Masurians Erotic

Masurians are a people whose identity mixed things that nationalists on both sides of the border found hard to square. They spoke a Polish dialect, worshipped as Lutherans, and for centuries were loyal to the Prussian crown. Their homeland is Masuria, the lake and forest country of northeastern Poland that was once the southern edge of East Prussia. Towns such as Ełk, Giżycko and Mrągowo sit among more than two thousand glacial lakes.

Most Masurians descend from settlers who moved north from Masovia, the region around Warsaw. They began arriving in the fourteenth century to farm a thinly settled wilderness, left that way after the Teutonic Knights conquered the Baltic Prussians. The turning point came in 1525. Albrecht, the Order's last grand master in Prussia, became a Lutheran and turned the territory into a secular duchy under the Polish king. His Polish-speaking peasants followed him into the Reformation, and that faith set them apart from the Catholic Polish speakers of neighboring Warmia. Religion reached deep into daily life. Villages sang from Polish-language hymnals, and in the nineteenth century a lay revival called the gromadki brought farmers together to pray and preach in private homes.

Masurian speech took in a lot of German, and most speakers saw no conflict in using it while calling themselves Prussians. In the 1920 plebiscite on whether the area should join Poland, more than 97 percent voted to stay with East Prussia. From the late nineteenth century, many families left for the coal mines of the Ruhr, where they mostly kept apart from Catholic Polish miners. In 1938 the Nazi government replaced a large share of the region's Slavic and Baltic place names with German ones, as part of a wider campaign against its Slavic past.

The Second World War ended Masurian life as it had been. The region passed to Poland in 1945, and most people either fled the Soviet advance or were expelled afterward. Polish authorities treated those who stayed as autochthons, or native inhabitants, who could become Polish citizens. Even so, suspicion, lost property and life as Lutherans in a Catholic country drove steady emigration to West Germany over the following decades. Only a small community in Poland still uses the name. The older world lives on in Siegfried Lenz's affectionate stories about the invented village of Suleyken. It also survives in the name of Mrągowo, which was renamed after Krzysztof Mrongovius, a Lutheran pastor and scholar from the region who championed the Polish language.