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local knowledge, distribute it to the province’s population, and convince them that it was “theirs.” By

the late 1920s, officials and members of the pro-Piłsudski intelligentsia were busy setting up various

forums in which these processes could take place, including museums, journals, educational courses,

and folkloric societies. Like their counterparts within the German Heimat movement, they distributed

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information about premodern characteristics by relying on modern technologies. Photography,

print, and quicker means of transportation all fueled Volhynia’s regionalist project.

The most obvious center of permanent knowledge about Volhynia was the provincial

museum, which was established in Łuck in June 1929 and whose collections were based on the

ethnographic and historical displays that had been on show at the Volhynian exhibition the previous

year. To fund the museum, Józewski obtained a subsidy from the state education budget, while

Aleksander Prusiewicz, an expert on folklore and a former professor at the university in Kamieniec

Podolski (which now found itself on the Soviet side of the border), became the museum’s first

director. Reflecting a larger European idea about the role of local museums, of which the German

Heimatmuseum was perhaps the most highly praised model, the museum’s supporters claimed that it

would play an important didactic role for the diverse members of local society, acquainting them

with the region in which they lived so that they might see “with their own eyes” the great cultural

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monuments of this “ancient land.” The museum boasted an ethnographic section that featured old
wall hangings and embroidery, traditional peasant folk costumes, portraits of the Ostrogski princes,

and a collection of historical documents and manuscripts dating back to the sixteenth century (Figure

21 On the ways in which modern technology played an important role in sustaining German ideas about the
“historic” landscape through the Heimat movement, see David Blackbourn, “‘Garden of Our Hearts:’ Landscape,
Nature, and Local Identity in the German East,” in Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place: German-
Speaking Central Europe, 1860-1930, edited by David Blackbourn and James Retallack (Toronto, 2007), 154.
22 “Muzeum wołyńskie,” Przegląd Wołyński, July 14, 1929, 3. On rural museums in Europe during the interwar
period, see League of Nations European Conference on Rural Life. Intellectual Aspects of Rural Life, no. 16
(Geneva, 1939), 7. For more on local museums in Germany, see Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, 93-103. On this
approach to county-level museums in Volhynia, see K. Przemyski, “W sprawie muzeów powiatowych,” Dziennik
Urzędowy Kuratorium Okręgu Szkolnego Wołyńskiego 6, no. 11 (December 1929): 376.

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