Category Archives: language

by | 5 August 2025 · 7:53 am

Piecing Poland Back Together, 1920s

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 553-555:

The first task facing the new state was to recover from the devastation of the war, which had been enormous. Much of the infrastructure of the country had to be rebuilt from scratch. Industry needed to be developed, as there was huge unemployment. And agriculture, which had been disrupted and ravaged by the war, needed to be put back on its feet. The country was impoverished; it was also experiencing a food crisis. To boot, some four hundred thousand Poles had died fighting in the Prussian, Austrian, and Russian armies during World War I, which meant a depletion of the best patriotic forces.

Another enormous challenge concerned the knitting together of disparate pieces of territory and peoples who had experience of very different imperial regimes—different legal systems, educational systems, forms of national and local governance, and the like. The enormity of the physical task of bringing together the previously partitioned lands, after 123 years of belonging to states other than Poland, was reflected in the network of railways. The railways all led to the imperial hubs, thus being a centrifugal not a unifying force. New railway branches had to be added to facilitate travel to the capital of Warsaw as well as to cross the breadth and length of the state. Even today one still notes a particular denseness of railway lines in the west (the former Germany), light coverage in the east, and the south best served by the Galician west–east line connecting Kraków with Lviv and beyond.

Those businesses that were able to resume operation relatively quickly now faced a different domestic market. No longer were they able to export to Berlin, Vienna, or Saint Petersburg. And if they had relied in part on inputs available elsewhere in those empires, they would need to find new suppliers within the borders of the new state. The country experienced a painful bout of hyperinflation in 1923: at one point, one U.S. dollar was worth 20 million Polish marks. The replacement of the mark by the zloty in the spring of 1924 and the concomitant currency correction essentially wiped out the savings of the country’s middle class. This did not augur well for the economic well-being of the citizens of the young Polish state.

As the history of partition suggests, not all Polish citizens were equally prepared for national independence. Regionalism became pronounced, as inhabitants felt they had more in common with those who came from their partitioned zone than with those from other partitioned zones. Few had any real experience of self-rule, making Galicians the most likely candidates to move to the new capital, Warsaw, to help run the new government. This in turn rendered Lviv, the former capital of Galicia, a remote provincial backwater. At the same time, there must have been a clash of cultures in the new Polish capital. The earlier inhabitants of Warsaw (as we have seen) had a very unpleasant experience in the elections to the Russian State Duma. Would these experiences carry over to Polish politics in an ostensibly Polish state?

Indeed, few Poles knew what to expect from the new Poland. In a novel by Stefan Żeromski, The Spring to Come, the reality of life in a state experiencing growing pains is brought to life. A Polish industrialist in what was then the Russian imperial port of Baku tries to interest his son (the main protagonist of the novel), who had lived his entire life outside of the homeland, in moving to Poland. The father weaves a beautiful story of Poland as a land of glass houses and does convince his son to try his luck in the new Poland. However, this useful fiction of glass houses—a place of perfection, a promised land—proved but a bubble that soon would burst. There were no glass houses. Rather, the reality of life in the young state proved challenging at best.

Of course, no one in 1924 knew what a normal nation-state was to look like, let alone how to create one in this heterogeneous part of the world. There were various ideas as to Poland’s future shape as well. Various political camps had their own visions and mobilized their constituencies to fight to turn them into reality. The Roman Catholic clergy most decidedly had its own ideas of the role the church was to play in Polish life. Peasants sought improved conditions for farming, as well as greater access to land—something that was more easily accomplished by expropriating non-Poles than by doing the same to Polish nobles.

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by | 2 August 2025 · 8:57 am

Rebuilding a Polish Nation in Galicia

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 504-507:

Unlike the Hohenzollerns of Prussia/Germany or the Romanovs of Russia, the Habsburgs were Roman Catholic monarchs—and this is an important distinction. Furthermore, Habsburg piety was proverbial. All this meant that there should have been more common ground between the Poles and Austrians. At the same time, the Habsburgs had historically been the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (defunct as of 1806) and thus had a special relationship to the Germans of the rest of Europe.

As in all the partitions, the treatment of the new subjects was uneven. In the beginning, the Austrian authorities sought to civilize what they considered to be a backward land. Later, under the oppressive influence of Metternich, they sought to constrain what they thought was a revolutionary people—as witnessed in the debacle of the peasant jacquerie of 1846. (The incorporation of the Free City of Kraków into Galicia set the relatively thriving medieval capital of Poland back decades.) Metternich had seen fit to equate Polonism with revolution. Doubtless the new ruler of the Austrian Empire, Franz Joseph, felt similarly.

Only after a period of absolutism and Germanization did the tone change. This was brought about by several Austrian military defeats. The loss to the French in 1859 led to reforms at home that ultimately resulted in constitutional rule in Austria as of the early 1860s. Notably for the Poles, they were allotted their own provincial Seym as early as 1861.

