Podlachia Culture & Language

Podlachian culture is a survival of religious and linguistic plurality that the twentieth century removed from most of Europe.

Orthodoxy

The Grabarka pilgrimage each August is the great Orthodox occasion in Poland: pilgrims carry wooden crosses up the hill and plant them, and the slope around the monastery now holds tens of thousands of them, weathering into the trees. The Suprasl monastery and the wooden churches around Hajnowka are the architectural expression, with iconostases, chant and a liturgical calendar thirteen days behind the Western one.

Tatar heritage

The mosques at Kruszyniany and Bohoniki, built of timber in the eighteenth century, are among the oldest surviving Muslim buildings in Europe and look startlingly like village churches. The community has been Polish-speaking for centuries, fought in Polish armies, and keeps a distinctive cuisine.

Esperanto

Ludwik Zamenhof grew up in Bialystok, a town where Poles, Jews, Belarusians, Russians and Germans lived without a common language, and invented Esperanto in 1887 as a deliberate response to it. The city marks the connection.

The wooden churches

The Orthodox villages around Hajnowka and the Bug valley hold timber churches built without nails, with shingled onion domes and painted iconostases, several of them two or three centuries old. They are small, dark and still in weekly use, and the contrast with the enormous modern Orthodox cathedral at Hajnowka — built in the 1980s in a deliberately modernist idiom and host to an international festival of Orthodox church music — is one of the more interesting things in the region.

Village singing and building

Belarusian-language multipart singing survives in the eastern villages, and the wooden houses with carved and painted window surrounds are a genuine regional architecture.

Polish is the language of everything official and is spoken by everyone.

Belarusian and the local po prostu borderland dialects are spoken in the Orthodox villages of the east, particularly by older people, and bilingual signage exists in some municipalities. Lithuanian is spoken in the far north around Punsk, where there is a recognised Lithuanian minority with its own schools.

Russian is understood by some, and English is limited outside Bialystok and the specialist wildlife guides, who generally speak it well.

Useful Polish: dzien dobry, dziekuje, prosze, przepraszam, na zdrowie.

In Orthodox villages, the greeting Chrystus zmartwychwstal at Easter, answered Zaprawde zmartwychwstal, is used for weeks after the feast.