For Zygmunt Mądry

Zygmunt Kukulski (1890-1944), characterised by Julian Krzyżanowski as follows: a prolific producer of "reprints, studies, editions and contributions", an excellent organiser of scientific life, thanks to his efforts a monument to Kochanowski was erected in the Lublin market square.

He was born on 2 May 1890 in Jasło. In 1909, he began studying law at the Jagiellonian University. A year later, he moved to the Faculty of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University, where he studied Polish philology and pedagogy.

In 1914, he was called up into the Austrian army. He returned from the war as an invalid officer. Wounded in the battle of Rokitna, he never regained full fitness; several subsequent operations resulted in the amputation of his shot leg.

In 1920 he moved permanently to Lublin, where he worked as a teacher of Polish literature and history at the Stanisław Staszic State Gymnasium. Jan Dobrzański, who was a teacher at that school, said the following about Kukulski: "Despite his physical ailments and various jobs and activities, he was always composed and even-tempered. In relation to young people, he combined high requirements with understanding and considerate kindness. [...] His colleagues valued his qualities of character, his scientific ambitions, they admired his almost Benedictine diligence".

In the school year 1929/1930, Kukulski was the principal of the Stanisław Staszic State Gimnazjum, and in 1931 he became the principal of the Lublin School.

He was also a professor of pedagogy at the Catholic University of Lublin. He is one of the precursors of pedagogy as a science in Poland. His scientific interests focused mainly on the history of upbringing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the reception of the views of Jan Henryk Pestalozzi in Poland and the pedagogical activity of Stanisław Staszic.

He played an important role in the cultural and scientific life of Lublin. As Stanisław Tync wrote, he was "the soul of various initiatives, a busy and reliable manager of various scientific undertakings". Together with Professor J. Krzyżanowski and Professor L. Kamykowski, he reactivated the Society of Friends of Science in Lublin in 1927 and was its president until the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1929, he headed the Committee for the Construction of a Monument to Jan Kochanowski in Lublin. The idea arose in connection with the 400th anniversary of the poet's birth, which fell in 1930. As chairman of the Committee, Kukulski led to the unveiling of Kochanowski's monument in front of the Crown Tribunal on 27 September 1931.