Kresy myth

Polish irredentist national myth

The Kresy myth is the name to a certain sense of views or attitudes in connection to nostalgic attachment of the former eastern borderlands of Poland (Kresy), sometimes in an ethnic nationalist sense, sometimes as a multicultural land dominated by Polish culture. According to Andrii Portnov, the Kresy is seen even as "'the lost paradise' of Poland’s 'civilisational mission'" at the same time as the location of "bloody and romantic clashes with the Cossacks and Tatars". The Kresy was part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Second Polish Republic but since 1945 is outside of Poland, in present-day Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania. The Kresy, in certain definitions, extend beyond the areas which became part of interwar Poland. In particular after the territorial changes, population transfers of World War II, the nostalgia focused on the Vilnius region and East Galicia. It is argued exponents of the discourse tend to focus specifically on Poles, living in the Kresy without paying sufficient attention to the region's Ukrainian, Lithuanian, or Belarusian inhabitants.

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