Page 168 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

(usually coupled with a Polish-speaking Roman Catholic minority), the countryside was made up of

settlements in which visitors would hear people chattering in Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, or German,

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rather than in Russian or Yiddish. The economic role of the countryside was also distinct from that
of the town. The village lacked a rynek (market square), which was central, both figuratively and

literally, to urban settlements and to which surrounding peasants traveled on market days to sell their

produce. The buildings here were overwhelmingly constructed of wood and rarely from the stone or

brick that was more common (although by no means ubiquitous) in the province’s towns. Indeed,

despite the diversity among different types of rural space, Polish civilizers argued that the Volhynian

countryside presented a peculiar set of challenges that were different, if no less difficult to overcome,

than those of the towns.

Whenever Sanacja officials discussed rural spaces, comments about civilizational

backwardness were never far away. Polish depictions of the Volhynian countryside frequently

focused on the physical distance between villages and centers of state power, such as the schools,

administrative buildings, and clinics that one was more likely to encounter in a town. This situation

was made worse by the fact that muddy unpaved roads slowed down the pace of life and that, in

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some areas, the closest train station was eighty kilometers away. Methods of rural transportation

well into the interwar period differed little from those of the prewar years. Horse-drawn wagons

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remained the norm; cars remained a novelty.

Physical isolation and peasant ignorance seemed to feed off one another. If Polish elites

alleged that urban-dwelling Jews shunned European-style modernization by putting “Jewish”

10 For more on the ethnic structure of Volhynia, see Jan Kęsik, “Struktura narodowościowa województwa
wołyńskiego w okresie międzywojennym,” in Kresy Wschodnie II Rzeczypospolitej: Przekształcenie struktury
narodowościowej 1931-1948, edited by Stanisław Ciesielski (Wrocław, 2006), 53-92. A list of the national
breakdown of all settlements in Volhynia can be found in Skorowidz miejscowości Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej. Tom
IX: Województwo wołyńskie (Warsaw, 1923).
11 “Potrzebny kulturalne wsi wołyńskiej,” Wołyń, August 9, 1936, 5.
12 Anastazy Ryszard Garczyński, Wołyń naszą ojczyzną (Lublin, 1999), 50-53.

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