Poland was in ruins after the war. The automobile was just replacing the mule when suddenly both were replaced by German tanks and then by Russian tanks. When it was all over, Kronyk Butycz was long itching to leave his small and devistated village outside Bydgoszcz.
His late brother, Maksymilian Butcyz left behind a bicycle but the frame was badly crumpled from an encounter with a German tank. Family legend has it that the tank fared even worse from the encounter. Kronyk replaced the damaged tubes at the workshop of the village plumber-who fortunately left the door unlocked when he laft to fetch more solder and instead found another form of lead which was moving rather quickly at the time.
With his brother's bike repaired and all of his belongings in his improvised potato sack panniers, Kronyk left the village. He had only just made it to Bydgoszcz when his front wheel landed in a crater left by artillery and he was thrown from his bike. His top tube and down tube braved the impact-they were thick stove pipe which he soldered into place at the plumber's shop. His fork however was badly bent. He pushed his worldly heap to the city's only bike shop which also repaired machines of both agriculture and of war. Having no way of paying for a new fork, he entered into an apprenticeship there. Thusly, a legend was born.
It was apparent from the start that Butcyz was driven to build bicycles, as if from behind by a ceaseless sensation. He was a man who couldn't sit still and he spent every day at the torch or by the drafting table, trying to scratch out just a little more from the limited materials at hand. He never found the relief he sought when he set out from his village in the summer of 1945, but in those few kilometers he traveled he found a long and successful career and work for decades with the same passion as when he first threw his leg over Maksymilian's bike. He was known throughout the eastern bloc for his frames and he even produced several batches of frames of a popular model he called the "Pynczanrol".
Unfortunately he is all but unknown to the western world today. A modern collector could be forgiven for mistaking one of his original builds as a modern imitation , criticizing it as a half-baked anachronistic mashup of forms which are loosely connected by a nostalgia for cycling cliches from the first half of the twentieth century. Butcyz built through hard times , and ideas which we associate with the 1910's,20's,30's and so on were all alive simultaneously in Butcyz shop. His progressive , sometimes almost prophetic geometries were well ahead of their time. Kronyk Butcyz had a mastery-an affliction-which transcended decades.
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