WOJCIECH HENRYK PAWLIK

Jagiellonian University professor of geology, miner's son who read the stories in coal

As a boy in Nikiszowiec, Wojciech Pawlik was told never to touch the lumps of coal his father brought home on his boots, and so naturally he kept the ones with leaves inside.

The leaves were three hundred million years old. The boy did not know that yet; he only knew they were beautiful, ferns pressed into black stone as if between the pages of a book, and that nobody else at school seemed interested. His father, Henryk, a miner at the Wieczorek colliery, would not explain them, but he cleared a shelf for them. By fourteen Wojciech had a catalogue. By nineteen he had a place to study geology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, the first in the family to leave the district for anything except the mine.

He took his doctorate in 1987 on the fossil plants of the Upper Silesian Coal Basin and spent thirty-five years at the Faculty of Geography and Geology, becoming a full professor in 2003. He taught palaeobotany, mapped coal seams with his students, and wrote a popular children's book about ferns in coal that sold mostly in Silesia, mostly, he said, to retired miners buying it for their grandchildren. He was a generous supervisor, a tuneless baritone at Christmas parties, and a collector of student theses with good jokes in the acknowledgements.

He married Beata in 1983, and they raised Piotr and Agnieszka in a flat near the Błonia meadow in Kraków, with a window box of red geraniums and, by the front door, a fern fossil in a shoebox lid. Every Barbórka, on 4 December, he drove to Nikiszowiec to stand beside his father; after Henryk died in 2019 he went anyway, and laid a lump of coal tied with red ribbon on the grave. He was a quiet man whose gift was making other people feel that their work mattered.

Wojciech died on 19 July 2025 in Kraków after a short illness, with Beata and the children beside him. As he asked, he was buried in Katowice-Janów next to his parents, with a fern leaf in his pocket. He leaves Beata, Piotr, Agnieszka, two grandchildren and a generation of geologists who say, when a rock puzzles them, 'What would Pawlik have asked?'

“A rock is only a very patient witness.”