Ossolińskich, ZNiO), or the Ossolineum is a Polish cultural foundation, publishing house, archival institute and a research centre of national significance founded in 1817 in Lwów (now Lviv).

[3] Although its origin may be traced to the foreign imposed partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 18th century, the institute's actual history dates from 1817 in the former Polish city of Lwów, then known as Lemberg, capital of Galicia, a province of Austria-Hungary (now Lviv in western Ukraine).

[4] Due to continued existential ordeals provoked by two world wars and other military and political conflicts, such as the ethnic cleansing of the Polish population of the Eastern Borderlands (Kresy) after the annexation of one-third of Poland's landmass in 1939, much of the library and other collections were plundered, scattered or deliberately destroyed.

It is the repository of manuscripts of some of the foremost Polish scientists, writers and poets, including: Nicolaus Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, Jan Kochanowski, Adam Mickiewicz, Adam Asnyk, Jan Kasprowicz, Władysław Reymont, Stefan Żeromski, Juliusz Słowacki, and in particular Henryk Sienkiewicz, whose chief publisher it has been.

Ossoliński who was a politician, writer and researcher had already devoted his long life to building and cataloguing an extremely rich library collection, consisting of books, manuscripts, prints and coins.

It was only upon mature consideration and after observing developments since the Congress of Vienna that he opted for Lwów, as the most suitable place in which to house his 52 crates of materials having obtained prior approval of the Austrian emperor, Francis I.

[4] The National Ossoliński Institute had been located from its foundation until 1945 in the former convent and church buildings of the Carmelite Order of nuns in Lwów at 2, Ossolińscy street, (since renamed vulytsia Stefanyka).

[7] It housed a clandestine Polish printing works in the early 1840s, and had exclusive rights for publishing textbooks under the relative Galician autonomy.

There were also individual smaller archives and book collections deposited at the Ossolineum by grand families such as the: Jabłonowski, Piniński, Pawlikowski, Skarbek, Balzer, Sapieha, Lubomirski and Mniszech.

After the Russian Revolution and the collapse of Austria-Hungary, before World War I had even ended, Galicia was the scene of further major more localised armed conflict.

[9] After the takeover of Lwów by the Soviet Union in the September 1939 attack on Poland, the Communist Party nationalized and redistributed all private property.

The manuscript collection of Lwów's own scholars was included in the move: Wojciech Kętrzyński, Ludwik Bernacki, Oswald Balzer, Karol Szajnocha along with the archive of the Galician activist peasant movement of Bolesław and Maria Wysłouch.

[14][15] The Ossolineum cargo reached German occupied Kraków during March and April 1944, with the intention of safe storage in a cellar of the Jagiellonian Library during the expected military actions.

Only a small part of the library and archival material was transported from Lviv to Wrocław during 1946–1947 as a "gift from the Ukrainian people to the Polish nation".

Among the deeply questionable decisions to withhold documents were: In Lviv stayed a priceless collection of the Polish press, which lay unprotected and "temporarily" stored for 50 years in the Jesuit Saints Peter and Paul Church.

This collection was subsequently deliberately destroyed as a part of the Soviet tendency to eradicate any evidence of Polish heritage and its 600-year role in the history of Lviv.

The Wrocław city authorities allocated a former German secondary Catholic boys school, which had ceased to function in 1945, as the main building for the Ossolineum in the old St. Matthew's Academy at 37, Szewska street.

Two further buildings were later provided, one at 24, Sołtysowicka Street and the other a Museum and exhibition space at "Kamienica pod Złotym Słońcem" at 6, Rynek ('The House under the Golden Sun' at no.

After the "Agrarian reform Act" 1945 in Poland which abolished landed estates, the main source of finance for the institute's maintenance dried up so the Budget took over responsibility in the new order of the Polish People's Republic.

When the representative of the original owners of Mickiewicz's epic, the Tarnowski family, came to reclaim their "deposit" of the Polish national bard's manuscript after the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, its destiny seemed on a knife-edge.

[21][22] Even before de-merging from the Polish Academy of Science, the publishing arm of the National Ossoliński Institute continued its independent publishing operation and has resumed its popular world literary classics series, Biblioteka Narodowa, as well as major publishing projects, such as Roman Aftanazy's monumental work of reference Dzieje rezydencji na dawnych kresach Rzeczypospolitej - History of Residences in Poland's Former Eastern Borderlands, (1991–1997), in eleven volumes by voivodship listing, illustrating and describing the cultural heritage contained in the myriad estates and grand residences in the once Polish Kresy and Inflanty regions.

The Lubomirski collection in Lwów was made up of: Representatives of the Polish school of art were: Bacciarelli, Brandt, Fałat, Juliusz and Wojciech Kossak, Lampi, Matejko and his first canvas, depicting the Union of Lublin, Piotr Michałowski, Norblin, Aleksander Orłowski, Kazimierz Pochwalski and Leon Wyczółkowski.