Hotel chain founder and businessman Tadeusz Gołębiewski dies at 79

"There are farewells we are never prepared for... With deep sadness we inform that Tadeusz Gołębiewski passed away on June 21, 2022. We bid farewell to our Boss, Mentor and Friend," reads the obituary published on social media by Tago company and Gołębiewski Hotels.

Tadeusz Gołębiewski was the founder of luxury hotels across Poland and a confectionery factory Tago based in Radzymin. He was 79 years old.

He was building his last hotel in the seaside town of Pobierowo. It was meant to be one of the largest building of this kind in Poland. In an interview for "Wirtualna Polska", Gołębiewski said that, in order to finance the investment, he had sold part of his paintings collection.

Gołębiewski would present himself as a humble man. He said that at a construction site he would eat at a canteen with workers and sleep at their quarters, as he had always wanted supervise everything personally.

Tadeusz Gołębiewski was born on January 1, 1943. He finished a confectionery secondary school and later graduated from the then Main School of Planning and Statistics (today's Warsaw School of Economics).

He began to produce confectionery after finishing college in 1966. As "Newsweek" has recently wrote, in the early days of his company, Gołębiowski would mix the filling for the waffles he produced in a legendary "Frania" washing machine.

In 1972, he founded the Confectionery Products Company Tago near Radzymin. After the war in Ukraine broke out, Gołębiewski would hire Ukrainian refugees to work in his firm.

The name Gołębiewski is primarily associated with luxury hotels. The businessman decided to build his first hotel in 1989 in Mikołajki, which welcomed its first guests in 1991.

In 1998, he bought a hotel building shell from Orbis company located in central Białystok. The hotel was opened the following year. Another two hotels were opened in southern towns of Wisła and Karpacz.