Warmia-Masuria Culture & Language

The region’s culture is layered in an unusual way: the built inheritance belongs to one people and the living culture to another.

Brick Gothic

The Teutonic Knights built in brick because there is no building stone on the glacial plain, and the result is a distinctive regional architecture — massive, austere castles and hall churches in red brick, of which Lidzbark Warminski is among the finest surviving in Europe. Malbork, the Order’s vast headquarters, lies just over the boundary in Pomerania.

Copernicus

He was a canon, a physician, an economist and an administrator here for forty years, and the astronomy was done in the time left over. Frombork holds his tomb, identified by DNA in 2005, and the towns of Warmia make a good deal of the connection.

Resettlement and memory

The post-war population brought its own traditions from Vilnius, Lviv and the Ukrainian south-east, and the region’s folk culture is therefore a transplanted mixture rather than an indigenous one. The Greek Catholic churches and the Ukrainian festivals at Gizycko are part of it.

Sailing

The genuine modern regional culture. Mikolajki and Gizycko have serious yachting communities, and the shanty singing that goes with Polish sailing is a real if slightly startling tradition.

The Old Believers

A community of Russian Old Believers, who split from the Orthodox church in the seventeenth century over liturgical reform, settled in the Masurian forests in the 1830s after fleeing persecution. A few hundred descendants remain around Wojnowo, where the monastery and cemetery survive and services are still held in Church Slavonic to the old rite — another of the region’s religious layers, and one almost nobody expects to find in Poland.

Wooden architecture

Masurian timber cottages with half-hipped roofs survive in the villages.

Polish is the language, spoken by everyone, and with no strong regional dialect — unusual in Poland, and a direct consequence of the population being resettled here from many different places after 1945.

Ukrainian is spoken by the community deported here in 1947 and by more recent arrivals, and Greek Catholic services are held in several towns.

German is understood by some and is increasingly heard from visitors, many of them descendants of East Prussian families returning to see where their grandparents came from. Bilingual signage exists in a few places.

English is spoken in Olsztyn, in the marinas and by charter companies, and is limited in the villages.

Useful Polish: dzien dobry, dziekuje, prosze, przepraszam, na zdrowie. Sailors will appreciate stopa wody pod kilem as a toast — a foot of water under the keel.