The parishioners had set up heat lamps on the richly carpeted floor, but last night’s frost still clings to the air. It mingles with a thick haze of incense, filling the nave, catching rays of sunlight creeping in through the window. You can just make out a fresco of Christ’s baptism, beyond the iconostasis at the end of the nave. A row of old women huddle together, along the left-hand wall, chatting in hushed whispers in the shadows of the morning. Some rise to light candles near the dozens of icons that adorn the space. One, of the Virgin Mary, dates back to the 18th century.
I’m in Puchły, at the Church of the Protection of the Mother of God, wooden, dark blue, and completed in 1918. The church is small and the village smaller: officially Puchły has a population of 42, but even that feels generous. Yet in tiny places like these, in the region of Podlasie, a whole forgotten world comes to life. For in this corner of northeast Poland, famed for its forests and its rare herds of wild bison, you can uncover a diversity mostly lost to Eastern Europe.
Those old ladies, after all, do not mumble in Polish, but in Podlachian, a microlanguage far closer to Belarusian and Ukrainian. Unusually for the homeland of Pope John Paul II, the babcias aren’t Catholic either. As the Cyrillic blessing on the archway of the Church of the Protection implies, the people here are Eastern Orthodox, sharing the Podlasie countryside with Lithuanians, Muslim Lipka Tatars, Jews. Some locals even continue to rely on szeptuns, folk healers who blend Orthodox and pagan practices. No wonder many Podlachian refer to their nationality simply as tutejsi — “from here”.
Over recent decades, though, people here have been under rising pressure to be from somewhere, the remorseless logic of nationalism pushing them to be Polish, or Belarusian, or even Russian. That’s especially true now, as literal walls go up right across Podlasie, and governments across the region prepare for future bloodshed. Yet that hardly means Puchły and its people are anachronistic, forgotten and marooned as the continent rearms. On the contrary, its borderless identity evokes both the deep past of Eastern Europe — and reminds us that another future is possible.
Places like Puchły were fired by history. Located in the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, whose eastern lands were once known as Ruthenia, Podlasie was a place where varied identities could coexist without contradiction. This wasn’t due to some magnanimous vision of pluralism, but simply a reflection of reality. In the 16th century, the Catholic kings of the Commonwealth spoke Polish, a West Slavic language related to Czech. But most of their subjects spoke East Slavic tongues like Podlachian, and practiced Eastern Orthodoxy.
Jews and Muslims were welcomed as merchants and warriors respectively, integrated as yet another layer in this complex society. One excellent example of the multifaceted nature of identity in Eastern Europe is the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz. Born in modern Belarus, to a family with probable Jewish roots, he began his famous Polish-language epic Pan Tadeusz: “Lithuania! My fatherland!”
To a certain extent, this cultural richness endures in Podlasie. “On a daily basis, we speak Polish,” says Daria, a young Puchły parishioner, her light brown hair covered with a blue headscarf. “Or, like many in Podlasie, we speak po svojomu.” The phrase means “in our own way” — but though Daria is referring to the Podlachian language, it’s an elegant stand-in for the region’s broader identity. “For me, being from Podlasie, being Orthodox, is being someone who sticks to his own,” says Roman Ostapczuk, head of the nearby Koweła village, chomping on home-cured sausages and horseradish, an icon of the Virgin Mary hanging above our heads.
Nor do you have to speak Podlachian, or even be especially religious, to spot Podlachian pride. Puchły is one of several villages in a microregion evocatively known as the Land of Open Shutters. Here, houses, churches, and even bus stops feature ornately carved patterns, their wooden shutters painted the colours of the rainbow. Orthodox crosses guard the entrance of every village, while carved figurines adorn windowsills and shelves. Other cultural practices are distinctive too. Village choirs sing “in voices” — a style of belted singing typical of the region.
It’s tempting, then, to see this place as a kind of Disneyland of Slavic folklore. But that’d be wrong — and not just because there isn’t a tourist in sight. For if the long-dead Commonwealth was broadly indulgent of religious and ethnic diversity, recent decades have been far less gentle on Podlasie. During the interwar period, over a hundred Orthodox churches were destroyed by Polish authorities across the country. As the state religion of Tsarist Russia, an empire that had occupied parts of Poland for centuries, they were razed as an alien presence.
Despite enduring deportation to Siberia at the hands of invading Soviet forces from 1939, just like their Catholic compatriots, Orthodox communities in Podlasie were also targets of a racist “pacification” campaign once the Second World War was over. Led by rogue officer Romuald Rajs — nicknamed Bury, meaning “dark” or “grey” — a group of Polish partisans killed dozens of Orthodox civilians right across Podlasie, burning villages as they went. One middle-aged woman I met recalls being unwilling to even admit she was Orthodox as recently as several decades ago, for fear of being mocked as a kacapy: a Polish slur for Russians.
To be sure, Rajs’s actions were condemned by his superiors, and described as genocide by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance in 2005. But the age of nationalism isn’t easy to escape, with an extremist Polish fringe lately recasting Bury as a freedom fighter. And, in 2019, under the auspices of the Right-wing and strongly Catholic Law and Justice Party (PiS), the Institute of National Remembrance walked back on its earlier conclusions about Bury’s butchery. Not to be outdone, nationalists from across Poland have held annual marches in Hajnówka, ostensibly to honour various anti-communist fighters. But chants of “Bury, our hero” inevitably abound.
There are more contemporary geopolitical pressures here too. Before 1939, Poland’s borders extended deep into modern-day Belarus, placing Podlachian side-by-side with their Belarusian kin inside a single state. But the creation of a hard border, when Belarus became part of the USSR in 1945, separated mothers from sons, and villages that once shared a life ended up in different countries. More recent developments have spurred division too. Responding to a migration crisis, artificially set in motion by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, Poland has erected a five-and-a-half-metre tall wall along its eastern frontier. Warsaw has also started a network of fortifications, and withdrawn from an international convention against anti-personnel mines, to guard against future Russian attacks.
