Dariusz Kołodziejczyk

Dariusz Włodzimierz Kołodziejczyk was born in Warsaw on 25 May 1962. His father, Ryszard Kołodziejczyk, was also a historian, and his mother was Irena Wiktoria Kołodziejczyk, née Skulimowska (1928 to 2020).

He studied at the Institute of History of the University of Warsaw, graduating in 1986. In 1990 he received his doctorate there for a dissertation on the Ottoman province (eyalet) of Kamieniec in Podolia from 1672 to 1699, supervised by Antoni Mączak. He regarded Mączak, Marian Małowist and the Turkish historian Halil İnalcık as his teachers. In 2001 he completed his habilitation on the basis of his edition of Ottoman-Polish diplomatic documents, and in 2013 he received the title of professor.

Kołodziejczyk joined the Institute of History of the University of Warsaw in 1988 and rose from assistant to professor of the university in 2003. He served as the institute's academic secretary from 1996 and as the director's representative for international relations from 2002. He twice headed its Department of Early Modern History, from 2010 to 2014 and from 2019 to 2022, and was director of the whole institute, now the Faculty of History, from 2012 to 2016. From 2010 he was also a professor at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

He was a research associate at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in 1991 and 1992 and at the Near East Institute of the University of Munich in 1994 and 1995, a visiting associate professor at the University of Notre Dame in 2004, an invited lecturer at the Collège de France in 2011 and an international visitor at the Stanford Humanities Center in 2021 and 2022. He also held a visiting post at Hokkaido University.

His research covered the diplomatic history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Khanate, frontiers and borderlands, and the comparative history of empires. His principal books were Podole pod panowaniem tureckim (1994), on Ottoman rule in Podolia; Ottoman-Polish Diplomatic Relations (15th to 18th Century): An Annotated Edition of 'Ahdnames and Other Documents (Brill, 2000); The Ottoman Survey Register of Podolia (ca. 1681) (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2004); The Crimean Khanate and Poland-Lithuania: International Diplomacy on the European Periphery (Brill, 2011); and Zaproszenie do osmanistyki (2013), a guide to the sources left by the Commonwealth's Muslim neighbours. He co-edited Universal Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2012) with Peter Fibiger Bang and co-wrote Orzeł i półksiężyc (2014), a survey of 600 years of Polish writing about Turkey, with Adam Balcer and Natalia Królikowska. In his later research he studied Central and Eastern Europeans in Asia, especially in the Jesuit order and the Dutch East India Company, and the region's part in early modern globalisation.

Kołodziejczyk kept his private life out of public view, and little about it has been published beyond his family background as the son of the historian Ryszard Kołodziejczyk. He lived and worked in Warsaw throughout his career.

Dariusz Kołodziejczyk died on 16 October 2026, aged 64. The Faculty of History of the University of Warsaw announced his death the same day. Colleagues writing on social media said that he died after a long illness; no cause of death was officially made public, and the place of death was not reported. Funeral arrangements had not been announced at the time of writing.

The history portal Histmag and the Crimean Tatar news agency QHA published obituaries on 16 October, and tributes came from Polish historians and from Turkish colleagues, who recalled him as a student of Halil İnalcık and an honorary member of the Turkish Historical Society.

Colleagues regarded Kołodziejczyk as one of the most important Polish historians of the Ottoman world of his generation. His editions of Ottoman and Crimean treaties with Poland-Lithuania became standard reference works, and his studies argued that relations between the Commonwealth and its Muslim neighbours were shaped as much by diplomacy and exchange as by war. QHA wrote that his work had brought the lost diplomatic memory of the Crimean Khanate back to light from European archives. His recognition included the Polish Prime Minister's prize (2012), the prize of the Crimean Tatar Bekir Çoban-zade Foundation for the best book on Crimean history (2012), honorary membership of the Turkish Historical Society (2013), the French Ordre national du Mérite (2014), election to the Academia Europaea (2017) and a special award of the journal Przegląd Wschodni for his life's work.