Masovians Erotic

Masovians are the people of the middle Vistula: the flat, sandy, pine country in the center of Poland that the rest of the nation long regarded as its backwater and now regards as the place where everything happens. The soil is thin, rye and potato ground rather than wheat, with forest and marsh where the plow gave up, and that poverty produced the region's strangest social fact. Masovia carried an enormous population of petty nobles, families with a coat of arms, a legal privilege, and roughly a peasant's acreage, who worked their own fields and married among themselves for generations. Entire villages of them survive around Łomża and Ciechanów, the family name still fused to the place name. Politically the region held out as a duchy of its own for nearly four centuries under a stubborn junior line of the Piasts, absorbed into the Polish crown only in 1526, when the last of them died. Their most consequential act came in 1226, when Konrad of Masovia invited the Teutonic Knights north to deal with the pagan Prussians and got in return a military state that Poland fought for the next three hundred years. Seventy years after the duchy ended, the Vasas moved the court from Kraków to Warsaw, and the backwater acquired the capital.

They speak the Masovian dialect, and one of its features is well known enough that linguists named it after the region: mazurzenie, the collapse of the sz, ż and cz series into plain s, z and c. So is the dance. The mazurka takes its name from Masovia, Chopin was born at Żelazowa Wola just west of Warsaw, and the Polish national anthem is built on the meter. Within the region there are branches worth knowing. The Kurpie of the Narew forests were never fully manorial peasants. They lived off the woods, cut hives high in living pines under their own beekeepers' law, dug amber out of the marshes, and still carry decorated palms several meters tall into the church at Łyse on Palm Sunday. The Księżacy around Łowicz, tenants of the archbishops rather than of lords, are the ones in the hard orange and red woolen stripes that turn up in every photograph of Polish folk costume. A separate thread runs north: Masovian settlers who moved into ducal Prussia became the Masurians, turned Lutheran at the Reformation, and by the twentieth century had mostly cast their lot with Germany, then left. Catholicism in Masovia proper stayed dense and practicing. Today the region is Poland's wealthiest, anchored by a capital rebuilt out of rubble after 1944 and fed by villages whose grandparents spoke the dialect and whose grandchildren commute.