The defeat of Austria by Prussia in 1866 was even more significant. The defeat forced the Habsburgs to reach a new modus vivendi with the Hungarians, who had been chafing under Habsburg rule particularly since the end of their failed revolution of 1848–1849. In 1867, the two parties reached the famous compromise that led to the establishment of the Dual Monarchy. Henceforth, the country would be known as Austria-Hungary.

That the Habsburgs had been compelled to make concessions to one of their subject peoples was a fact not lost on the Poles. Already the failure of the January Insurrection under Russian rule led some important Galicians to reconsider their approach to the Habsburg monarchy. A new and influential group known as the Kraków Conservatives resolved to be loyal to the Habsburgs. Although initially skeptical, after several years the Polish elites of Galicia were won over to this idea. Even the defeat of Austria at the hands of Prussia did not shake their belief in the monarchy.

…

These developments led to a third, and most fruitful, phase for the Galician Poles. Unlike the disgruntled Czechs of Bohemia, Poles decided to participate in the Reichsrat or imperial council, a two-chambered parliament in Vienna. Polish elites sought to recast Galicia as a conciliatory, conservative, loyal province. All this boded well for the position of Poles within the Habsburg Empire. Indeed, during the Dual Monarchy, a number of Poles actually came to hold important posts in the imperial government, including that of prime minister.

Given a degree of autonomy, Galicia became a haven for the Poles—a place where Poles could be Poles while still being loyal to the Habsburg dynasty. This dual identity was facilitated by Article 19 of the Fundamental Laws, which specified that each people within the monarchy had the right to cultivate its own nationality and language. Poles, and especially the democrats who vied with the conservatives for influence within the province, availed themselves of this opportunity in various ways, including the celebrating of a series of national figures and historic anniversaries. Among the most noteworthy were the solemn reburial of the poet Adam Mickiewicz in the Wawel crypts in 1890 and the five-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Grunwald in 1910, also celebrated in Kraków. The Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski had commissioned a massive monument commemorating that great medieval battle. These large public celebrations helped to bring Poles from all three partitioned lands closer together.

Thus, in the last third of the nineteenth century, the best place to be a Pole—certainly if one wanted to be politically active—and unlike in the Prussian or German lands, politically active in Polish—was Galicia. One could breathe Polish air there—or, as was also remarked, the very stones spoke Polish. To be sure, in Vienna (in the Reichsrat) Poles used German for their interpellations. However, back in the province, in the Galician Seym, the Polish language ruled (although it should be noted that Ruthenian interpellations during the proceedings were written down, phonetically, in Latin—not Cyrillic—script). Polish nonetheless became the language of government, the language of schooling.

Galician Poles had a high degree of autonomy—all of which allowed them to school themselves in the art of governance, to work in the bureaucracy, to develop scholarly institutes and universities where Polish would be the language of instruction, and the like. They lived in a country in which they had parliamentary representation and the rule of law. This, combined with the rights of nationalities, suggests that, as of the last third of the nineteenth century, one might think of Galicia as the closest thing to a Piedmont that the Poles had (Piedmont, meaning the Italian province that initiated Italian unification in the 1860s). Could these advantages within Galicia, thus, help propel the Poles to their own unification?

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by | 31 July 2025 · 4:46 pm

Wielka Emigracja po 1831

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 454-458:

Not all Poles stayed around to see how matters would develop after 1831. Already during the insurrection, some insurrectionists abandoned the Kingdom of Poland and made their way to the west. After the November Insurrection, a mass exodus of Poles ensued to France, Belgium, and Britain. There were so many Poles in western Europe that this came to be called the Great Emigration (Wielka Emigracja). The term wielka can mean large—which it was. Somewhere in the vicinity of ten thousand Poles became political émigrés in Paris and elsewhere. But wielka also means great. It was a great generation, comprised of the leading Polish intellectual lights as well as dedicated cadres of insurrectionists. Among those former were the great Romantic poets—the so-called Bards: Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, and Zygmunt Krasiński. Mickiewicz, incidentally, had managed to escape from Russia to the west right before the November Insurrection.

Also in emigration was a young composer from Warsaw, Fryderyk (French: Frédéric) Chopin. Son of a Polonized emigrant from France, Fryderyk was in Vienna when the insurrection broke out and made the reverse journey. The young Chopin, whose musical genius would (among other things) popularize Polish dances such as the polonaise, the mazurka, and the krakowiak, channeled his anguished reaction to the loss of the November Insurrection into his famous, and moving, Revolutionary Étude.

Only in emigration did Polish Romanticism—in literature even more than in music—develop to its full potential. Polish literature of this period is interesting not only for its intrinsic value but for what it represented to Polish society in that period. When politics failed (as they clearly did in 1830–1831), poetry took its place. Poland went from being led by generals wielding sabers to generals wielding pens.

These newfangled generals led a cultural campaign. Their task was to produce a vibrant literary culture that would unite all the lands of the former Commonwealth as well as enrich the Polish spirit. Here the Polish Romantics were influenced by thinkers like Herder, famous for his conception of the Volksgeist, which can be translated as the spirit of the people or nation or as national character. In this vision, the people or nation was viewed increasingly as the common man.

