Sieć cerkiewna na terenie klucza poleskiego ekonomii brzeskiej w XVI–XVIII
The Church Network in the Polesie Demesne of Brest Stewardship between the 16th and 18th Centuries

Author(s): Andrzej Buczyło
Subject(s): History
Published by: Instytut Badań nad Dziedzictwem Kulturowym Europy
Summary/Abstract: The article is an attempt to reconstruct the network of churches withinthe Polesie demesne of Brest stewardship between the 16th c. and the end ofthe 18th c. There were a total of 18 parish centers in the discussed area. Initially,they were Orthodox churches. Starting from the 1st half of the 17th century,they transformed into Uniate ones. The church network had developed to thefull by the 1670s. In the 18th c., only one chapel of ease was built, and anotherone, functioning at the Ruda royal court, was discontinued.In the beginning, nearly all the churches of the Polesie area probably belongedto the protopopy (later deanery) of Polesie. Only 4 churches were different:Oziaty, between 1726 and 1729 reassigned to the deanery of Kobryn, aswell as Radzież, Ołtusz and Orzechowo, which in the 18th century belongedto the deanery of Włodawa. Some records suggest that originally those threecould also have been part of the protopopy/deanery of Polesie.The analysis of the layout of the parish network in the area clearly showsthe huge impact of geography. Numerous boggy and hardly manageable areaswere the reason why one-village parishes were predominant in the Polesie demesne,which was more typical of southern Uniate dioceses than of the areaof the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (where the model of parish covering severalvillages was more popular).

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