Sącz Lachs Erotic

Ask a highlander in the Polish Beskids who lives down in the valley and the old answer is Lachy: the lowlanders, the Poles of the open country. The word is an old East Slavic name for a Pole, used by Rusyn and highland neighbors alike, and around Nowy Sącz it stuck and hardened into an identity. The Lachy Sądeckie, or Sącz Lachs, are the farming people of the Sącz Basin in southern Lesser Poland, where the Poprad runs into the Dunajec below the Beskid ridges. Podegrodzie, a big village west of Nowy Sącz, is usually treated as the heart of the group. Nowy Sącz and Stary Sącz are its market towns.

They are Poles, and nobody here argues otherwise. What sets them apart is position. The Lachs sit between the Krakowiacy of the lowlands to the north and the Górale of the mountains to the south, and their culture works as a hinge between the two. Their speech is a Lesser Polish dialect with the region's mazurzenie, shaded by highland vocabulary. Until 1947 Lemko villages began in the hills just to the southeast, so Lach country was also the line where Polish Catholic farmland met Rusyn Greek Catholic settlement. The postwar deportation of the Lemkos erased that frontier.

Basin soil is better than anything up in the Beskids, and the relative comfort of Podegrodzie farmers showed in their clothes. The Lach festive costume is among the most heavily embroidered in Poland: men in navy cloth trousers and jackets covered in red and multicolored stitching, brass buttons, broad leather belts, and a long pale wool coat called a gurmana; women in beaded velvet bodices, flowered skirts, white embroidered aprons and strings of red coral. Nobody wears it to the fields now. It comes out for Corpus Christi processions, harvest festivals, and the regional ensembles that have kept the songs and dances in circulation since the interwar years.

Religion is Roman Catholic and local in flavor. Stary Sącz still centers on the Poor Clare convent founded in the thirteenth century by Kinga, the duchess venerated as the region's patron, and John Paul II canonized her there in 1999 before an enormous crowd. Larger history mostly arrived from outside: Austrian rule from the 1770s, Galician poverty, and heavy emigration overseas around 1900. Today most Lachs commute, tend orchards, run small businesses, and dress like anyone else in Poland. The identity survives in brass bands, in the open air museum at Nowy Sącz, and in Podegrodzie's Druzbacka contest, where village musicians and wedding orators compete to show that the old rhymed speeches of the best man still land.