This proved to be one of the most important periods of Polish literature, if not the most important (which surely could be argued). And Adam Mickiewicz—the young poet introduced earlier—is the most famous of the Polish Romantic poets. Indeed, he is the most famous literary figure in all of Polish history. Thus it is interesting to consider the opening line of his most famous work, the epic poem Pan Tadeusz. Expressing the longing of the émigré for the country he has left behind, it begins with the invocation, “Lithuania! My fatherland!” Writing in Polish, this poet who hailed from the territory of today’s Belarus, considered Lithuania his homeland. This suggests that this quintessentially Polish poet reflected ideas of Poland and Polishness that were hardly straightforward—ideas more redolent of the former Sarmatian, Commonwealth realm. Polish and provincial culture (brought to life in the Lithuanian landscape) were one in this depiction of a soon-to-be-lost Sarmatian idyll in its encounter with the transformations of the Napoleonic era. Indeed, it is a Polish peculiarity that national self-definitions were often forged at its margins—in the borderland realm increasingly referred to in the nineteenth century as the Kresy.

Paris proved a seedbed for all kinds of ideas about Poland’s past, present, and future. The émigrés were obsessed with “the Polish question,” a question not limited to the regaining of national sovereignty. Lacking independent statehood, Poles had to answer some other crucial questions as well. They increasingly had to choose, consciously, to be Poles, as this was no longer a choice of state identification. But what, then, was Polishness? How was one to define Poland, or who was a Pole? How to justify being—let alone becoming—Polish, in a world of imperial dominance?

Again, the poet spoke. Or, rather, wrote—although it should be added that Mickiewicz also spent the period from 1840 to 1844 lecturing on Slavic literature at the Collège de France, his lectures often electrifying his audience. Consider his Books of the Polish Nation and the Polish Pilgrimage. Mickiewicz believed that the Poles had a mission of universal significance. In his messianic vision, Poland was the Christ of Nations, suffering for the rest of the world. “But on the third day,” he wrote in true biblical style, “the soul shall return to the body, and the Nations shall arise and free all the peoples of Europe from slavery.” Mickiewicz also saw a special role for his nation in the Slavic world. The future of Europe lay with the Slavs—and the Poles, not the Russians, were Slavdom’s natural leaders, who would fight against the perceived evils of civilization.

Despite his liberal use of biblical phrasing, Mickiewicz’s Roman Catholicism was hardly orthodox. The Pole was conflicted in his relationship to the See of Peter. He, like many others, was outraged that the Vicar of Christ should side with the partitioning empires and condemn the Polish insurrection. Furthermore, Mickiewicz fell under the spell of Andrzej Towiański, a leader of a mystical cult; this experience did little to strengthen his connection to the Roman Catholic Church of his day.

Mickiewicz and the Romantics focused their attention, in exile, on the Polish nation, seeking to determine what in the Polish past was significant, and whether the nation had a historical mission. Theirs was an ideal vision of the nation, focusing more on the body politic—the potential masses of Poles—than on any future territorial incarnation. The Poland of the Romantics was one of the mind. They believed that their nation did have a mission, which was to bring universal freedom to Europe. In this mission lay all hope for Poland. Only if Poles fought for universal freedom could they be considered worthy of regaining independent statehood. Their national stance, thus, was an active and engaged one. The purpose of Polish Romantic literature, furthermore, was to embolden and inspire the nation as well as strengthen national consciousness, without which there could be no gains. In an age when generals wielding sabers had failed, the Romantics saw themselves as generals wielding pens.

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by | 30 July 2025 · 3:24 pm

Life in Poland’s Partitions, 1795

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 421-424:

Life under the three empires took on distinctly different forms. If regionalism was a problem earlier, it now threatened to become even more intractable. Although the three partitioning powers prided themselves on being enlightened states, each approached the new territories and new subjects differently. Thus, a new layer of regionalism was superimposed on the old ones. The newly acquired population was incorporated into each of the partitioned territories in different ways. Each empire was further diversified and internationalized—perhaps in ways even the partitioning powers had not anticipated. Likewise recall that, although the final partition of Poland came only in 1795, already since 1772 certain parts of the country had come under foreign rule, which left the territories further differentiated.

Prussia became a much more heterogeneous entity, although it sought to dilute the concentration of Poles in the newly acquired territories. The Prussian state took over the Crown lands, which it sold to German landowners; German bureaucrats took the place of Polish officeholders. No municipal self-rule or noble assemblies were allowed under Prussian rule. A Protestant power, Prussia also took over properties belonging to the Roman Catholic Church. Religious issues complicated the picture. Prussia truly became a multiethnic and multidenominational state. It was faced with either dealing with, or doing away with, diversity.

Prussia eventually undermined the Polish nobles by taking away their privileges. The position of their peasants was strengthened. The position of Jews was changed beyond recognition, their corporate rights undone. Rather, Friedrich the Great delineated two types of Jews: those who were to assimilate and in the process receive civil rights and those who did not have these rights and would be expelled from the province. This facilitated a relatively rapid Germanization of the first group—certainly compared to the two other Central and East European empires.

