Page 207 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

CHAPTER SIX:
REGIONALISM, OR THE LIMITS OF INCLUSION

In the first week of September 1928, residents of Volhynia’s provincial capital peeped through the

cracks in a fence on Józef Piłsudski Street in order to get a better look at the inaugural Volhynian

exhibition (wystawa wołyńska) (Figure 6.1). The 666 exhibitors on show at the four-and-a-half-

hectare site reflected the province’s predominantly agricultural character, as well as its historical and

modern qualities. In addition to showcasing the production of seeds and grains, the raising of horses

and cattle, horticulture, poultry farming, beekeeping, sugar refining, brewing, distilling, and forestry,

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visitors could also learn about health and hygiene, history and ethnography, and electricity and cars.

Following the Minister of Agriculture’s ceremonial ribbon cutting, 50,000 people—“a huge, even

unexpected” number of attendees, according to the Volhynian Review—pushed through the gates, a

figure that dwarfed the 12,000-strong crowd that had attended a similar show in Włodzimierz just

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two years earlier.
From the mid-nineteenth century onward, international fairs in European and north American

cities had provided arenas in which states could showcase their engagement with modernity—and

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compete against one another in the process. In the eyes of the Volhynian exhibition’s organizers,

however, the proposed audience that September was neither national nor international, but regional.

Indeed, almost all the visitors were themselves from Volhynia, a trend that was encouraged by

county committees whose members traveled to villages across the province with the aim of

encouraging the participation of local farmers. To attract visitors from counties beyond Łuck, a range

of social organizations, including scouts, firemen’s associations, and village youth societies, arranged

excursions that brought almost 15,500 people to the exhibition. The distribution of 10,000 leaflets in

1 “Wyniki wystawy: sprawozdanie prezesa komitetu wystawy,” Przegląd Wołyński, October 14, 1928, 7.
2 Ibid., 6.
3 Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851-
1939 (Manchester, UK, 1988).

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