Podlashuks Erotic

Podlashuks are the Orthodox, East Slavic-speaking people of the villages and small towns of Podlachia, the strip of eastern Poland that runs along the Belarusian border between the Narew and the Bug. Ask an older person in Bielsk Podlaski or Hajnówka what they are and the classic answer is tutejszy, meaning simply from here, and that is less an evasion than a precise description. Ukrainian ethnographers count them as a Ukrainian subgroup, Belarusian scholars claim the northern villages, and the Polish state has counted most of them as Belarusians since 1945. What holds the group together is not a flag but a church calendar, a dialect and a shared memory of displacement.

The speech of the Podlashuks belongs to the Ukrainian side of the East Slavic continuum, close to the West Polesian dialects across the border, with the diphthongs and vowel shifts that set it apart from the Belarusian spoken north of the Narew. It has no official status. Since the mid-2000s a small circle of activists has been writing it down as pudlaśka mova, with its own spelling, a website and a trickle of books, in an effort to keep it from dissolving into Polish within a generation. Religion is the sharper boundary. The villages are Orthodox, and the Polish Orthodox Church is the institution that has outlasted every state here. Its calendar runs thirteen days behind the Catholic one, so Christmas falls in January, Easter often on a different Sunday, and the year's great gathering is the August pilgrimage to Grabarka, the Holy Mount, where pilgrims carry wooden crosses up the hill and leave them among thousands of others. Some southern communities around Biała Podlaska descend from Uniates who were forced into Orthodoxy by the tsar in 1875 and then went Roman Catholic after 1905, which is how families a few miles apart ended up on opposite sides of the confessional line.

Two catastrophes shaped the modern group. In 1915 the retreating Russian army evacuated nearly the whole Orthodox population eastward in the flight remembered as bieżeństwo. Families spent years in the Russian interior and many never returned. After 1945 the southern Podlashuks were swept up in the deportations that emptied Poland's borderlands of Ukrainians, while the northern villages, counted as Belarusian, largely stayed put. What survives is intensely local: the wooden houses of Trześcianka, Soce and Puchły with their carved, painted window frames and shutters, the red-and-black embroidered ritual towels, the harvest and Kupala customs still kept by village ensembles, and an annual church music festival in Hajnówka that draws Orthodox choirs from across the world.