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the Ukrainian language, as well as 3,000 posters in Polish, also indicated that the exhibition was open

to the linguistically diverse populations of the province, including those “petty farmers, especially of

the non-Polish nationality” who had been exposed to misleading and politically subversive claims

4
that painted a “grim picture of today’s Poland.” Such endeavors apparently paid off. After the
exhibition, the Volhynian Review reported on its success in fostering more positive feelings toward

the Polish state among the Volhynian population. Even in those localities where people generally

“did not understand” such events, the exhibition was said to have led to “significant breakthroughs in

5
the conservatism and passivity of our countryside.” When the president of the exhibition committee

declared that the “whole of society” had contributed to the event’s success, he argued that the Polish

6
state and the Volhynian population had engaged in a common mission in the borderlands.
This chapter asks—and attempts to answer—questions that have been implicit in our story so

far. What was Volhynia? Who controlled the process of turning the province into a meaningful unit

of political space? And what, precisely, did it mean (if anything) to be a Volhynian? It does so

through an exploration of the origins, development, and character of Volhynian regionalism, which

enjoyed its apogee between the late 1920s and the mid-1930s. Made up of academics from beyond

the region, as well as state officials based in the province and members of the local pro-Józewski

intelligentsia, regionalists embarked on an ambitious project that involved several interrelated

processes: creating and distributing local knowledge, reinforcing the concept of Volhynia as a viable

political and cultural unit within the Polish state, and molding a modern and self-consciously

Volhynian citizen who would be loyal to the Second Republic. Drawing on myths that valorized the

national diversity of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, they argued that a regional identity

would provide the antidote to the national tensions over education, language rights, settlement

4 “Plon Wystawy Wołyńskiej,” Przegląd Wołyński, October 14, 1928, 4.
5 Ibid., 9.
6 Ibid., 4.

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