These tensions show up in politics. Despite the traditional values of locals, the county town of Hajnówka has for decades voted for center-left parties in national elections. That’s in stark contrast to most of Poland’s east, where the PiS enjoys ironclad support. Beyond the electoral map, though, you really feel this opposition to PiS’s national vision from Podlachian themselves.
“I am not a Pole,” says Wiktor Stachwiuk, an author and philologist in Trześcianka, a village near Puchły. “I am a Belarusian, a Ruthenian from Podlasie.” Surrounded by a kingdom of manuscripts in his orange-shuttered living room, pouring generous shots of plum moonshine as he goes, Stachwiuk suggests that the Catholic Poles have “connected themselves mentally” with the West, preferring to be “with the British” than their Slavic cousins. Though he emphasises he’s fervently opposed to the regimes of Putin in Russia and Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, he laments the distance political borders in the region have created between him and and his brethren to the east.
“I am not a Pole. I am a Belarusian, a Ruthenian from Podlasie.”
Other Podlachians have gone the other way: citing their long presence on Polish soil, they’ve situated their unique local identity within a broader loyalty to the Polish nation. Either way, such attitudes are probably an inevitable consequence of the region’s hard borders — and of the forces, on both sides of the fence, that see Poland as a Catholic country with little space for Orthodox Podlachians. It hardly helps, of course, that the clergy itself has arguably muddied the waters. In early 2023, the head of the Polish Orthodox Church set off a media storm when he appeared to condemn Ukraine’s moves to establish its own separate church from Russia. Amid the backlash, Metropolitan Sawa was forced to apologise, denouncing Putin’s “criminal” invasion of Ukraine.
Unease is also heightened by the sense that Podlachian culture is at risk of vanishing altogether. When he was young, Ostapczuk recalls learning Polish as a foreign language. Now, though, the number of Podlachian speakers dwindles with each passing generation, and the number of people actively writing in it can be counted on two hands. Ostapczuk adds that his children today live their lives in Polish first and foremost, seeing Podlachian as a language tied to the home. For writers like Stachwiuk, then, putting the language to paper is not just about developing its literary tradition — it’s about giving Podlachian a kind of immortality. “This exists,” he proudly declares, showing me a book he wrote entirely in Podlachian.
Not that everyone here feels drawn to binary national labels that place Podlachian identity in opposition to Polishness. One example is Ostapczuk, who emphasises he doesn’t want to be “pigeon-holed” as Belarusian — whatever language he grew up speaking. The historian and ethnographer Doroteusz Fionik has a name for this more intimate form of belonging. “The little fatherland is that place where a person feels best,” he says. “For the little fatherland, there are none of today’s state borders. The person doesn’t endeavour for those borders to change, the person just wants to be able to live comfortably in the place where he exists.”
Once again, history offers a guide here. Set amid the gentle bluffs north of Puchły, the Supraśl Orthodox Monastery is perhaps the most spectacular expression of the deep bonds between Poland and its Orthodox community. First built in 1503, all lofty towers and vaunted ceilings, the monastery’s Belarusian Gothic interior is dazzlingly ornate. At the back of the nave are vivid frescos showing the End of Days. Tellingly, the space features icons depicting both Orthodox and Catholic saints, while the monastery’s choral tradition combines Byzantine and Latin influences.
In fact, the new church was only built in the Eighties, at the tail end of communist rule, after the original monastery was destroyed by the retreating Wehrmacht in 1944. Yet even that speaks to Supraśl’s hybrid identity. According to Brother Jan, a monk at the monastery, the Germans targeted this monument to Orthodoxy not to spite the Russians — but because they saw it as an expression of Polish identity that needed to be crushed. As Jan puts it: “This place was supposed to highlight what unites us, not what divides us.”
And if Supraśl has reemerged from the ashes of Poland’s bloody 20th century, there are other signs, too, that the “little fatherland” endures. Podlasie now boasts a pair of Belarusian language schools, and though younger generations may not speak po svojomu as much as their parents, activists like Stachwiuk are fighting to keep the tongue alive. Revivalists scored a major win when a song by a local duo, written in Podlachian, made it to the final round of Poland’s qualifications for Eurovision — the first time most Poles had ever been exposed to the language.
Yet as usual in this corner of Poland, politics threatens to smash this fragile identity. With growing heterogeneity within, and mounting threats without, the old Polish temptation to draw lines in the sand is starting to rear its head once again, with many urging loyalty to a single national ideal. For the country’s far-Right, gaining in polls ahead of presidential elections in May, the multifaceted landscape of Podlasie poses a challenge to their “us” and “them” vision of modern Poland.
Despite a respite of two years, ultranationalists returned to Hajnówka last month to hold yet another parade honouring the partisans who fought in the region — with Bury among them. Supporters of the far-Right Confederation Party came to protest the establishment of integration centres for foreigners in the region, a move funded by the Podlasie regional government and backed by many locals who view it as an expression of their historic openness to multiculturalism. And, after that Podlachian song’s success in Eurovision, the contest again turned into a theatre for nationalistic chest-beating, with online Rightists tying the language to Russia and Ukraine, calling it an attempt to “Ukrainianise” Poland.
But here, in Podlasie, the tutejsi know another way is possible. “If there is the term ‘Pole’ today, then we don’t have to imagine a Polish nationalist who shouts ‘Poland for the Poles!’” Fionik says. “We should move toward an understanding that when someone says ‘Pole’, we imagine that this is a person who loves his neighbour, no matter his faith.” A heartening sentiment — even if Podlasie’s little fatherland remains in danger.
