Remembering Igor Drecki (1966–2023)

Today marks the first anniversary of the untimely death of Igor Drecki (Curator, Cartographic and Geospatial Collections), along with his beloved wife Iwona. Though he was only with the Alexander Turnbull Library for just over two years before his passing, we in the Curatorial Services team — and across the National Library — remember Igor as a dear colleague imbued with remarkable dedication, expertise, and an unyielding enthusiasm for all things cartographic.

I first met Igor when he started with the Turnbull Library in March 2021. Our desks and workspaces were next to one another, and I can recall his broad smile when I mentioned that I held a BA in Geography and attempted to welcome him to the library in Polish, which I’m sure likely amused Igor more than anything else.

Countless conversations followed, often punctuated by his singular humour and insightful perspectives, and which ranged (not exclusively) from our immigrant experiences moving to New Zealand and the pleasures of a good coffee to geopolitics, faith, and what for Igor was most important in life: family.

What shone through first and foremost was Igor’s deep knowledge and passion for his subject. This quickly became evident during off-site visits we took together to appraise collections, our discussions of the potential acquisition of a 17th-century Dutch map (depicted below), and how he turned his mind to questions of collection management.

His work, however, was not just about acquiring material and managing a collection; it was about telling the stories behind the maps and making them accessible to everyone.

Igor’s willingness to share his knowledge with the wider community was demonstrated in the eulogy delivered by Paul Diamond (former Curator, Māori at the Turnbull Library) during the New Zealand Cartographic Society remembrance event held in the National Library:

When the Library decided to try delivering its Turnbull Up Close talks series online, Igor was the first to give the new format a go. His talk in October 2021, clearly structured and delivered, was a revelation and gave me new ways of seeing the collections. When I saw Geography students from a class in the South Island engaging with the talk, I could see the potential for this kind of session. This brought the collections of the Library to everyone, not just those who could visit Wellington. Later, at a Library training session about using Zoom to give talks, the presenter from our Auckland office said Igor’s seminar was her benchmark for how to deliver a presentation online.

Igor also did some great outreach work with Māori. For example, when one of the claimant groups in the Chatham Islands was running a series of webinars to help whānau understand collections at the Library, he agreed to speak about the first surveyed map of the Islands.

The copy Igor showed the group had annotations of place names and other features. He also shared a digital copy of the map, which is now held at the new museum at Waitangi.

Igor also agreed to give a guest lecture in the Cultural Mapping course taught at Victoria University of Wellington by my Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga colleague Dr Dennis Ngawhare.

Having volunteered Igor for this gig, I went to the lecture to support him and was pleased to see how engaged the students were. Dennis also said what Igor covered would help him in his job managing the Māori heritage list at Heritage New Zealand.

Sam Orchard (Assistant Curator, Cartoons and Comics) added that:

Igor’s commitment to knowledge sharing was complimented by his collegiality. He was a thoughtful and generous colleague and demonstrated this in a variety of ways, whether it be spearheading our curatorial excursion to Baring Head point, applying ‘pure magic’ (his words) to our photocopier in the name of efficiency, or patiently teaching us about new lighting systems. He helped to make the library a better place for researchers, and for us kaimahi.

Seán McMahon (Curator, Manuscripts) reflected further on the personal and professional impact Igor made:

After a redesign of our floor Igor came to sit alongside me near the Manuscripts and Archives Section. Igor had a wonderful, irreverent sense of humour which he applied to everything including work, his colleagues and anything Polish, particularly Polish related sports. He was a keen follower of the Polish players in water polo, tennis and handball, which was all new to me — and I'm a sport’s nut.

He would go about his activities with little fanfare and I was surprised to learn that Iwona would regularly bring their dog Pączki (named after a traditional Polish donut which speaks to Igor’s sense of humour) to the library at lunchtimes and they would take him for his daily walk. I was to later learn just how much he loved their dog.

He was also devoted to his Polish Church and the Catholic faith. As an Irish Catholic we shared stories of our religious experiences. I am more in the lapsed camp but Igor attended mass every Sunday and adhered to the practice of no meat on Fridays. In many ways he was very devout and this I think speaks to his integrity. If he believed in something he was fully committed to it.

Igor was very dedicated to his craft of being a Cartographic Curator. He once told me he had 14 map related projects on the go at once. I thought this might have been him testing me with his humour but he then went on to list them all.

There was the identification of maps, the retrospective cataloguing, sorting and filing of maps, designing a new cataloguing sequence, work on GPS and digital maps, ideas for talks and publications, plans for the various conferences he was involved with planning or presenting at, the pro-active collecting and acquisition of maps, and his ongoing communications with researchers aiding their research projects.

It was an exhausting list but he cheerfully recounted all this and he did have a ferocious appetite for work. All this is of course on top of his work with the New Zealand Cartographic Society and the International Cartographic Association and his own personal map projects at home.

The spare room in his house was full of map materials for his personal cartographic research and he even had two large file plan cabinets which he had shipped down to Wellington from Auckland.

No job was too big for Igor, no undertaking too small.

He is sorely missed by his colleagues, researchers and friends alike.

Igor’s personal map collection arrived at the National Library in September 2023 on four large pallets. The hundreds, if not thousands, of maps, mostly of New Zealand, the Pacific region and Japan, accompanied by some aerial photographs and boxes of books, will greatly augment and help to fill gaps in the National Library collection for use by researchers for decades to come.

As we remember Igor, let us, too, celebrate his life and his generous spirit.

In the words widely attributed to the poet and Catholic priest Jan Twardowski (1915–2006), ‘Nie umiera ten, kto trwa w pamięci żywych’ / He who remains in the memory of the living does not die.

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Watch Igor Drecki's online presentations

Igor shared his enthusiasm and knowledge of cartography through numerous presentations, including those in the Turnbull up close and Connecting to Collections series.

NZ cartographic heritage: the land, the people, the stories

An online visual tour of New Zealand government maps providing an opportunity to discover them in a new light and appreciate the creative beauty of cartography.

New Zealand cartographic heritage: the land, the people, the stories (12 October 2021)

Managing cartographic collections spatially

Ever wondered how to visualise a cartographic collection? This talk illuminates the process of fusing maps’ classification system with spatial tools to manage and care for the national cartographic taonga.

Managing cartographic collections spatially (18 October 2022)

'Why make an atlas?'

Igor was meant to give this talk in October 2023. Instead, his friend Dr Chris McDowall kindly delivered the talk in Igor’s memory, reflecting on the enduring significance of these geographical compilations.

‘Why make an atlas?’ (17 October 2023)