„Gente Rutheno-Polonus – Natione Ukrainica”. Jan Stefan Marian Tokarzewski-Karaszewicz from Tokary – Polish landholder, Ukrainian diplomat and community activist

The article presents the life and work of Jan Stefan Tokarzewski-Karaszewicz (1885-1954), a Polish landowner who came to embrace his Ukrainian identity later in his life. He did so under the influence of the ideology of Ukrainian territorialism proclaimed by Viacheslav Lypyns’kyi, which held that nationality derives from belonging to the land one lives on and whose history one embraces as one’s own. During the early years of Ukrainian statehood, he became involved in the independence movement and served as a diplomat – first under the Hetmanate of Pavlo Skoropadsky and later under the Ukrainian People’s Republic. He served as a counselor at the embassy in Vienna, then in Istanbul, and then as a representative to the UPR in the capital of Turkey. On behalf of the UPR Directorate, he held discussions with the Holy See regarding international recognition of the Ukrainian state. Following the failure of Ukrainian efforts to achieve independence, he became a director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the Ukrainian government-in-exile based in Tarnów (Poland) from January 12, 1922, to September 3, 1924. He then lived in exile in Paris, Rome and London, where he actively participated in Ukrainian social life through his journalistic and academic work. In the 1930s, he collaborated with the Ukrainian Scientific Institute in Warsaw, where he published many valuable Ukrainian documents from the era of the Ukrainian hetmans such as Jan Mazepa and Filip Orłyk. As a devout Roman Catholic and a member of the Order of Malta, he regarded religion as a personal matter of every Ukrainian, but he sought to free the Orthodox Church in Ukraine from its dependence on the Moscow Patriarchate. Although personally attached to conservative and aristocratic traditions, he was able to appreciate the significance of the republican and democratic trends of the time, integrating them with republican principles of governance.