Basil, 1st Chevalier de Weryha-Wysoczański-Pietrusiewicz^[1] (23 April 1816 – 25 October 1891) was a Polish wholesale merchant, landowner, town property owner^[2] and philanthropist from Odessa.^[3]

He came from an old noble family of Walachian^[4] boyar^[5] stock and was the 4th son of Jan, 2nd Chevalier Wysoczański de Pietrusiewicz.^[6] He had one daughter, Wilhelmine, who married a Swiss rentier and died at age 19 in Cannes,^[7] as well a favoured place of her father and of the international nobility in general.^[8] The son of his niece Anna^[7] was composer Yaroslav Yaroslavenko, for whom de Weryha-Wysoczański stood sponsor.

Born in the Austrian Empire, de Weryha-Wysoczański made his money, as his biographer informs us in 1892, with vodka supplies for the army during the Crimean War. As a result, he bought landed estates and town property and ‘became a merchant on a grand scale’. According to his biographer, he once lost a whole ship on the sea but more than made up his losses. He soon got rid of a café-pâtisserie on Odessa's famous Deribasovskaya Street and, as his biographer puts it, ‘became a fully-fledged gentleman capitalist’. His biographer estimated that de Weryha-Wysoczański's cash alone amounted to £11.700.000.^[9] In 1861 he was awarded the Silver Medal on the Ribbon of Saint Stanislas^[10] and in 1876 received a confirmation of the title of Hereditary Chevalier of Galicia with the Wukry coat of arms,^[2] extended to all direct descendants in the male line of his elder brother Gregory, some of whom still living to this day.^[4] He died in Odessa in the Russian Empire.

De Weryha-Wysoczański donated £2.340.000 for scholarships, for the education of children.^[11] After the death of his only daughter, he gave in Odessa, in February 1885, £900.000 for orphaned girls who would be paid dowries.^[12] He founded the Saint Nicholas Church in Wysocko Wyżne, Austro-Hungarian Empire,^[3] the consecration of which took place on 13 October 1891.^[13] Its architect was Jan Lewiński and its polychromy was carried out by Teofil Kopystyński. It is a large church with both neoclassical and neobyzantine elements.^[14]

In 1930 de Weryha-Wysoczański's life was made into a biographical novel by Ivan Fylypchak by the title Willpower (Lwów 1930; second edition Sambor 1999).^[3] De Weryha-Wysoczański features in it with his real name, although other names were changed, as well as some facts for reasons of dramatisation.