Skeleton Of Medieval Giantess Unearthed From Polish Cemetery

Skeleton Of Medieval Giantess Unearthed From Polish Cemetery

Just outside of the Medieval church of the Ostrów Lednicki stronghold in Poland, archaeologists have unearthed the strange burial of a giantess. The woman’s skeleton showed that she reached a towering height of 7’2″ but also that her short life was full of traumatic injuries and disease.

The giantess was found in a cemetery that was once used solely by the elite of the area: dignitaries, the very wealthy, and people connected with Bolesław the Brave, the king of Poland in the early 11th century, and with the local Piast ruling dynasty. By the late 12th century, though, the cemetery saw more and more burials of commoners, with over 2,500 skeletons recovered at the site of Ostrów Lednicki Island.

But in spite of the elite nature of the cemetery, its most famous resident is a woman from a lower social class who died in her late 20s. Writing recently in the book New Developments in the Bioarchaeology of Care, archaeologists Magdalena Matczak and Tomasz Kozłowski detail the intriguing skeleton and the odd nature of the grave.

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Magdalena Grodzka-Guzkowska - A Lucky Woman

From CBS News:

Magdalena Grodzka-Guzkowska's journey of self-discovery is pieced together from interviews with her and people close to her, emails made available to The Associated Press, information provided by Yad Vashem, her memoir "Lucky Woman," and documentary footage.

Decades after she helped save the rabbi and about a dozen others, mostly children, by teaching them Christian customs, Grodzka-Guzkowska discovered documents in an old suitcase showing that her father and other close family members were Jews. Growing up she knew vaguely that one of her great grandmothers was Jewish but nothing more about those roots.

The Enigma of Stephanie Rosenthal

From the Jerusalem Post Magazine:

We are all used to the phenomenon of the wandering Jew, and to finding a Jew in almost every nook and cranny. But who would have imagined that in the 1920s, a Polish Jewish woman was writing a best-seller in Chinese that was said to be “going like matza water” because half a million copies had been sold.

Prof. Irene Eber, an eminent scholar of Chinese literature and history and of Jews in China, was reading a fascinating travelogue by Mejlekh Ravitch, a Yiddish poet from Warsaw, written while he traveled in China for six months during 1935. Ravitch mentioned having met a landsman, one of the few women writers in the country. This discovery set Eber on a search to uncover the identity of her landsman as well.