Page 240 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

of a nesting arrangement, their authors promoted carefully chosen villages in the areas around towns

as gateways into exotic eastern space, in the same way that Volhynia as a whole was marketed as

place of domestic exoticism to tourists from the more central and western parts of Poland. The author

of the Równe guidebook suggested that readers make their way to a village seven kilometers from

the town that was known for its prehistoric excavations, while those behind the Krzemieniec

guidebook urged people to make an excursion to Żołoby, just three kilometers to the south, in order

to view the village from an “anthropogeographical and ethnographical” perspective. 103 On reaching

Żołoby, the gaze of the visitor was directed to the village’s shape and the style of its buildings, which

were made of clay loam rather than wood, as well as to the straw roofs atop peasant houses, which

were “somewhat reminiscent of the roofs of Carpathian buildings.” 104

Such texts indicated how the very same attributes that some state officials cast as indicative

of backwardness could be transformed in a different context into markers of attractive primitiveness.

Seen through a regionalist pair of eyes, peasant huts became aesthetically pleasing examples of

authentic ethnographic culture, rather than places of filth and squalor. And yet, as had been the case

with earlier iterations of the regionalist project, advice concerning which villages were worth visiting

betrayed assumptions about where the acceptable borders of regionalism—and the nation—lay. For

every Żołoby, there were countless villages that Krzemieniec’s elites chose not to include on their

book’s pages and which the visitor would presumably bypass entirely.

***

In March 1937, Jan Fitzke, the curator of the provincial museum in Łuck, stated that Volhynia

possessed a compelling internal coherence. It was, he stated, “a closed territorial whole with specific

103 Mały ilustrowany przewodnik po Krzemieńcu i okolicy, 66.
104 Ibid., 68.

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