The situation in Austria looked quite different. Under Maria Theresa and especially Joseph II, various reforms were implemented—reforms that could be considered enlightened. But under Francis I, scarred by the events of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic periods, reaction ensued. Seeking to centralize power, the Habsburgs took away various privileges of the Galician nobility. Indeed, many nobles suffered dreadfully under Austrian rule: if they were not able to provide proof of nobility—something that was difficult for many an old noble family fallen on hard times—they were reduced to the status of peasants. This déclassé nobility was clearly the worst off, although the burden of taxation reduced further nobles to penury. The peasants came to fare slightly better, as they were protected by legislation and the amount of time they spent working for the landlord was regulated. Jews were obliged to take German surnames and serve in the military (like members of all the estates), but their communities still had jurisdiction over religious matters. Although a staunchly Catholic power, Austria clearly did not trust its own population: witness the strong censorship of newspapers and other printed materials in the empire. The province would remain backward, socially as well as economically.

The territories that came under Russian rule—the most extensive of the lot—were the most ethnically diverse. The easternmost lands were inhabited by people we would now call Belarusians and Ukrainians (but which then were most likely termed Ruthenes or even Russians), Lithuanians, Tatars, and Jews. Poles were mainly noble landowners. It was Polish (Sarmatian) culture that had long radiated out through the entirety of the Commonwealth and that still carried weight.

Paradoxically, these lands witnessed little initially in the way of reforms. Even the old courts and laws were maintained. The nobles within the Russian Empire initially were not as inconvenienced as were nobles under Austrian and Prussian rule, except for the fact that Crown lands were taken over. By contrast, peasants found Russian rule more onerous: now classified as serfs, they were the chattel—that is, the personal property—of the landholders, who could do with them as they wished. Furthermore, they would eventually be subjected to Russia’s onerous military service: recruits were taken for a period of twenty-five years.

The biggest problem for the Russians related to religion. The imperial authorities would do away with the Uniate (Greek Catholic) religion in the 1830s, forcing Uniates to convert to Russian Orthodoxy. As the partitions provided Russia with her first real encounter with large Jewish populations, she decided to restrict them to a region that would become known as the Pale of Settlement; this swath of land was more or less coterminous with the boundaries of the former Commonwealth. Unlike their coreligionists elsewhere, Jews, thus, could not penetrate further into the heart of the empire, that is, into Russia proper.

Such was the starting point. It would not be the ending point. The arrangement ratified in 1795, and reaffirmed in 1797, proved less permanent than the partitioning powers might have imagined.

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by | 21 July 2025 · 5:40 pm

Changing Faces of Lublin’s Old Town

From The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe, by Marek Kohn (Yale U. Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 220-223:

Lublin has a long history as a site for key moments in the formation of Polish states. A congress of nobles welcomed Grand Duke Jogaila of Lithuania there in 1386, as he made his way to his royal wedding in Kraków, and proclaimed him King Władysław II Jagiełło of Poland. Jogaila returned the favour by granting a range of privileges that enabled Lublin to develop as a centre of trade between the two countries he and Jadwiga had united through their marriage. The treaty of union that inaugurated the Polish-Lithuanian Republic was signed at Lublin’s castle in 1569.

By that time, the urban kernel later known as the Old Town was taking shape on the high ground opposite, as a sturdy cluster of churches and townhouses arranged around a market square and an axis running from the Grodzka Gate on the eastern side to the western Kraków Gate. With an area of ten hectares, the walled town was the same size as its Warsaw counterpart. Meanwhile the space between the castle and the town was beginning to fill with buildings, as the Jewish quarter developed on the inferior land known as Podzamcze, meaning ‘under the castle’. Jews had been prohibited from settling within the city walls in 1535, after Christian merchants objected to the competition they introduced.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the district below the castle boasted one of the most important Hebrew printing houses in the country, and provided the base for the principal Jewish authority in Poland. Around the turn of the nineteenth century it became a major centre of Hasidic Judaism, after the legendary spiritual leader Yaakov Yitzhak haLevi Horowitz took up residence on Podzamcze’s main street. He was known as the Seer of Lublin, because of his reputed ability to see into the future and across the world, and he bestowed a magical aura on the Jewish Town that remained as his posthumous legacy after his death there in 1815.

As the century went on, however, many of Lublin’s Jews were drawn to modernity instead of mysticism. Their local horizons were opened up in 1862, when they gained full citizenship and the city abolished restrictions on where they were permitted to live. ‘Through Brama Grodzka, by which they had waited for so many years, they entered Lublin again,’ wrote the historian Meir Balaban, ‘renting and buying properties for shops and homes, first on Grodzka Street and later also on the Market Square.’ The poorer incomers gradually found niches throughout almost the whole of the Old Town, which had fallen into decline after being abandoned by its wealthier residents. Those who could afford it made instead for the up and coming streets around the city’s spacious central avenue. They resembled their Christian neighbours in their dress and lifestyle, while the old Jewish quarter became even more of a world apart.

