How the Lace Art of Koniaków Teaches Us the Art of Seeing

koronka koniakowska ze zbiorow marii gwarek fot marek skorupski forum-0428638709-1920.jpg, default, Lace from Koniaków, Maria Gwarek's collection, photo: Marek Skorupski / Forum, How the Lace Art of Koniaków Teaches Us the Art of Seeing

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Traditional lace is white and delicate, made as much from thread as it is from air. In Poland, this special craft intertwines 19th-century customs, the world’s heartfelt admiration, and the history of women’s emancipation.

In the fingers of a lace maker, the crochet hook flashes so quickly that it is hard to follow along as an observer, especially since it’s as thin as a needle. The thinner the thread, the thinner the hook needed. It makes the lace that emerges even more delicate and exquisite.

Koniaków, a mountain village in southwestern Poland, has about three and a half thousand residents – half of whom are women. Roughly seven hundred of these women, from young girls to seniors, know how to make lace decorations. This art, having appeared in the village almost two hundred years ago, has experienced a strong revival over the last decade. Possible reasons include recent design and fashion trends for drawing on folk patterns, alongside a growing appreciation for handmade crafts. After years of mass consumption, we have started to turn our attention anew to the originality and quality of what we buy (as Ania Cymer wrote about in her recent article on the kilim revival).

The renaissance of contemporary lace also stems from its artistic merits. While rooted in traditional craft, these days lace making in Koniaków has attained the status of art, as evidenced by contemporary lace artists like Zuzanna Ptak, Dorota Cieślar and Lucyna Bytow – there’s also Beata Legierska, born in 1971, who in September 2025 showcased her works and ran workshops at the Cheongju Craft Biennale in South Korea.

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The Chamber in Memory of Maria Gwarek, Lace Museum, Koniaków, 2013, photo: Jakub Porzycki / Forum

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There are several methods when it comes to making lace, but in Koniaków, it is crocheted, or ‘heklowane’ in the local dialect, using multiple crochet hooks of varying thickness – every true lace maker has a whole range of hooks on hand. Craftsmanship is crucial, but imagination and sensitivity are even more important. Creating lace teaches one to attentively observe nature and notice small details.

Every new lace ornament begins with fascination. In an interview, Beata Legierska described how girls in Koniaków learn the craft: ‘A girl walks through meadows, collects daisies, brings them home, and tries to crochet them with her mother.’ She calls her own work a ‘living thread’ that transfers meadow flowers and insects into lace products. Koniaków lace is neither trying to rally against anything nor warn its observers about some issue. Its goal is something else no less important – to beautify life and awaken sensitivity to the world’s beauty.

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Lace makers from Koniaków in the Żywiec Beskids, 1977, photo: Woody Ochnio / Forum

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Where is Koniaków’s lace from?

For centuries, lace decorations – whether created in Italy, England, France, Poland, Belgium or Spain – were luxury goods. Imported from Europe to China in the 16th–17th centuries, they were valued in silver taels (so-called Chinese ounces), just like jewellery and other luxury items were, not as ordinary fabric.

Their high value is also reflected in a legend about one of the wealthiest women in 17th-century Poland, Maria Zofia Czartoryska, owner of 700 villages and 30 towns – she is said to have exchanged a palace on Krakowskie Przedmieście in Warsaw (apparently today’s Krasiński Palace) for lace purchased from a merchant called Reskur. The price seems exorbitant, but it may have been justified. Intricate lace in 18th-century Poland was not only handmade from silk but sometimes used gold or silver thread. This was a practice used in only a handful of places in the world.

Supposedly, the first lace goods were brought to Poland by the Italian Queen Bona Sforza after she married King Zygmunt the Old. Her grandson King Władysław IV Vasa is wearing an elaborate lace collar in a portrait painted by Rubens. For centuries, lace was an exclusive ornament, available only to the richest people. They were made exclusively by aristocrats and nuns in cloisters. They only reached villages and towns in the mid-19th century, when lace could be made by machines en masse. But they remained a festive garment element only used on special occasions.

The earliest mentions of lace in Koniaków date back 200 years and concern the tradition of married women wearing lace caps. In old Poland, ‘oczepiny’ (the ritual of giving away the bride’s cap) was the most important wedding custom in the countryside – it symbolised a farewell to maidenhood and becoming a married woman. It took place in the evening or around midnight, when an elderly woman would lead the bride to a separate room. She would then ceremoniously remove the bridal flower wreath and replace it with a tightly tied cap, after which a scarf was tied under the chin and the back of the head.

The bride then returned to the wedding party. From that moment on, she was meant to always wear the cap in public – not only to avoid her neighbours’ criticism, but also due to a superstition that neglecting this custom might bring lightning and fire upon the household (a severe punishment for not wearing a head covering). The only decoration on the cap was some lace on the front that covered her forehead – unsurprisingly, over time the machine lace used evolved into a finer, more beautiful lace. It’s probable that young Koniaków girls learned how to make lace while working in aristocratic households.

