeyko, the Cordillera Domeyko mountain range in the Andes, and the Chilean town of Domeyko.

A bronze bust of Domeyko stands in the Casa Central de la Universidad de Chile, of which Domeyko was long-time rector.

In 1992, a plaque in Spanish and Polish was placed on a building at Krakowskie Przedmieście 64, in Warsaw, Poland, commemorating the "distinguished son of the Polish nation and eminent citizen of Chile."

On the 200th anniversary of his birth, UNESCO declared 2002 to be "Ignacy Domeyko Year."