Gerard Antoni Ciołek

Gerard Antoni Ciołek was born in Wyżnica, a small town in the Austro-Hungarian Duchy of Bukovina (in present-day Ukraine).

In 1921, the Ciołeks and their two children left Bukovina for the newly established Republic of Poland, and settled in the southern city of Lublin.

In 1929, on graduating from the Stanisław Staszic Lycee in Lublin [2], Gerard Ciołek embarked on tertiary studies in the country's capital, Warsaw.

Initially he intended to take up drawing and painting (especially "en plein air" watercolours) at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (Akademia Sztuk Pięknych).

In June 1939, he married Regina Najder (1917–2005) from an extensive family of aristocrats, landowners, railway and sugar refinery engineers, doctors, and businessmen from Kiev and south-western Ukraine, which was then part of the Russian empire.

At the beginning of World War II, in September 1939, Ciołek served in the Polish Army as a Second Lieutenant (2Lt) in an air-defense unit in Wilno.

In early 1944, he earned his Ph.D. for his research on the effect of the physical environment on the forms of villages and folk architecture in Poland, Belarus and Ukraine.