Page 11 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Numerous rivers, including the Styr, Stochód, Słucz, Ikwa, and Horyń, flowed from their southern

sources toward the marshlands of the north, with little towns often springing up along their banks.

[INSERT FIGURE 0.1]

Figure 0.1: Map of the Interwar Province of Volhynia.

Volhynia was also one of the most nationally, religiously, and linguistically diverse regions

of the famously heterogeneous Second Republic. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, this was a place

in which people spoke a cacophony of languages, worshipped different gods, and, depending on the

context, frequently identified with their localities, as much as with any clear-cut national group.

While census statistics are deeply problematic, in that they ascribed rather than reflected national

identities and did not account for phenomena like bi- or multilingualism, even they suggested that

Polish-speaking populations constituted a clear minority in the interwar province. On the 1931

census, Poles made up less than 17% of the total population, with almost 70% categorized as

12
Ukrainians, 10% as Jews, and smaller percentages as Germans, Czechs, and Russians. Such
categories frequently, although by no means uniformly, overlapped with religious identifiers: Polish-

speaking populations were usually Roman Catholics; Ukrainian- and Czech-speakers worshipped in

the Orthodox Christian Church; Yiddish- and Hebrew-speakers were members of Jewish religious

communities; and German-speakers were Protestant. It was, in short, a particularly diverse example

of a wider phenomenon: the multiethnic European borderland.

If these statistics referred to the interwar administrative province, however, the historical

borders of Volhynia (Wołyń) had ebbed and flowed over time, as multiple polities expanded and

12 Grzegorz Hryciuk, Przemiany narodowościowe i ludnościowe w Galicji Wschodniej i na Wołyniu w latach 1931-
1948 (Toruń, 2005), 139.

11