Intangible cultural heritage of Ukrainians in the post-migration borderlands of southern and eastern Poland | Niematerialne dziedzictwo kulturowe Ukraińców na postmigracyjnych terenach pogranicznych Polski południowej i wschodniej
The collection contains documentation of activities aimed at preserving Ukrainian intangible cultural heritage in the post-migration area of south-eastern Poland: the Polish-Ukrainian, Polish-Slovak, and Polish-Belarusian borderlands.
In the literature on the state of preservation of the heritage of the post-migration areas of south-eastern Poland, as well as in the national information space, still too little attention is paid to the Ukrainian legacy. And although since 1989 the topic has been discussed more frequently, freely and knowledge in this area has been significantly expanded, the issue of Ukrainian heritage is still not sufficiently present in scientific and journalistic narratives and in the practices of public administration of border regions of Poland. Within the current Polish borders, there are more than a thousand post-Ukrainian localities, whose tangible and intangible heritage has been destroyed, forgotten and pushed out of social consciousness, has become “transparent”, while the objects, which, despite progressive destruction, remained visible in the cultural landscape of post-migration areas, are often labelled with the inscription “difficult heritage”.
More than 5 million representatives of the Ukrainian national minority lived in Poland before World War II, while about 700,000 remained within the borders established in July 1944. The Ukrainians in the areas of Podlasie, Hrubieszowszczyzna, Nadsanie, Bojkowszczyzna and Łemkowszczyzna (called Lemkovyna in Lemko-Rusyn dialect) were not a migrant population. The area in which they lived was naturally a Polish-Ukrainian borderland. Polish and Ukrainian cultures intermingled, and their representatives, while being influenced by non-native culture, at the same time strived to preserve their own national identity. The new border and future directives abruptly changed the lives of these 700,000 Polish citizens, almost 500,000 of whom were deported in 1944-1946 to the USSR and 150,000 in 1947 to the western and northern territories of Poland.
In the mid-1940s, when the processes of forced relocation ceased, three processes and their effects overlapped: 1) the violent destruction of the heritage of their predecessors; 2) the clash of cultures; 3) the building of a new political system from scratch, which contributed to the destruction, above all, of the intangible heritage of the so-called Polish Ukrainians.
Settlement of the areas in south-eastern Poland by immigrant populations, systemic cut-off from the communication and cultural routes that had functioned here for centuries and, above all, from the knowledge of the heritage to date, the reduction of these areas during the communist period to the function of a border zone operating under special supervision, meant that the borderland struggled to suppress the sense of local identity and struggled with the impossibility of putting down roots.
The material in the collection was collected as part of the project “Intangible cultural heritage of Ukrainians in Poland: mapping and dissemination” project carried out by Jagiellonian University in cooperation with Europa Nostra Heritage Hub for Central and Eastern Europe, as well as The Association of Ukrainians in Poland, the magazine “Nad Buhom i Narwoju” and the Nowycia Foundation. The aim of the project is to draw attention to the necessity of saving Ukrainian cultural heritage in the aforementioned post-migration area of Poland, but also to undertake activities that would contribute to the integration and opening up of the hermetic minority, post-migration environment, experienced by historical traumas, uprooting and exclusion.
Project implementers:
Faculty of International and Political Studies at the Jagiellonian University
Europa Nostra Heritage Hub for Central and Eastern Europe
Project manager:
Dr Olga Kich-Masłej, Department of Polish-Ukrainian Studies
Project team:
Dr Katarzyna Jagodzińska
Dr Joanna Dziadowiec-Greganić
John Beauchamp
