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a taboo in communist Poland, the fall of communism in 1989 marked a renewed interest in the kresy

as a space for Polish national storytelling (although significantly not changes in formal borders). This

process has involved emphasizing the historical role of Poles in countries to the east. New narratives

of Poland’s historical links to Volhynia were forged, for instance, through a series of Ukrainian-

language YouTube videos (subtitled in Polish) about Luts’k’s “Polish traces” (polskie ślady), which

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were produced by the town’s Polish consulate.
The desire to appropriate a more positive narrative of Poland’s relationship with the eastern

borderlands also spoke to new projections of a multicultural European identity in ways that both

drew upon and echoed interwar trends. As they sought their country’s “return to Europe,” Polish

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elites stoked so-called kresy-mania. Leaders in Lublin, for instance, rehearsed the language of the
1920s when they highlighted their city’s historic role as a “gateway to the east” and presented

themselves as members of a European community that was also sensitive to the cultural and spiritual

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values of “the East.” Celebrations of Jewishness in today’s Poland also echo the interwar focus on
the Karaites by relying on the idea that this numerically marginal population is simultaneously exotic

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and indigenous. Far from being simply a political ploy, however, Polish interest in the kresy has

been commercially successful too. The many popular books on prewar kresy life, which include old

photograph albums, tourist guides, and even cookbooks offering traditional recipes from the region,

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are presented in a nostalgic way for a wide audience. When the violence of the region is addressed,

there is often something celebratory in popular depictions of prewar life. A controversial 2016

24 Accessed online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr9bkJfa8FE.
25 “Kresomania,” Tygodnik Powszechny, March 20, 2006. Accessed online:
https://www.tygodnikpowszechny.pl/kresomania-130828.
26 Zarycki, Ideologies of Eastness, 218.
27 Geneviève Zubrzycki, “Nationalism, ‘Philosemitism’ and Symbolic Boundary-Making in Contemporary Poland,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 58, no. 1 (2016): 90-91.
28 For a selection of this literature, see Piotr Jamski, Pocztówki z Kresów przedwojennej Polski (Warsaw, 2012);
Louise Boyd, Kresy: Fotografie z 1934 roku (Kraków, 1991); Świat Kresów, edited by Tomasz Kozłowski and
Danuta Błahut-Biegańska (Warsaw, 2012); Agnieszka Kozłowska, Zapomniana kuchnia polskich kresów (Kraków,
2008).

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