Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk

Who was Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk?

Count Geoffrey Wladislas Vaile Potocki de Montalk was a poet, polemicist, pagan and pretender to the Polish throne. Born in New Zealand, he was the eldest son of Auckland architect Robert Wladislas de Montalk, grandson of Paris-born Professor Count Joseph Wladislas Edmond Potocki de Montalk, and great-grandson of Polish-born Count Jozef Franciszek Jan Potocki, the Insurgent, of Białystok.

In 1926, de Montalk left his wife and small daughter in New Zealand to be a poet by "...follow the golden road to Samarkand". He travelled to England but moved in 1949 to Draguignan in the south of France where he obtained land and a ramshackle stone cottage - the Villa Vigoni - deep in the Provençal countryside. He did not return to New Zealand until 1983. Between 1984 and 1993, he followed the sun by spending summers in either New Zealand and France. He died at Brignoles in France in 1997 and was buried at Draguignan.