Page 140 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

years also linked the castles, places of worship, monuments, educational establishments, and sites of

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interest with earlier versions of the Polish state. In his study of Polish geography, Stanisław

Lencewicz wrote of how Volhynia’s towns carried the marks of the nation’s material culture within

the urban landscape, including those that stretched back to the tenth century. For him, old-fashioned

houses with shingle roofs and porches, as well as baroque churches at the center of the towns, formed

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symbols of quintessential Polishness. In contrast, Russian sites were generally depicted as ugly,
aesthetically aberrant, and nationally out-of-place.

History could be rewritten; names could be changed. But more troublesome were the day-

to-day conditions in these places, which did not conform with models of modern civilization—the

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muddy squares, the absence of officially named streets, the awful smells. Volhynia’s two weekly
newspapers certainly dedicated much column space to urban problems, while internal reports listed

the characteristics that Volhynia’s towns lacked, thus revealing what Polish elites considered to be

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European standards. Many of their comments related to the poor hygiene of urban inhabitants
across the province. According to the director of Volhynia’s Provincial Health Department, the

courtyards of houses in the towns were cramped and poorly maintained, while market squares were

impassable due to mud in the spring and autumn, prompting one journalist in Łuck to claim that a

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pedestrian had to “equip himself with galoshes up to his knees in order to reach his apartment.”
Because none of Volhynia’s towns had purpose-built water supply systems in the 1920s, the

populations accessed water at the nearest well, and the general absence of sewer systems and public

11 Letter from the Head of Kostopol County to the Volhynian Provincial Office in Łuck on the issue of Bereźne’s
borders (July 13, 1933), AAN MSW 300/106.
12 Stanisław Lencewicz, Polska (Warsaw, 1937), 345.
13 Examples of streets being given names for the first time can be found in Wydawnictwo statystyczne Magistratu m.
Olyka (Łuck, 1928), 9.
14 On the list of urban deficiencies in Równe, see “Sprawa Zjazdu Przedstawicieli Miast w Warszawie w marcu
1925r.,” DARO 31/1/283/715-716od.
15 Dr. Szaniawski, “Sprawozdanie roczne ze stanu zdrowia publicznego Wojew. Wołyńskiego za rok 1923,”
Zdrowie 40, no. 1 (January 1925): 12. For quotation, see “Z Całego Wołynia,” Przegląd Wołyński, October 1, 1924,
3.

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