Leon Cienkowski (1822-1887), also known as Lev Semyonovich Tsenkovsky, was a Polish botanist and microbiologist. Living at a time when Poland lost its independence, he necessarily carried out scientific activities in the Russian Empire, lecturing at the universities in Odessa and Kharkiv (now Ukraine). Called the “Ukrainian Pasteur”, he was a co-organizer of the Sevastopol Biological Station. At the beginning of his career, 25-year-old Leon Cienkowski was delegated by the Imperial Russian Geographical Society for an expedition to Sudan. It was an expedition initiated at the request of Muhammad Ali Pasha, and led by colonel Yegor Petrovich Kovalevsky. Its purpose was to locate and exploit gold deposits in the Blue Nile basin. The expedition achieved its goal by organizing gold mining in the Tumat River valley, but the illness of its leader cause the team to return to Russia prematurely. However, Leon Cienkowski remained in Sudan on his own, conducting fieldwork in geography, geology, botany, zoology, physical anthropology, ethnography and linguistics. He made a trip to Kordofan, on the White Nile and Bahr al-Ghazal. It seems that Leon Cienkowski was the first Polish explorer of these areas, although the results of his Sudan studies remain little known to this day.

Leon Cienkowski – a pioneer of Polish research in Sudan