Polish Coat of Arms: Herb, Clans and Your Own Crest

The Polish herb: one coat of arms, many families

The Polish word for a coat of arms is herb. It came into Polish through the Czech erb, from the German Erbe, "inheritance", and it first appears in a royal document in 1415. What makes Polish heraldry different from almost everywhere else is who could use a herb.

In England, Scotland or Germany, a coat of arms belongs to one person or one family line. In the old Kingdom of Poland and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, all the noble (szlachta) families who bore the same arms formed a heraldic clan, a ród herbowy. Members of a clan were often not related by blood at all. A clan's arms could be shared by several dozen families, and several hundred was not unusual. Armorials list more than six hundred surnames under the Topór arms and more than eight hundred under Leliwa.

Each herb also has its own name, which usually comes from the clan's battle cry, its ancestral seat or a pun on the picture. That is why you will see a Polish noble written as, for example, Jan Kowalski herbu Topór, "Jan Kowalski of the Topór coat of arms". The surname and the arms are two separate things.

How families joined a clan

Clans grew by adoption. The most famous example is the Union of Horodło in 1413, when 47 Lithuanian noble families were adopted into 47 Polish heraldic clans and began to use their coats of arms. Foreign families who were granted Polish nobility, called indygenat, joined the system the same way. Over the centuries, adoptions and grants turned nearly every Polish clan into a heraldic clan of unrelated families rather than a single bloodline.

Many Polish charges also look unlike Western heraldry. Lots of them grew out of old linear property marks, and they were simplified into the horseshoes, arrowheads, crescents and stars that fill Polish armorials. A few well known herbs:

• Topór: a silver axe on red. Its name simply means "axe".
• Leliwa: a gold crescent with a six-pointed star between its horns, on blue.
• Ostoja: two crescents facing away from a sword, on red, with records going back to the 13th century.
• Ślepowron: a raven standing on a horseshoe and cross, shared by hundreds of families.

So is there a coat of arms for my surname?

Usually not in the way gift shops suggest. A surname shared today by many families says little about whether any one of them belonged to a heraldic clan, and most Polish ancestors were not szlachta at all. Kowalski, the second most common surname in Poland, simply comes from kowal, "smith", and Nowak, the most common, means "newcomer". The March Constitution of 1921 also stopped recognizing privileges of birth and coats of arms of nobility, so modern Poland has no heraldic office granting arms to families.

If your family does have a documented herb, it is a lovely thing to research through parish and nobility records. Either way, the honest choice for a crest you will hang on the wall is to design your own: your name, your colors and a motto your family actually says. Do not copy a clan's herb exactly, because it is someone else's heritage.

The White Eagle and Polish colors

The arms of Poland are a crowned white eagle with a golden beak and talons on a red shield. The modern design goes back to the late 1920s, and its crown, removed under communist rule, was restored in 1990. A legend tells of Lech, who found a white eagle on its nest against a red sunset and named his settlement Gniezno, from gniazdo, "nest". White and red are still the national colors.

Those are state arms, protected by Polish law, so give your crest its own design: an eagle in silver on green or blue, or a different emblem in white and red. The examples on this page all keep heraldry's rule of tincture, a metal (silver or gold) on a color, never color on color. The eagle coat of arms guide covers eagles from Rome to Poland, and the meanings guide explains every color and emblem.

Mottos

Polish clans were known by battle cries more than mottos, so a motto is yours to write. The words Bóg, Honor, Ojczyzna (God, Honor, Fatherland) are famous from Polish military banners, and many families write a short English line instead. Mottos in the Studio can be up to 48 characters. Exploring roots next door too? See the German family crest guide.

Design a Polish crest

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