Selected Works by Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz – Image Gallery

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Today, caps with lace forehead pieces are still being made by Koniaków women, although their more popular creations are round doilies known as ‘różyczki’, elongated table runners, lampshades, gloves and collars. They even make lace thongs, which became infamous worldwide at the turn of the 21st century – this ‘lingerie scandal’ was covered by Time, The Wall Street Journal and Le Monde. Many local artists protested against using traditional lace fabric for underwear, saying it was a symbol of tradition and should be treated as sacred. Long after the heated debates about exploiting folk art died down, the Koniaków lace thong sales have continued – but, unlike the village’s floral doilies, they have not achieved the status of art.

A lace way of life

To make lace, a tight chain has to be formed from the thread wound around the crochet hook and the lacemaker’s finger. Loops extend from the chain – these are various kinds of stitches, such as posts, half-posts or popcorn stitches. The combinations of these loops – eleven of one kind, nine of another – form motifs such as flowers, snowflakes, leaves or stars. The elements are connected by tiny spider-like bridges made of lace. Flower by flower, a round doily takes shape, dubbed a rose or ‘różyczka’ in Koniaków. It resembles a Hindu mandala not only in its shape and radial composition, but also because both carry symbolic meaning, evoking a sense of calm and harmony.

Although certain motifs are common – especially roses, lilies, daisies, leaves, twigs, pine cones, stars and suns – no two Koniaków doilies or tablecloths are alike. There are no ready patterns or templates to copy. Making lace is like speaking or writing – the motifs are the words we use, but each lacemaker creates their own sentences.

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The world’s biggest lace, endorsed by the Guinness Book of Records, photo: Jakub Porzycki / Forum

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In 2013, five Koniaków artists – Marta Haratyk, Danuta Krasowska, Renata Krasowska, Mariola Legierska and Urszula Rybka – created the world’s largest lace doily. Taking over four months to complete, their beautiful ‘rose’ has over eight thousand motifs, is five metres in diameter, and uses 50 kilometres of thread. It is displayed at the Koniaków Lace Centre.

The careers of lace artists start in early childhood. Both Ptak and Legierska have said in interviews that they created their first doilies as children. Skills are passed from mother to daughter, grandmother to granddaughter, and from older neighbours to younger ones.

Today in Koniaków, the memory of Maria Gwarek, an exceptional 19th-century artist and lace craft populariser, is alive and well. After she passed away in 1962, her family home became the Lace Museum. Not only can you see beautiful ‘lace roses’ there, but also the last work on which she was working when she died: a surgically-fine silk doily intended for Queen Elizabeth II of England. Her late student Helena Kamieniarz would say that Gwarek often urged local girls to learn lace-making by explaining that it was a skill that would stay with them their whole life.

The belief that women should have a craft skill – giving them the ability to earn independently and decide their own fate – was the foundation for many lace schools established in mountain regions during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The most famous of these was founded in Zakopane in 1883 by the distinguished actress Helena Modrzejewska, renowned not only in Poland but also in England and the United States (where she was known as Helena Modjeska). At the National Lace School she established, the teachers for the rural girls were lecturers from the prestigious Kraków Academy of Fine Arts. Modrzejewska, a great admirer of mountain folklore, also promoted thread decoration to a global audience – many photographs show her in gowns adorned with lace. This was meaningful – her costumes, both on stage and in private life, attracted wide attention. In the United States, her richly decorated dresses were even called ‘à la Modjeska’.

Schools and promotion transformed lace-making from a home craft into a way for mountain village women to fight poverty and avoid hunger, homelessness and begging. Money earned from lace sales bought shoes and schoolbooks for children – items that were rare a century ago in poor mountain villages. Lace had gained an ethical as well as artistic and aesthetic meaning.

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Beata Legierska during an exhibition of her work at the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, 2018, photo: Paweł Supernak / PAP

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Painting with a needle

Beata Legierska made her first crochet chain at six and was soon crocheting flowers and doilies in the years that followed. She was almost eighteen when she first seriously considered becoming a lacemaker – her then-boyfriend (later husband) had brought her an old and holey, but beautifully crocheted, lace collar by Maria Gwarek. He asked if she could repair it. She agreed and spent weeks repairing by trial and error, counting stitches, crocheting and undoing. ‘The collar was made with patterns I didn’t know, and I didn’t know how to approach them, plus they’d been made with a fine thread the likes of which I’d never worked with before,’ she told the website Sztuka i Styl in an interview.

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The Koniaków lacemakers Beata Legierska & Marta Legierska presenting lace designs, photo: Alina Świeży-Sobel / Forum

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In the years that followed, Legierska won many awards, including the Special Prize of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage for her contributions to folk culture. In May 2025, she received Poland’s most prestigious folk art creator award – the Oskar Kolberg Prize.

She is one of the only Koniaków lacemakers focused on traditional caps, just like the one that began her story. Legierska made one, along with a corset and veil, for the fashion house Dior – every motif she used for it appeared only once in the design. She also creates jewellery combining lace with amber and crystal, and even produces lace paintings.

Like her role model Maria Gwarek, she believes Koniaków girls should learn lace tradition – not to buy children shoes as in the past, but to preserve the tradition for the future. In an interview with the website Ślązag, she also stresses that lace, like any art, is the intellectual property of the artist. It is her creative composition, and that is one of the reasons she signs her lace paintings. Her example may well be the next step for women’s emancipation in folk art, which is yet to come to fruition.

Originally written in Polish, Aug 2025, translated by Adam Zulawski, Nov 2025

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