Olyzar (Polish: Olizar). A Ukrainian noble family in the Kyiv region and Volhynia. The progenitor was Olyzar Volchkevych, the starosta of Chornobyl (1533–45) and one of the organizers of the 1569 Union of Lublin. The family became Polonized in the late 16th century. Adam Olizar (ca 1572 to 1624), a Polish cavalry commander who converted from Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism, owned large landholdings (7 towns and 33 villages) around Korostyshiv, near Zhytomyr. He and his son, Ludwik (d 1645), developed iron-ore mining there. Ludwik's son, Jan (d ca 1700), was elected marshal of Kyiv voivodeship in 1665. Jan's son, Adam (ca 1657 to 1713), was a petty nobleman in Ovruch in Volhynia. One of Jan's descendants, Filip (ca 1750 to 1816), the son of the Kyiv functionary Onufry (ca 1722 to 3 April 1753), was the Polish royal chamberlain from 1774 and cupbearer of Lithuania (1780–94). He increased the family's landholdings and built the first iron smelter in the Kyiv region, in the early 1780s near Horodske, Zhytomyr county. Under Russian rule he became president of the chief court of Podilia gubernia and, in 1807, a member of the Educational Commission of Volhynia guberni, Podilia gubernia, and Kyiv gubernia. Filip's son Gustaw (1798–1868) served as marshal of the nobility in Kyiv gubernia (1821–6), and was a Polish poet, translator, and publicist. He was imprisoned for participating in the Decembrist movement. Gustaw helped German colonists to establish a woolens factory in Korostyshiv. His memoirs were published under the pseudonym A. Filipowicz in Lviv in 1892. Gustaw's brother, Narcyz (1794–1862), was also a Polish poet, memoirist, and émigré publicist and was a Volhynian leader of the Polish Insurrection of 1830–1. In 1832 he fled abroad. A few other members of the Olizar family were marshals, starostas, and Sejm delegates.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]