That world disappeared from the face of the earth during the Second World War. After the German invaders took control of Lublin in 1939, they ejected Jews from the townhouses around the central avenue, forcing them back to the old Jewish quarter. The Jews of the Old Town were sent there in April 1941, after the occupiers turned the former Jewish Town into a ghetto, which they liquidated a year later. Some 26,000 Jews from the Lublin region were killed at the Bełżec extermination camp, almost all of them upon arrival. Others were sent to a secondary ghetto on the outskirts of the city, Majdan Tatarski, and eventually to the nearby Majdanek camp. The Lublin extermination ended with Aktion Erntefest, Operation Harvest Festival, in November 1943. Over two days, SS squads and German police shot 42,000 Jews at Majdanek and two other camps in the region. At the outbreak of the war, some 43,000 Jews had been living in the city, out of a total population of around 120,000. Almost none of them were left alive by the war’s end.

Little was left of the Jewish Town either. The Germans razed much of it to the ground, as they did in Warsaw’s Jewish district. There, the destruction had begun as a tactic used by the occupiers in their efforts to suppress the Ghetto Uprising. In Lublin, the Germans had already emptied the houses, which they condemned on the grounds of the buildings’ poor construction standards and states of repair. Their underlying purpose was to erase the remains of Jewish presence, which in that locality dated back four hundred years.

The main street disappeared altogether, and with it the form that the Jewish settlement had found in Lublin’s topography. It had previously run along the base of the slope below the castle, its buildings jostling for space and concealing the lie of the land. Tumbledown shacks and solid edifices alike were gone, as was the warren of alleys into which Alfred Döblin had ventured. One unintended consequence was to give the Red Army a clear field of fire in front of the castle for its artillery when it fought its way into Lublin in July 1944.

Three days after the Soviet forces captured the city, the new authorities installed the provisional body that became known as the Lublin Committee, and which formed the germ of the regime that eventually became the Polish People’s Republic. This was the third key moment in Lublin’s history as a site of state formation, initiating a drive to build socialism on Soviet lines that was led by a man with local roots. Bolesław Bierut was born near Lublin and went to school in the city. His early work experience there included a job as a bricklayer’s assistant, and his presence was felt in the reconstruction of Lublin when he headed the country during its Stalinist period.

The site with the most obvious potential for symbolically loaded redevelopment was the barren plain, overlooked by the castle and the Old Town, that now lay where the main street of the Jewish district had previously been. A quadrant had been spared on the far side, where the tenement houses were in relatively good condition, and housed ethnic Poles who had been displaced by the creation of the Majdan Tartaski ghetto. Apart from that, the area formerly occupied by the Jewish Town was emptier than it had been since the Middle Ages.

For nearly ten years, the authorities’ efforts were concentrated up above, within the castle, and were devoted not to reconstruction but to the suppression of armed resistance. The castle had itself been rebuilt in the 1820s after a long twilight of ruin, its rectangular mass clad in a stern neo-Gothic facade appropriate to its function as a prison. Having served to incarcerate anti-czarist insurgents in the nineteenth century, communists between the wars and resistance fighters during the German occupation, it now held anti-communist partisans, many of whom had previously been anti-Nazi partisans. More than 30,000 prisoners were confined there during the new regime’s first decade in power. Death sentences were carried out in the cellar of a building that stood by the castle’s arched front entrance.

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by | 20 July 2025 · 6:05 pm

Changing Wilno into Vilnius

From The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe, by Marek Kohn (Yale U. Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 179-183:

The transformation of pre-war Wilno into post-war Vilnius was effected by removing those of its inhabitants who called it Wilno, the Poles who had constituted the majority of its population. Their departure followed the removal by genocide of the second largest ethnic group in the city, the Jews, who called it Vilna or Vilne. The same sequence took place in the other borderland city that Poles had held dear, known today as Lviv, which had also been inhabited largely by ethnic Poles and Jews before the war.

Vilnius’s reconstruction was principally a population project and only secondarily a rebuilding programme, especially in the Old Town. Czesław Miłosz described the pre-war city as an enclave of negative ambiguity, ‘neither Polish nor not-Polish, neither Lithuanian nor not-Lithuanian’. The aim of the reconstruction was to remove that ambiguity, remaking Vilnius as a city that was definitely Lithuanian and very definitely not Polish. It succeeded in establishing the city’s Lithuanian identity, but had to make do with concealing the ambiguities endemic to the Old Town and the surrounding districts.

Until the Nazi occupation, the heart of Vilnius’s character as a multi-ethnic city was a triangular district adjoining the central space over which the town hall presides. The historic Jewish quarter was not beyond the walls – unlike in many European cities, such as Kraków, whose Jewish residents had been sent to live in the separate township of Kazimierz at the end of the fifteenth century – but right in the middle of the city. A larger Jewish neighbourhood spread out from it across the western side of the Old Town. By 1939, according to one estimate, the central district was home to 75,000 people, of whom 35,000 were Jewish.

