No drawings or photos exist of Getzko, this illustration is just here for illustration purposes.
Getzko (pronounced Getch-Call), also known as Polski Dziki Człowiek (pl. Polish Wild Man) - a legendary humanoid that according to the stories used to live in Poland around the 19th Century. It is one of two "Polish Bigfoots", the other being the even more obscure Puszczyn.
Biology[]
The creature stood two-and-a-half meters tall, and was incredibly hairy excluding its face. It was capable of human-like movement, and made strange, horse-like sounds. According to some people, it could even run sideways.
Stories[]
The stories and relations about the creature are very scarce, with the first one being about a cossack going into the woods to kill the alleged hominid, only then to return with his headless body still on the horse, much to the horror of the villagers. The neck was examined, and it was clear that the head was ripped off, not cut off.
The second story is much more bizarre, with a boy that during a large storm got lost in the woods on Getzko's territory and was held captive by the creature until the storm passed over. Then he ran away back to his village and told everything.
Explanation[]
Seeing how Getzko was an allegedly two-and-a-half meters tall ape, the perfect fit would be the infamous Gigantopithecus which somehow survived the extinction and used to live in the Polish regions. Excluding the size however, Getzko could just as easily have been a gorilla which escaped from a circus.
The hosts of a Polish paranormal podcast, Radio Paranormalium, theorized in a 2012 episode on cryptids that Getzko might have been an aggressive, hairy hermit.
Name[]
The creature's name is not actually "Getzko"; Getzko is only a phonetic approximation of how it was pronounced (like how, for example, someone would write the polish word "paluszki" as "palooshky" or "Błaszczykowski" as "Blascheckasvkee") - the only internet post (made on cryptozoology.com) mentioning the creature came from a Polish-American, who wrote the creature's name as Getzko. He also miswrote several other Polish words, including "babcia" (grandmother) as "bobczi" or "Bronka" as "Brunka". The closest actual Polish word to Getzko is "Dziecko" meaning "child".
The original report of Getzko sightings mentions them happening near a non-existent village called "Orunkya". No such village exists in Poland - Polish cryptozoology enthusiasts theorize that Orunkya might either be Orunia (formerly an independent town, now part of the city of Gdańsk), or a village in modern-day Belarus.