The convent of the Bernardine Nuns in Wilno, founded in 1596 by the Grand Chancellor of Lithuania Lew Sapieha, was closed down by the Russian authorities in 1886. The community was reactivated in 1926, a few years after Poland restored her independence, and again disbanded after World War II, when Wilno became the capital city of Soviet Lithuania. The nuns had to leave Wilno (Vilnius) and their conventual church of St Michael was converted into a museum of architecture (1956). While the stucco side altars were demolished, the marble structure of the main altar (stripped of its paintings) and the founders' tombstones remained intact. The fact that the church was turned into a museum no doubt saved the building from devastation; the movables suffered more, though the extent of the damage is still waiting for an assessment. Many of the paintings, vessels and vestments that used to belong to St Michael's have been put away into museum storehouses and forgotten. The only exception is the holy icon of the Virgin Mary of St Michael's. Transferred in 1992 to the Vilnius Cathedral, it has been made available for the veneration of the faithful. However, its original name and its close links with the Bernardine Church are overshadowed by the icon's new name Madonna Sapieżynska.
The Convent's original chronicle was destroyed during a raid by the army of Tsar Alexei in 1655. An attempt at re-composing it was made in 1671-1674 once the nuns had settled in again in their old convent. The project was initiated by Mother Superior Konstancja Sokolińska, whose resilience and sense of respons-ibility had a decisive role in the community's survival during the war and then in the restoration of the ruined convent. The new chronicle contains a history of the foundation and of the convent during the wars with Muscovy and Sweden; a list of nuns who were members of the congregation between 1596 and 1674; and a detailed description of the church as it looked like in 1674. Later entries, which were discontinued in 1774, record the functioning of the community, but bring hardly any fresh information about its church and the convent.
That does not diminish the value of the chronicle which remains ac excellent source the first hundred years of the convent's history as well as a compeling record of the 1650s, the time of the Russian incursions. The writer evidently knew the things she was writing about from first hand and, thanks to her literary talent succeeded in producing a dramatic narrative, written in a clear, graphic style. Although not averse to displaying her emotions freely, she was scrupulously accurate about her data. This is clear from the way she filled in the gaps that had been left in the first version of the text to check some key facts, names, or dates. The value of the chronicle is greatly enhanced by its abundance of personal details. With the help of that mine of information it has been possible to complement this critical edition with a register of 188 nuns who resided at the convent from its early days until 1774.
The manuscript is an octavo volume, bound in smooth brown leather. Of its 120 leaves seventy-two are written over (mostly on both sides). Their pagination was pencilied in some time after 1945, when the book found its way into the Lithuanian National Historical Archives in Vilnius (Sign. 1135-2-50). Earlier it had belonged to the library of the Wilno Association of the Friends of the Sciences. That collection was put together in 1907-1939; however, the date of the acquisition ot the Chronicle and the name its donor could not be established. What we do know is that it could not have occurred before 1911, when the volume was still in private hands. It may have been in the possession of Father Franciszek Tyczkowski (1891-1982), who in the became Rector of St Michael’s. He produced a complete copy of the Chronicle, which he handed over to the Wróblewski Library in Wilno on 14 January 1938 (now in the MS Department of the Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, Sig. 147-928).
A comparison of the two texts reveals that two last pages with an inventory made in 1678. Prior to 1939 the two texts seem to have attracted hardly any attention, there is at least no mention of them in Polish publications. More recently the manuscript of the Chronicle caught the eye of Lithuanian historians. They used it as a source in their research, but did not provide adequate reference notes to it in their published work. Consequently, the Chronicle has remained hidden away from the interested readers, while of the existence of Father Tyczkowski's copy they were totally ignorant. Therefore, I thought it necessary to complete this critical edition of the manuscript of the Chronicle with the missing fragment, drawn from another document. Although the latter is a secondary record and the only one we have got, t ere can e no about its reliability.