Page 155 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

[INSERT FIGURE 4.3]

Figure 4.3: Plans for the Colony for State Officials in Łuck. Source: Wiktor Mondalski,
Budownictwo powojenne na Polesiu i w województwach wschodnich: T. 1 (Brześć nad Bugiem,
1925).

The transition from plan to reality had, however, revealed that transforming Łuck from a

“Jewish” to a “Polish” town through urban planning alone would not be an easy undertaking. In

1925, an article in the Volhynian Review expressed horror at the building work that had been

completed so far. While the original proposals had been attractive, what was materializing was a

“noisy, stifling, and cramped small town (małe miasteczko) where more than a hundred families will

57
be crammed in.” More worrying still, however, were the attitudes of the colony’s Polish
population. While the settlement had always been conceived as a separate district of the town, in

close proximity to other key sites of Polish urban development, the author feared that these people

58
would throw themselves “into the limits of a closed Polish ghetto,” made up only of officials. Since
the term “ghetto” was used in an exclusively pejorative way during this period—alluding to a Jewish

community that was unwilling to open itself up to the forces of modernity—the word is worth noting.

In walling themselves off, Polish officials risked failure in what should have been the “honorable

cultural mission of national revival” with which they had been charged. Such anxieties did not abate.

In 1927, the Volhynian governor who preceded Józewski wrote in a letter to Warsaw that the lack of

housing, along with the generally unhealthy conditions and the absence of a “Polish cultural

environment,” constituted the main reasons why the state still struggled to recruit officials to work in

59
Volhynia. Rather than simply constituting a practical annoyance, these problems spoke to the

ongoing question that Polish elites—whether military settlers, border guards, or urban planners—had

57 “Kolonje Urzędnicze w Łucku,” Przegląd Wołyński, April 11, 1925, 3.
58 Ibid., 3.
59 Letter from the Volhynian Governor to the President of the Council of Ministers in Warsaw (November, 9, 1927),
AAN PRM Part 4 Rkt. 56 t. 8/94.

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