Page 259 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

[INSERT FIGURE 7.1]

Figure 7.1: Types of peasant hut in Polesie and Volhynia, with descriptions. Source: Jerzy
Niebrzycki, Polesie: opis wojskowo-geograficzny i studjum terenu (Warsaw, 1930).

Debates over the correct location for the administrative border between the provinces of

Polesie and Volhynia had already revealed such dynamics during the 1920s, when a range of

stakeholders evoked the physical and human liminality of the area to push for their competing

political agendas in Warsaw. In 1923, the provincial governor of Polesie, Stanisław Downarowicz,

had sent a memorandum to the Minister of the Interior in which he depicted Polesie as a “future

Polish corridor between a Belarusian north and a Ukrainian south,” one that had managed hitherto to

remain outside of the zone of non-Polish nationalizing influences but in which Ukrainian and

Belarusian “elements” (czynniki) might dangerously “shake hands.” As part of his conclusions, he

argued that all of the northern areas of the Volhynian province should be detached and connected

38
instead to Polesie, since they had a fundamentally Polesian, rather than Volhynian, character. The
counties of Sarny and Koszyrski, which were made up of areas that had been part of the Russian

imperial governorate of Volhynia but had been included in the Polish province of Polesie, proved to

39
be particularly important sites of internal contestation. A letter penned in the Volhynian provincial

office and sent to the Ministry of the Interior in February 1925 argued that the two counties needed to

be rejoined to Volhynia, since they gravitated toward the province in terms of their economic

40
development, infrastructure, and administration. And yet, in the eyes of the Polesian governor, their

fundamental character remained Polesian, meaning that they should not be relinquished to Volhynia.

38 Stanisław Downarowicz, “Zarys programu zadań i prac państwowych na Polesiu,” AAN MSW (Part 1) 938/5, 2-
3. For a history of the Ukrainian movement in Polesie, see “Ruch ukraiński na Polesiu 1918-1933r.,” AAN
UWwBnB 36/3-43.
39 The counties were Sarny and Kamień Koszyrski. See Mielcarek, Podziały terytorialno-administracyjne, 49. See
also Jerzy Stefan Langrod, Ze studjów nad podziałem administracyjnym państwa (Kraków, 1931), 98.
40 Moreover, they still came under the authority of the regional courts in Łuck and Równe, the director of state
forests, and the Orthodox and Roman Catholic bishoprics. Letter from Volhynian provincial office to the Ministry of
the Interior (February 2, 1925), AAN MSW (Part 1) 176 t.II/719-721.

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