Wsie, których już nie ma – miejsca, które jeszcze są. Opuszczone jednostki osadnicze w powiecie piskim jako materialna pamięć pogranicza*
Villages that no longer exist, places that still do. Abandoned settlement units in Pisz County as material memory of the borderland

Author(s): Anna Majewska
Subject(s): Sociology of Culture
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: deserted villages; Masuria; cultural landscape; archaeology of the contemporary past; historical geography;borderland;
Summary/Abstract: The article describes a problem of social and material disappearance of villages in Pisz County. In this area, following the socio-political changes after the end of the Second World War, a total depopulation of several different settlement units took place. Pisz County – until 1945 located in the southern part of East Prussia, and already considered a borderland for hundreds of years – joined the interior of the country that regained its independence in the new borders. However, in the early years of its functioning in the new State organism, it was treated almost like a no-man’s land – and certainly an “alien” land – with its residents treated as strangers and its foreign heritage. The result has been a rapid transformation of the cultural landscape, but its structures still contain various information. For example, the current distribution of abandoned settlement units indicates the course of former political borders. In turn, their spaces, resembling the history of Masurian land and its residents, are still a kind of borderland; these are places of interaction: modern with heritage, the past with the present. In Pisz County – in the very zone of 10 km from the southern border of former East Prussia – a part of the cultural landscape is constituted by several settlement units, which nobody occupies today; these include 27 villages and 7 forester’s lodges. Their material structures tell the story of the former and present borderland.

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