The Badass Story of Simona Kossak, Real Life Forest Witch
Polish ecologist Simona Kossak lived every woman’s dream: alone in a haunted cabin in Europe’s oldest forest with a 400-pound wild hog, a terrorist crow and a hot photographer as her lover.
Polish ecologist Simona Kossak lived every woman’s dream: alone in a haunted cabin in Europe’s oldest forest with a 400-pound wild hog, a terrorist crow and a hot photographer as her lover.
Simona was born in 1943 in Krakow during the German occupation to a family of artists who were a preeettty big deal in their time. Her very birth shook the status quo: she was expected to be born a boy, to carry on the Kosak name into a new generation of Polish artists. Instead, she charted her own path. Compassionate bad bitch that she was, she would spend most of her adult life living in the woods, advocating for the protection of the wildlife that she loved so much.
After earning a degree in zoology from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, she worked in the Mammal Research Institute at Białowieża Forest, a 350,000 primeval forest spanning the board of Poland and Belarus. Barbara Ewa Wysmułek, a friend of Simona’s, recognized in her a yearning for something more. Good ol’ Barb was married to a forest ranger, and she knew of a decrepit home far from civilization that was so Simona.
In the bright white moonlight of a winter night, Ewa, Simona, Ewa’s husband and a hired guide ventured into the deep forest to the cabin. As they approached their final destination, an auroch, or a European Bison crossed their path. From the path emerged a clearing, at the center of which stood Dziedzinka, an abandoned house topped with untouched snow.
Simona later wrote:
It was the first aurochs that I ever saw in my life - I am not counting the ones in the zoo. Well, and this greeting right at the entry into the forest - this monumental aurochs, the whiteness, the snow, the full moon, whitest white everywhere, pretty [...] and the little hut hidden in the little clearing all covered with snow, an abandoned house that no one had lived in for two years. In the middle room, there were no floors; it was generally in ruins. And I looked at this house, all silvered by the moon as it was, romantic, and I said, ‘it’s finished, it’s here or nowhere else!’
Like every woman who knows a good thing when she sees it, Simona went to her boss and demanded Dziedzinka be assigned to her as staff housing. The forest service repaired the home, but it remained without electricity and no running water. Hardcore!
Simona settled into the house and traversed to and from Dziedzinka by motorcycle like an absolute badass. To those who frequented the woods — park staff, ecologists, photographers, hunters — Simona zipping through muddy trails on her bike, nicknamed “The Mosquito,” was a familiar sight.
Soon, Simona would find herself unwillingly cohabitating with a human male when wildlife photographer Lech Wilczek obtained permission from the parks service to occupy half of Dziedzinka. At first, Simona was all like, “What in the actual fuck is this outdoor bro doing in my bubble?!” But, Lech shared her love of the wildlife, and the ice between them thawed when he brought home an orphaned baby wild boar (take notes, gentlemen!).
They christened the boar Żabka — which translates to ‘Frog’ in English — and she grew to be, well, fucking enormous. Photos taken by Lech illustrate the bond between the boar and the two humans who raised her, showing Żabka eating at a table with Simona, cuddling with her in the grass and sleeping in her bed.
Lech and Simona fell in love, and he documented their extraordinary life together over three decades in Białowieżain. During their time in the forest, the pair befriended dozens of wild animals. Among their companions was a crow named Korasek, who terrorized visitors to the forest, attacking people’s heads with his sharp beak and stealing things from their pockets. Samona raised a lynx named Agata — who slept in her bed — and cared for dogs, moose, rats, peacocks and more.
Simona was an uncompromising badass protecting the forest she loved and lived in. When she caught a group of scientists using illegal methods to poach carnivores for tagging, she ganked their equipment, refused to give it back, and testified against them in court.
She contributed to the creation of the UOZ-1 repeller, a device that warns wild animals of coming trains. In 1980, she earned a doctorate, and in 2000, the Polish government awarded her the Golden Cross of Merit, the highest civilian award for her work and research in aid to protecting the Białowieża Forest. In 2003, she was appointed Director of the Department of Natural Forests, a role she would maintain until she died in 2007.
Lech continued to live at Dziedzinka after Simona’s death. He continued their work and authored a biography of Simona. He died in 2018.
Simona was a Snow White renegade, a nonconformist, a woman who saw a dilapidated house in the middle of a forest and thought, “Fuck yes.”
Man is also a part of nature, and there are no more [or] less important parts in it. A flower, a star, a stone, a man is permeated with the same divine spark. Those who learn to sympathize with plants and animals can understand others and will be better for themselves, that is, they will do nothing against their nature. — Simona Kosak
Watch
In this 2022 documentary, Simona's grandniece travels to the Bialowieza Forest to uncover her aunt’s extraordinary life.