Podlachia historical timeline

Podlachia’s history is that of a frontier between Poland, Lithuania and Rus, and of a forest that outlasted every regime that owned it.

Borderland

The region was contested between the Polish crown, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Ruthenian principalities through the Middle Ages, and the result was a population that was Catholic and Orthodox, Polish- and Belarusian-speaking, with Jewish communities in every town and, from the seventeenth century, Tatar settlements. The Lublin Union of 1569 transferred Podlachia from Lithuania to the Polish crown, but the mixture remained.

The royal forest

Bialowieza was a hunting preserve of the Polish kings from the fifteenth century, then of the Russian tsars after the partitions. Access was restricted, settlement forbidden and poaching punished severely, which is precisely why the forest survived when everything comparable across Europe was cleared.

The bison’s near-extinction

The First World War broke the protection. Occupying troops and poachers shot the herd out, and the last wild European bison in Bialowieza was killed in 1919. The species survived only in zoos — fewer than sixty animals worldwide — and was reintroduced here from captive stock in 1929. Every European bison alive today descends from twelve individuals.

The twentieth century

Soviet occupation in 1939, German in 1941, and the destruction of the region’s Jewish population — Bialystok’s ghetto rose in August 1943 and was liquidated. Borders moved west in 1945 and populations with them.

Bialystok and the Branickis

The region’s one great aristocratic project was Jan Klemens Branicki’s remaking of Bialystok in the eighteenth century into a baroque residence and garden so ambitious it was called the Versailles of Podlachia. The palace was rebuilt after wartime destruction and now houses the medical university, and the formal gardens are open — an unexpected piece of courtly display in a region otherwise defined by forest and village.

Since

Quiet depopulation, the national park expanded in 1996, and a continuing argument about logging.