Author: Sarah Laskow / Source: Atlas Obscura
In Pacanów, Poland, Koziołek Matołek—the Silly Billy-Goat, or the Dopey Goat—is famous. There’s a statue of him in the park at the center of town, and his image appears all over. Through all his wanderings, this town was Koziołek Matołek’s destination: He had heard it was possible to find shoes for goats here.
Created in the 1930s, Koziołek Matołek was the star of perhaps the most popular Polish kids’ books before World War II. Today, he is a considered classic character of Polish children’s literature, but is mostly unknown outside the country.
Kornel Makuszyński, the author of the Koziołek Matołek books—four in all—was a poet, journalist, and critic before he wrote children’s books. Born in 1884, he started writing poems when he was young, and in the goat books each illustration came with sing-song verses. The illustrator, Marian Walentynowicz, drew caricatures for newspapers and had traveled around the world. In the 1930s, foreign comics—Prince Valiant, most notably—were becoming popular in Poland, and publishers were interested in homegrown illustrated stories. In the origin myth of Koziołek Matołek, the two men decided to send their goat on a pilgrimage to Pacanów after meeting a man in a café who came from the tiny town.
But his adventures weren’t just about making it to Pacanów to find those shoes. Instead, Koziołek Matołek wanders the world with a naive, happy-go-lucky attitude that gets him into…
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