EN
Contemporary factual evidence treats the creation of the Society for the Protection of the European Bison as the beginning of the European bison restitution. The event that is considered decisive for this process was Jan Sztolcman’s speech at the Congress of Nature Conservation in Paris in the spring of 1923. Thanks to the search for documents stored in the Archives of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in Krakow as well as articles published in years 1919−1924 in the press dedicated to forest, hunting and nature protection, it was established that the discussion on the necessity and possible ways of restoring this species to nature began in Poland as early as in 1921. In 1922, a private fund initiative arose to restore the European bison to the Białowieża Primeval Forest, curb the prevailing poaching, and recreate the former reputation of this hunting ground. It is possible that this concept – promoted by Władysław Janta−Połczyński – was treated as competitive to the creation of a representative hunting ground in Białowieża Primeval Forest planned from May 1921. For this reason, it was blocked by the government, and the funds donated to the restitution of European bison were not utilised. This delayed the actual beginning of the restitution of this species in the Białowieża Primeval Forest by several years, and the activities of hunters gathered around Władysław Janta−Połczyński at that time are now completely unknown. The article introduces some details of this concept, but also presents an unknown document from 1921, which shows that there was a notion of restoring European bison in the Białowieża Primeval Forest among state officials already at that time.