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exemplary dwelling of Captain Teliga, the settlement’s leader, whose “white, stylish house arose

from green trees” and “sent out a special beauty to the settlement.” 104 Similarly, a former inhabitant

of the village of Folwark, which was home to two Polish and four Ukrainian families, recalled his

impressions of the same settler colony. “I remember that from our house, at a distance of perhaps one

and a half kilometers, was the settlement of Wola Rycerska, which was built and developed in front

of our very eyes,” he would later write, “we always looked upon it with respect and we were proud of

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it.”
The nostalgic tone employed by many Polish memoirists likely resulted in large part from

these peoples’ experiences of violence, deportation, and exile during and after the Second World

War. But in contemporaneous documents too, settlers and their supporters argued that they

constituted conduits of a particular type of rural modernity. Jerzy Bonkowicz-Sittauer, one of the

county heads appointed by Józewski and a settler himself, explicitly contrasted the attitude of the

settlers with those of the neglectful former tsarist authorities, forming part of a broader story in which

the quotidian practices of Poles provided the antidote to both bad imperial governance and the

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ongoing inertia of local people. As Bonkowicz-Sittauer put it, the Russian authorities had

neglected the region so badly that there was “barely a modern postal network,” a situation that led to

the isolation of villages from the rest of the world. But while native villagers did not subscribe to

newspapers and while letters from America were received in a very roundabout way, the settlers

were doing their best to rectify the situation. Almost half of them permanently subscribed to journals

and, in doing so, created a “very strong demand” for a modern postal service that would benefit rural

folk more generally. Drawing on the idea that civilization could be measured through basic

amenities, the article also referred to settler-built wells that provided inhabitants with access to clean

104 KARTA AWII/1251.
105 KARTA AWII/1251
106 J B-S, “Osadnictwo wojskowe” (1931), republished in Leon Popek Osadnictwo wojskowe na Wołyniu (Lublin,
1998), 20.

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