Page 138 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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around 21,000 people. Indeed, it is unlikely that an observer from western Europe, or even from the
larger cities of western and central Poland, would have recognized these small towns as true urban

centers. They were certainly not cities like the state capital Warsaw, where the country’s first

skyscraper appeared on the skyline in the early 1930s; the textile center of Łódź, which was

colloquially known as the Manchester of Poland; or even the port city of Gdynia, which had arisen at

lightning speed on the Baltic coast. Instead, Volhynian towns frequently had the look of “overgrown

villages,” their one- or two-level buildings made mainly of wood, rather than the brick that was

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ubiquitous further west. Other commentators argued that these spaces might be more fruitfully

compared to towns beyond Europe’s borders, with one interwar geographer even writing that the

bazaars in kresy towns were reminiscent of those in the “Near East” and that their narrow streets

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looked “almost ‘oriental.’” Such comparisons indicated not only how Polish discussions about the
eastern borderlands were constantly connected with broader assumptions about global civilizational

hierarchies, but also that “civilization” was itself measured in the physical urban landscape.

When Polish commentators talked about Volhynian towns in the 1920s, what exactly did

they mean? In other words, what allowed a settlement to qualify as a town in the first place? This

deceptively simple question yielded a rather complicated answer. Since the definition of what

constituted a town was itself slippery, and since the official status of various settlements changed

during the 1920s, statistics on the percentage of Volhynian town dwellers, including those cited

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above, are inherently problematic. Like the imperial Russian clerks before them, interwar Polish

officials attempted to categorize various types of settlements as towns (miasta) or small towns

5 Mędrzecki, Inteligencja polska, 44.
6 According to statistics published in 1930, only 10 to 15 percent of buildings in Volhynia’s towns were made of
brick, compared with between 80 and 100 percent in the western provinces of Poznań and Pomerania. See
Rzeczpospolita Polska: atlas statystyczny, Table 4 [no pagination]. See also Mędrzecki, “Przemiany cywilizacyjne,”
107.
7 Ludomir Sawicki, Eskapada samochodowa po Kresach Wschodnich (Kraków, 1927), 21.
8 On the various changes, see Mędrzecki, Województwo wołyńskie, 18; Mielcarek, Podziały terytorialno-
administracyjne, 56. The Polish word “miasto” translates into English as “town” or “city.”

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