Photo / Video
http://www.instrumentyludowe.pl/en/photo-video.html#sigProId894d7002f9
http://www.instrumentyludowe.pl/en/photo-video.html#sigProId2994c57794
mielec suka
Mielec suka is an old Polish string instrument, belonging to folk chordophones group, resembling violin with its construction. The head is in the shape of nail, the base has two short legs leant on the top board. The four strings are attached to the casters that are embedded at the bottom.
The watercolor by Stanislaw Putiatycki that presents "a peasant with a violin in the vicinity of Mielec" (1840) is in the collection of the National Ethnographic Museum.
The watercolor has been done very carefully which enables a perceptive analysis of Mielec suka. Placing the fiddle while playing vertically on the leg of a sitting player indicates knee fiddle and a wide neck suggests the fingernail technique.
The instrument's design features imply that it can be considered a hybrid of already well-known violin and obsolescent knee form. Putiatycki's watercolor is the evidence that those relict forms of chordophones still functioned in folk musical practice in the mid-nineteenth century. Maria Pomianowska and Eve Dahlig called a new discovery – Mielec suka in order to distinguish it from Bilgoray suka.