
Kresy
Sign in to saveAlso 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 sectionsContents
- 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.