The area between the Vistula and the Bug, making today’s Lublin Region, has since the Middle Ages been a place of coexistence of many cultures, confessions, languages and nationalities. Each of the religious and national groups has left here traces of its stay, more or less distinct and visible to modern inhabitants, yet making a specific, multicoloured cultural landscape.
It has been a place of contact for Eastern and Western Slavs, for the Orthodox and Catholic religion. Apart from those two Christian confessions, the religious map of the region included followers of Judaism, and in more recent times Muslims, Protestants, Greek Catholics (Uniates) and in the 20tb c. also Old Catholics.
The formation of a religious conglomerate is a consequence of the historical vicissitudes of the area and Poland as a whole, shaped by the politics of the rulers, magnates or the Parliament of the Republic. During the rule of the House of Piast (10th-l4th c.) the Lublin lands were divided between the Polish and Ruthenian states. It was an ethnic, religious and political borderland, laid waste during armed neighbourly conflicts by invasions of Tartars, Yatvings or Lithuanians. After the Polish-Lithuanian union of Krewa (1385), those peripheries became the centre of the rule of the Jagiellonia-ns, and the heyday of the Polish-Lithuanian state, manifested in dynamic settlement and location of new towns and villages, was also the time of prosperity for the area.
The 16th c. in the history of the Lublin Region, as well as the remaining Polish lands, was a period of religious tolerance exceptional in Europe. Poland became a safe haven for Jews, persecuted in many European countries. Just like Armenians, Germans, Italians or Greeks, they engaged in brisk trade here.
The wars of the 17th c. caused, on the one hand, a depopulation of towns and villages but, on the other, the settling of prisoners of war in villages and of immigrants from what is now Holland on wetlands. During post-partition times an increased influx of foreign officials could be noted, in turn from the Habsburg monarchy and the Russian empire. German village settlement developed while towns and industrial centres were supplied with merchants and entrepreneurs from Western Europe.
From World War I the process of national and religious differentiation has slowed down. The evacuation. of nearly a third of the inhabitants of the then Lubtin province to Russia included over 90% of the Protestant and Orthodox population. A large proportion of the exiles was never to see their homeland again. Just as dramatic were the years 1939-1947, when the Jewish community ceased to exist and the Ukrainian population was displaced to the USSR or to northern and western Poland. The old cultural diversity has left a not
ten Matejko. The Union of Lublin always very clear testimony in the form of architecture, decaying cemeteries or place names.
Especially multicoloured religiously and culturally is the Bug riverside belt, reaching from the southern Podlasie region to the towns of Hrubiesz6w and Tomasz6w. The tourist visiting the area is surprised not only by the peacefulness or even sleepiness of the Bug riverside landscape, its depopulating towns and villages, but also the wealth of the traces of the still present ethnic and religious diversity.
For many centuries the Bug was not a frontier river, which contributed to the similarity of the cultural landscape of both of its sides. Parishes of many denominations could be found in the same area, and their members lived not only next to each other but also with each other: there were many mixed marriages (an exception was the Jewish population). Holidays of other religions were respected while mutual tolerance, despite conflicts, allowed those communities to coexist.
This led to the mutual influence of diverse cultures. Its examples in sacral architecture include the Gothic chapel of the Lublin Castle, the late-Renaissance synagogue in Zamosc, the Baroque Uniate cathedral in Cheim, or the Classicist orthodox churches: the Uniate one in Wisznice and the Orthodox ones in Wlodawa and Chetm. Nineteenth-century sacral architecture had a number of styles: from Classicism, through fashionable Neo-Gothic, to eclectic structures referring to Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque. Similar diversity can be observed in secular architecture, exemplified by landowners’ residences and representative government buildings in larger cities.
The extant folk architecture primarily includes wooden Catholic and Orthodox churches, often built by the same carpenters. A clear example of cultural variety, and at the same time mutual influence, are cemeteries. Often the same stonemason’s workshops made tombstones for Catholics, Uniate and the Orthodox.
Evangelical cemeteries have left few traces outside Lublin. Remains of Jewish burial grounds have been preserved in almost every major settlement which had a Jewish community. History was less kind to synagogues; the towns where they have survived include Zamosc, Wlodawa, Lecz-na, Kazimierz or J6zef6w in the Roztocze.
A telling testimony of the multiculturality of the Lublin Region are its place names which, despite numerous attempts to obliterate them, have preserved the traces of the presence of various nations. The name of the village Niemce near Lublin comes from the Teutonic Order captives settled here by king Jagietto. Cyc6w comes from the name of linen made by the Olenders. The historic Horodto and Oubienka, Horysz6w Ruski, Dolhobyczow, Dothobrody, Krasne and Jabteczna are only a few examples of the influence and presence of our eastern neighbours in this area.