Many of that fraction were crammed into the overcrowded and insanitary alleys of the original quarter, which was an object of fascination for outsiders and a symbol of identity for Vilna’s Jews. During the First World War, a boy named Moyshe Vorobeychik often happened upon German soldiers painting and sketching scenes in the quarter. Some of them were notable artists in civilian life. Vorobeychik himself became a photographer, under the name Moï Ver, and produced an avant-garde album based on one of the Jewish streets. The project represented a desire shared by other young Jewish artists in the city, to innovate and embrace modernity while retaining their cultural roots. They formed a group called Yung Vilne, whose emblem was a young tree growing above one of the old Jewish quarter’s signature arches.

Max Weinreich, an eminent linguist and scholar of Yiddish, felt similarly about the relationship between learning and place. He considered that modern Jewish research needed an environment like that of Vilna, where ‘the houses and stones retain a memory’ of its Jewish cultural heritage. Weinreich was a leading figure in the YIVO institute of Yiddish studies, which continued a tradition of intellectual enterprise that had made Vilna a centre of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, in the nineteenth century. YIVO’s headquarters opened in 1933 on a broad modern street at a distance from the city centre, but the emotional heart of Jewish Vilna was still embedded in the sclerotic alleys of the old quarter. The enclave retained its allure for outsiders too, despite the warning in a guidebook by a Polish professor about ‘the typically eastern slovenliness of the inhabitants of this anti-hygienic district and its unbearable fug, which makes it impossible for a cultured European to visit these alleys, especially on hot summer days’.

After the Germans took control of Vilnius in 1941, they confined its Jewish population to two ghettos, one in the old quarter and one in the newer neighbourhood. The former was the smaller of the two, holding 11,000 people. It was liquidated after a month, in October 1941, leaving 29,000 people in the larger one, which was maintained until September 1943 and used as a source of labour. The ghetto inmates’ tasks included the construction of a model of Vilnius, which was produced by a team of thirty architects, engineers, draughtsmen and artists. They were forced to create a representation in miniature of the city from which they had been excluded, complete with the tiny zone where they were imprisoned in the middle of it. Four of them are known to have survived the war, but they were rare exceptions. The great majority of Vilnius’s Jews perished in the Holocaust, many of them shot by squads of Lithuanian volunteers at a killing ground in woodland outside the city. Several hundred managed to stay alive until the end of the German occupation, and a few thousand escaped – many of them involuntarily, deported by the previous communist authorities – into the depths of the Soviet Union. Nearly all of the survivors subsequently emigrated to the United States, Israel and other distant lands. Vilna, the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’, became an exile memory.

The dissolution of Wilno began with an attempt by Polish forces to recapture it. In July 1944, as the Red Army pushed westwards, the Polish underground state launched a nationwide operation to liberate cities and territories ahead of the Soviet advance. The battles of July were the overtures to the nine-week tragedy of the Warsaw Uprising, which began on the first day of August. Wilno’s political and emotional importance to the Polish cause was expressed in the codename for the Armia Krajowa (AK) assault against the city’s German occupiers: Ostra Brama, the Polish name for the Gate of Dawn. A grand and reverent window is set above the arch on the inside of the gate; through it an image of the Virgin Mary, clad in gilded silver, presides over the street below. The site is one of the most intense foci of the Marian cult at the heart of Polish Catholicism, and therefore of Polishness as it is orthodoxly conceived, venerating Mary as ‘Queen of Poland’. Thousands of silver votive offerings attest to its devotees’ faith that the image has miraculous powers. It is said that the first of the offerings came from a Polish-Lithuanian commander who led his men through the gate in an assault on the Swedes who occupied the city in 1702.

As a precedent, it was hardly auspicious. Instead of ejecting the occupiers with supernatural support from the Mother of God, the attackers were checked and forced to retreat. The assault in 1944 also lacked the miraculous intervention that would have been needed to achieve its double objective of driving out the Germans and keeping out the Soviets. After failing to overcome the German defences on the first day, and struggling to communicate with their comrades inside the city, Polish units operated alongside the Soviet forces. In the latter stages of the battle, AK troops fought their way through the Old Town to capture the city hall, and raised the Polish flag over the castle tower. It was quickly taken down by their inimical Soviet allies, who replaced it with a red one.

After six days, the Germans were defeated, and on the day after that, the Soviet leadership ordered the disarming of the AK soldiers. The ensuing arrests of Polish officers heralded a programme of repression that saw thousands detained in Vilnius as the year went on. That sent an ominous message to the Poles who comprised most of the city’s surviving population. In September, the Soviet and Polish authorities agreed terms for the removal of ethnic Poles from Lithuania to territory within Poland’s new borders. It was to be a notionally voluntary exodus, not an expulsion. Lithuanian Poles were sent away from their homes and birthplaces in railway goods trucks, but they were not herded onto the trains at gunpoint. The official term was ‘evacuation’, which suggested that the Poles were being given aid – and that they were under threat.

Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog’s (1968) Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change was one of my most memorable textbooks during my early graduate work in linguistics, in a class taught by one of my most memorable professors, Derek Bickerton.

