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Let's start by saying a few words about the Tribune himself, one of the more colourful characters in ''Pan Tadeusz''. We don't know his first name, but we do know that his surname was Hreczecha (pronounced, very roughly: ''gretch-{{small|EH}}-hah''). "Tribune" (Polish "''wojski''", Latin "''tribunus''") was a medieval title, originally used by officials who took care of knights' wives and children while their husbands were away at war; in Hreczecha's case, it was an unofficial honorific awarded by the local gentry out of respect for the old man. A middle-income nobleman, also known as a ''grykosiej'', or "buckwheat-sower" (in fact, Hreczecha's own surname comes from "''hrechka''", the Belarusian word for buckwheat), even though he had his own estate (he could afford to give his younger daughter, Tekla, a village in dowry), he preferred to live, along with Tekla, in the household of Judge Soplica, his more affluent friend, distant relative and might-have-been son-in-law (the Judge, in his youth, had been engaged to Marta, the Tribune's elder daughter, but she died before the wedding and he would never marry anyone else). In Soplicowo, the Tribune had the role of a kind of seneschal, managing the Judge's domestic servants.
Earlier, the Tribune "with gentry had spent his life, eating, at assemblies, {{...}} or at council meeting",<ref>A. Mickiewicz, ''op. cit.'', Book V, verses 427–428</ref> were where he mastered the ancient art of knife throwing. But it was in the realm of hunting that the Tribune was considered a real expert. He had learned this skill as a young man serving at the court of Tadeusz Rejtan, a Polish national hero. The Tribune remembered him not as a model patriot, though, but as a master hunter. As for his choice of game, he would always go for one of two extremes: on the one hand he believed that only large animals with horns, claws or fangs were worthy of being hunted by a nobleman. In his view, chasing hares was a good sport for youngsters and servants. "Hreczecha is my name – was his saying – since King Lech, it's no habit of a single Hreczecha to follow a rabbit."<ref>A. Mickiewicz, ''op. cit.'', Book I, verses 816–817</ref> On the other hand, he spent a lot time hunting flies. He would always carry a flyswatter around and, when mushroom picking (a popular Polish pastime, then and now), he would forage for fly agarics, a species of fungus used for killing the pesky insects.
The Tribune was also a big talker. He could talk for hours on end about astrology, flies' mating habits, local assemblies and, most of all, about hunting. The poem is interspersed with the Tribune's chatter – often in episodes, as he keeps getting interrupted. He manages to finish only some of his stories by the end of the epic, but there's also one whose ending the poet had to recount in a footnote. Silence made the Tribune feel tired, so whenever he couldn't find anyone to converse with, he would run off to the noisy kitchen.
