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Kresy
EntityQ1411476· pop 31· linked from 789 articles

Also known as Kresy Wschodnie

Eastern Borderlands (), often simply Borderlands (, ) was a historical region of the eastern part of the Second Polish Republic. The term was coined during the interwar period (1918–1939). Largely agricultural and extensively multi-ethnic with a Polish minority, it amounted to nearly half of the territory of interwar Poland. Historically situated in the eastern Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, following the 18th-century foreign partitions it was divided between the Empires of Russia and Austria-Hungary, and ceded to Poland in 1921 after the Treaty of Riga. As a result of the post-World War II b

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Encyclopedic overview

41 sections
Contents
  • Extents
  • Etymology
  • History
  • The Partitions of Poland
  • The Pale of Settlement
  • Economic decline of Kresy
  • Between the World Wars
  • During and after World War II
  • Interwar population
  • Largest cities and towns
  • Polish minority after World War II
  • Notable people
  • A
  • B
  • C
  • D
  • F
  • G
  • H
  • I
  • J
  • K
  • L
  • M
  • N
  • O
  • P
  • R
  • S
  • T
  • W
  • Z
  • Cradle of Polish culture
  • Present day
  • In contemporary Poland
  • Polish regional dialects
  • See also
  • Notes
  • References
  • Bibliography
  • External links

Eastern Borderlands (), often simply Borderlands (, ) was a historical region of the eastern part of the Second Polish Republic. The term was coined during the interwar period (1918–1939). Largely agricultural and extensively multi-ethnic with a Polish minority, it amounted to nearly half of the territory of interwar Poland. Historically situated in the eastern Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, following the 18th-century foreign partitions it was divided between the Empires of Russia and Austria-Hungary, and ceded to Poland in 1921 after the Treaty of Riga. As a result of the post-World War II border changes, all of the territory was ceded to the Soviet Union, and today the area of Kresy is divided between Western Ukraine, Western Belarus, and south-eastern Lithuania.

The region gave rise to the Kresy myth, a collection of nostalgic views about the area. After the fall of Communism in Europe and dissolution of the Soviet Union a major economic conflict emerged about the real estate lost by Poland with the loss of Kresy.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Kresy” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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