Kresy

A bilingual reissue of Louise Arner Boyd's collection of the interwar photographs of Kresy (Polish for "Borderlands"). Kresy was the Eastern part of the Second Polish Republic constituting nearly half of the territory of the state. Its population was multi-ethnic, primarily comprising Poles, Jews, Ukrainians and Belarusians. According to the official Polish statistics from interwar period, Poles formed the largest linguistic group in these regions, and were demographically the largest ethnic group in the cities. Other national minorities included Lithuanians and Karaites (in the north), Jews (scattered in cities and towns across the area), Czechs and Germans (in Wolyn and East Galicia), Armenians and Hungarians (in Lviv), and also Russians and Tartars. Louise Arner Boyd (1887-1972) was an American explorer of Greenland and the Arctic, who wrote extensively of her explorations, and in 1955 became the first woman to fly over the North Pole privately chartering a DC-4 and crew that included aviation pioneer Thor Solberg. In August 1934, after being elected as a delegate to the International Geographical Congress in Warsaw, Poland, Louise set out on a 3-month journey across the Polish countryside photographing and recording the customs, dress, economy and culture of the many ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Lithuanians. The journey, by car, rail, boat and on foot took her first from Lviv to Kovel (contemporary Ukraine), and then to Kobrin, Pinsk, Kletsk, Nesvizh, Slonim (now, in Belarus). She finished the journey in Vilno. Her travel narrative was supplemented with over 500 photographs and published by the American Geographical Society in 1937 as Polish Countrysides.