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Filed under Baltics, education, Germany, language, migration, nationalism, Poland, religion, USSR, war

by | 12 July 2025 · 5:55 am

Catholic vs. Orthodox Slavs

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 231-235:

The war with Muscovite Russia was hardly over. Despite the accomplishments of the valiant Transylvanian [Stefan Batory], Polish-Russian relations had yet to enter into their most interesting—indeed, most incredible—phase. In the interim, another development took place, one that would have important repercussions for the battle not only for territory but also for the hearts and minds of the borderland inhabitants.

More precisely, this new development represented a war for souls. At the same time that Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy were vying for control of the Rus’ principalities, questions of jurisdiction over the Orthodox population of Eastern Europe generated sparks. This was the world of the Greek Church, adherents of Christianity in its Byzantine (that is, Eastern) rite.

Byzantine Christianity differed from the Church of Rome in a number of ways, not all of them doctrinal. Whereas in Roman Catholicism the high church language was Latin, there was no one single high church language in the Greek world: the Slavic lands had been given their own church language by the earliest missionaries to the Slavs, Cyril and Methodius. This language came to be known as Old Church Slavonic. Distinct from the spoken vernaculars of the region, it was nonetheless for the most part comprehensible to the population.

The relationship of the church and state in the East was also different than in the West. Following the pattern of Byzantium, the Eastern Church pragmatically subordinated itself to the authority of the state in which it functioned. Another seemingly obvious distinction: the Eastern churches did not owe allegiance to the pope in Rome but, rather, acknowledged the patriarch of Constantinople. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the position of the Greek Church was much diminished. This allowed for some jockeying within Eastern Christendom, especially in the East Slavic lands, where the majority of the faithful resided and the religion flourished.

To be sure, even before the Ottomans moved into Byzantium, not all was well in the Eastern Greek world further north. This in part was the result of the fact that, from its inception, the head of the Greek Church in the Rus’ lands had been the metropolitan of Kyiv. The shift of state borders that resulted in the Greek faithful residing in different states complicated the ecclesiastical picture and led various clergymen to vie with each other for influence over the faithful of Eastern Europe. To give one example: the Bulgarian clergyman who was chosen as metropolitan of the Ruthenian lands in 1415 soon found himself excommunicated by the patriarch of Constantinople, whose mind had been poisoned by the metropolitan of Moscow, who wanted this position for himself. Not until 1458 was Poland-Lithuania able to establish an independent Kyivo-Halych metropolitanate for its Orthodox population.

…

Those in the Commonwealth realized that they needed to counteract such moves. Essentially there were two options. They could either establish an autocephalous Orthodox church for the country or bring about church union—here, union with what was still the biggest force in Christianity: the Church in Rome.

The latter option won out, in part because the Church of Rome had made similar efforts in the past. First attempted in Constance, union between the Roman and Greek Churches had been achieved at the Council of Florence (1439), although nothing ultimately came of it (it is this attempt at union, incidentally, that led to the formation of an autocephalous Orthodox church in Moscow). Yet another sign that union was the direction favored by the Vatican was that, as early as 1573, a Greek College was opened in Rome as well as a Congregation for Eastern Churches.

The Commonwealth, thus, was convinced to work toward union and capitalized on a desire among Commonwealth clergymen not to subordinate themselves to Muscovy—in particular, not to send their financial dues there. This became visible in the synods that took place in the town of Brest, along the internal Polish-Lithuanian border, at the end of the sixteenth century. The Greek clergy decided to support the idea of union—with qualifications. While they would recognize the authority of the pope in Rome, they were not ready to make many changes that would affect the look and feel of their religion. They were allowed to retain their distinctive Eastern rite: the liturgy in Church Slavonic, as well as other traditions, including the marriage of the clergy. A selling point for the Orthodox bishops was a further advantage specified in the act of union: they were to be admitted into the Senate of the Commonwealth, on par with the Roman Catholic bishops.

This Union of Brest, as the 1596 agreement was called, produced a new phenomenon in the Commonwealth: so-called Uniates. These were Eastern-rite Catholics, in official parlance members of the Greek-Catholic Confession of the Slavonic Rite. In other words, while they retained their traditional Eastern rite and practices, they were part of the Catholic Church.

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Filed under Greece, Hungary, language, nationalism, Poland, religion, Russia, Ukraine

by | 9 July 2025 · 7:17 am

Pierwszy Poniedziałek Pażdziernika

Lately I’ve been not just reading more Polish history, but also trying to learn enough of the language to survive this coming academic year in Poland, where Ms. Far Outlier will be working to enrich English language-learning resources at schools there, while I learn enough Polish to handle shopping, navigating public transportation, and exchanging pleasantries with neighbors. Polish is a challenge for someone whose only serious contact with Slavic languages has been via Slavic loanwords in Romanian, like a citi ‘to read’ (cf. Polish czytać) and a iubi ‘to love’ (cf. Polish lubić). But I enjoy language-learning at any age!

The title to this post encapsulates one area of difficulty for speakers of Standard Average European languages who wish to master Polish: there are few reliable cognates even in days of the week (only Sobota) and months of the year (only Marzec and Mai), and the cardinal and ordinal numbers have many inflectional irregularities. Here are glosses for the title of this post.

