Page 236 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Both local members of Volhynia’s regionalist intelligentsia and Warsaw-based organizations

attempted to foster positive narratives that balanced the province’s quintessential Polishness with its

enticing Otherness for their own purposes. While Orłowicz had written many guidebooks focusing

on different regions of Poland during the 1920s, the fact that Józewski and the Łuck-based Provincial

Tourist Committee supported the publication of the guidebook to Volhynia indicated the role of local

elites in creating an image of Volhynia for outsiders. In 1930, local regionalist organizations also

promoted Volhynia at an international exposition for transport and tourism in the western city of

Poznań by focusing on both its national diversity and its physical attractiveness. Inside the

exhibition’s Pavilion 18, which was dedicated to both domestic and foreign tourism, the Volhynian

section featured numerous organizations that worked under the auspices of the regional committee.

The Union of Polish Elementary School Teachers, the Volhynian Society for Sightseeing and Care

for Historical Monuments, and the Volhynian Union of Village Youth all set up stalls, as did two

90
artists who displayed paintings and drawings of picturesque Volhynian scenes. The Volhynian
committee also organized a “Volhynia Day,” which focused on the province’s folklore and featured

91
radio broadcasts of choirs singing both Polish and Ukrainian folk songs.

If this performance of Volhynia in Poznań was indicative of the local regionalist approach,

the project of Volhynian tourism attracted proponents from beyond the province too. In the mid-

1930s, the Society for the Development of the Eastern Lands (Towarzystwo Rozwoju Ziem

Wschodnich, hereafter TRZW), a private Warsaw-based organization that had been established in

1933 and received government subsidies, also turned its sights to Volhynia’s burgeoning tourist

industry. In developing the “Summer in the Eastern Lands” program, by which the TRZW worked

alongside the Ministry of Transportation in order to provide subsidized travel to the kresy, it

90 Międzynarodowa Wystawa Komunikacji i Turystyki, 6.VII-10.VIII.1930: Przewodnik—Katalog (Poznań, 1930),
47-8.
91 “Propaganda Wołyńska na Międzynarodowej wystawie komun. i tur. w Poznaniu,” Przegląd Wołyński, June 27,
1930, 3.

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