Page 257 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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was characterized by complex ethnographic, linguistic, cultural, national, and even racial diversity.
While Wiktor Ormicki had argued that regions like Volhynia constituted anthropogeographical units

that should form the basis of academic study, in his 1929 publication on the eastern borderlands, he

had called northern Volhynia a “typical transition region” (typowa kraina przejściowa) and reported

that terms for the area tended to combine “Polesie” and “Volhynia”—it was either Volhynian Polesie

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or Polesian Volhynia. The casual flipping of the noun and the adjective indicated the unclear sense
of the region’s basic character. Was it a fundamental part of Polesie that resembled Volhynia or a

fundamental part of Volhynia that resembled Polesie?

Foreign visitors had certainly attempted to locate the point at which peoples and landscapes

began to change, and they found that the transition was gradual but perceptible. A British official

who traveled by car between the towns of Brześć in Polesie province and Kowel in the northern area

of Volhynia during the 1920s singled out the transitional zone between “White Russian” (Belarusian)

populations in the north and their Ukrainian counterparts further south. As he left the marshy country

behind him, he observed “certain differences in dress and appearance.” If “the White Russian peasant

resembles the heavy-bearded Russian moujik,” he went on, “the Ukrainian is lighter and more

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southern-looking,” while peasant costumes were “also quite different.” His compatriot, a journalist

reporting on the region for the London Times, made similar observations on his journey between the

two administrative provinces. It was not only that the landscape changed from the marshlands of the

north to the “mellow country” of rolling hills, oak forests, and hop gardens of Volhynia, but also that

the national characteristics of the populations were transformed. “The peasants are now Ukrainian,”

he claimed, “less phlegmatic and more alert, and one can tell from their gay embroideries, their brass

33 Jerzy Tomaszewski, “Belorussians in the Eyes of the Poles, 1918-1939,” Acta Polaniae Historica 51 (1985): 109.
34 Ormicki, Życie gospodarcze, 8.
35 “Report on a Visit to Volhynia and Eastern Galicia” NAL FO 417/16/83.

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