Pierwszy poniedziałek pażdziernika = First Monday of-October

I installed Microsoft’s Polish keyboard and used the Polish Programmer’s variant to type the text below. It allows the righthand Alt key in combination with standard letters to generate characters with diacritics. Wikipedia explains:

Nowadays nearly all PCs in Poland have standard US keyboards and use the AltGr method to enter Polish diacritics. This keyboard mapping is referred to as the Polish programmers’ layout (klawiatura polska programisty) or simply Polish layout.

Here’s a version of the Lord’s Prayer in Polish. The syntax is pretty predictable from other European languages but the orthographic and inflectional systems are rather more challenging. The English glosses are my own.

Ojcze nasz, któryś jest w niebie,
Father our, which art in heaven,

święć się imię Twoye,
be.holy Reflexive name Thy

Przyjdź królestwo Twoye, bądź wolą Twoyą,
Come kingdom Thy, be.done will Thy

jako w niebie tak i na ziemi.
as in heaven so also on earth.

Chleba naszego powszedniego daj nam dzisiaj.
Bread our daily give us today.

I odpuść nam nasze winy,
And forgive us our guilts

jako i my odpuszczamy naszym winowajcom.
as also we forgive our culprits.

I nie wódź nas na pokuszenie,
And not lead us into temptation,

ale nas zbaw ode złego.
but us lead from evil.

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Filed under education, language, Poland, travel

by | 8 July 2025 · 5:49 am

Polish Vernacular Printing Begins

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 150-151:

With the Renaissance and the increasing numbers of educated Poles came a demand for publications not only in Latin but also in the vernacular.

This was a period when the publishing industry was taking off in this part of Europe. Paper mills in Poland-Lithuania dated from the end of the fifteenth century, and the first printing press was set up in Kraków in 1474, by the Bavarian Kasper Straube. Naturally, Latin books were the first to come off the press, only later to be followed by Polish-language books. The first Polish-language book to be typeset (of course, much earlier there were manuscripts laboriously written out by hand), was the popular Paradise of Souls, which appeared in 1513. It is interesting to note that a Cyrillic-alphabet book was printed in Kraków even prior to that, in 1491, and the first Hungarian-language book was printed in the same city, in 1533. The first Polish grammar book did not come out, however, until 1568.

The sixteenth century proved the Golden Age insofar as the development of writing in the vernacular was concerned. Behind the move to turn Polish into a fully developed literary language was Mikołaj Rey (1505–1569). His famous ditty proclaimed to the world (or certainly, at least, to the Polish-speaking world): iż Polacy nie gęsi, iż swój język mają (that Poles are not geese, that they have their own language). Rey himself had not received a strong classical education, which may explain why he opted to write exclusively in Polish. Still, he penned many works, especially polemical ones, with juicy anecdote and ribald humor.

Rey helped to pave the way for the preeminent poet of the Polish Renaissance, Jan Kochanowski (1530–1584). Unlike Rey, Kochanowski was well educated and more than just conversant in Latin, yet he switched to writing in Polish sometime around 1560, while serving as secretary to King Zygmunt August. Clearly well connected, Kochanowski wrote, among other things, a play for the wedding of Chancellor Jan Zamoyski in 1577. A pure Renaissance drama, The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys boasted a message of pacifism as well as the elegant Polish for which Kochanowski was to become known. He did a magnificent job of translating the biblical Psalms, published in 1579. But Kochanowski will forever be remembered as a loving and doting father—in particular of his daughter Ursula, who died at the tender age of two. Heartbroken, Kochanowski wrote a moving series of nineteen poems lamenting her death, aptly called Laments (Polish: Treny).

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Filed under democracy, education, language, nationalism, Poland, publishing

by | 6 July 2025 · 5:33 am

How Italy Became Włochy in Polish

Mikołaj Gliński explains in CULTURE.PL #language & literature:

As it turns out, the word Włochy is descended from the Proto-Germanic word *walhaz (itself derived from the name of the Italian tribe Volsci) which was a term for speakers of various Romance languages living in post-Roman Empire areas with whom Germanic peoples came into contact. By extension, it could also refer to foreigners in general (compare the contemporary Dutch word Waals ‘Walloon’, and the English word Welsh).

In Polish, the word, or actually one of its variants, namely Wołochy, was at first used to refer to the Romanised tribes of the Balkans (compare Vallachia [and Vlachs]). It was only later that the name, now as Włochy, was transferred to another, more Southern people, namely the Italians.

The same word root włochy also appears in another Polish word, namely włoszczyzna (‘mirepoix’). The word denotes a mix of vegetables used for cooking a flavour base for soups. This handy bundle, which usually includes carrots, parsley, celery and leek, is even today sold in most grocery shops throughout Poland.

Curious for more Polish idiosyncratic geography? Countries like Włochy, Niemcy and Węgry feature in this guide.

I was sure the Polish name for Italy had something to do with their name for other Romance-speaking remnants of the Roman Empire. Glad to see supporting evidence.

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Filed under Hungary, Italy, language, migration, Poland, Romania