Page 75 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Russian titles and were officially renamed after Polish poets, historical figures, and important

22
national festivals. As the Cyrillic signs posted by the imperial authorities came down and were

replaced by those in the Latin script of Polish, representatives of the state sought to renationalize

towns as part of a broader set of processes in reclaimed borderlands across the continent. Their

Hellenizing counterparts had done something similar in the formerly Ottoman port city of Salonica in

23
1913, as had the French in Alsace-Lorraine after the First World War.
By claiming that Poland was a nation-state that simply attempted to reintegrate its long-lost

borderlands, Polish elites of various political stripes continued to reject imperial analogies. The

author of one article that appeared in the right-wing Warsaw Courier (Kurjer Warszawski) in

November 1922 explained the proper relationship between Poland and Volhynia by comparing it to

England’s relationship with Scotland and its dominions and to that of France with Brittany,

Provence, and Alsace-Lorraine. Each case taught Poles, he argued, that “it is always officialdom and

24
the army that realize the union between a country and its borderlands.” Another journalist writing in
the right-wing weekly Volhynia Life also insisted that Poland did not act in a “colonial” manner, as

did the British, Dutch, and Belgians in their holdings in Africa, and insisted instead that generations

25
of Poles had created an “inseparable whole” with the sacrifice of their blood. Antoni Zalewski

22 See Wydawnictwo statystyczne Magistratu m. Olyka (Łuck, 1928), 9. Theodore R. Weeks discusses this process in
interwar Wilno, which had also been under Russian rule. See Weeks, Vilnius Between Nations, 133.
23 On Salonica, see Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430-1950 (New
York, 2006), 301-4. For a comparison with French developments in Alsace-Lorraine, see Alison Carrol, “In the
Border’s Shadow: Reimagining Urban Spaces in Strasbourg, 1918-1939,” Journal of Contemporary History 48, no.
4 (2013): 666- 687.
24 The original article could be found in the November 23 edition of the Kurjer Warszawski. The article was reported
in a French bulletin of Polish press coverage on the 1922 Volhynian elections. See Bulletin périodique de la presse
polonaise du 16 au 30 Novembre (Ministère des Affaires étrangères), December 12, 1922, 2. Despite this Polish
depiction of Alsace as a borderland area that was being absorbed into France, some in Alsace-Lorraine themselves
argued that France was behaving in a colonial way by treating Alsace like a “colony.” See Samuel Huston
Goodfellow, “Autonomy or Colony: The Politics of Alsace’s Relationship to France in the Interwar Era,” in Views
from the Margins: Creating Identities in Modern France, edited by Kevin J. Callahan and Sarah A. Curtis (Lincoln,
NE, 2008), 143.
25 Julian Podoski, “Dwie sanacje,” Życie Wołynia, April 6, 1924, 1.

75