How Poland absorbed Ukraine and called it shared heritage

Gente Ruthenus, natione Polonus — “Ruthenian by birth, Polish by nation.” For five centuries the phrase has sounded like a peaceful compromise. In reality it is an accounting rule.

One formula says it all. It is attributed to Stanisław Orzechowski, a nobleman from near Przemyśl who signed himself “Roxolanus”, a Ruthenian: gente Ruthenus, natione Polonus, “Ruthenian by birth, Polish by nation.” For five centuries the phrase has sounded like a peaceful compromise. In reality it is an accounting rule. You keep your origins as a souvenir, and everything you achieve is credited to Poland.

The formula outlived the Commonwealth, the partitions, Romanticism, the interwar republic and communism. Today it lives on in the word “Kresy”, in the souvenir shops of Kraków, and in the confidence with which Polish textbooks long explained who built the culture east of the San river.

I. The Wiśniowieckis: one family, two ends of history

1550s – 1669

Start with a family that is a short course in absorption all by itself. The Wiśniowiecki line produced Dmytro Baida, an Orthodox prince who in the 1550s built a fortress on the island of Mala Khortytsia. The Zaporozhian Sich traces its origins to him. Within three generations the same family produced Jarema, the man who drowned Cossack uprisings in blood.

Between them stands a woman Polish literature prefers to forget. Jarema’s mother, Raina Mohylianka, a relative of Petro Mohyla, founded the Orthodox monasteries of Hustynia and Mhar. The boy grew up among Church Slavonic books and Ruthenian speech. In 1632 he converted to Catholicism, and the transformation began. The owner of the Lubny lands, one of the largest private estates in Europe, became a “Polish” magnate.

Then comes an ending no novelist would dare invent. In 1669 Jarema’s son, Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki, was elected King of Poland. In two generations an Orthodox Ruthenian house travelled from founding the Sich to the Polish throne. Baida’s descendants sat in Wawel and no longer remembered in which language their great-grandmother prayed.

II. Sienkiewicz: the adapter mechanism

1884 – 1888

Henryk Sienkiewicz wrote his Trilogy, as he admits in the last line of Fire in the Steppe, ku pokrzepieniu serc, “to lift up hearts.” Whose hearts was never in question. And that uplift required a rewritten Jarema.

In With Fire and Sword he is the embodiment of Polish chivalry, the shield of civilization against the wild East. His Ruthenian roots are not denied; they are simply cut from the frame. So are the origins of Helena Kurcewiczówna, from an invented Ruthenian princely family. Wołodyjowski became “simply Polish” too, although the real Jerzy Wołodyjowski came from the Podolian gentry.

Watch how the mechanism works. The Orthodox Ruthenian in the Trilogy is Bohun or Khmelnytsky: passionate, ungovernable, handsome and dangerous. Let a Ruthenian change his rite, and he instantly acquires a Polish character: restrained, pious, loyal to the state, correct. Faith works as an adapter that plugs a person into someone else’s identity.

III. The Ostrozkys: from a Bible to re-baptized bones

1514 – 1620s

In 1514 Kostiantyn Ivanovych Ostrozky, an Orthodox prince, defeated a far larger Muscovite army at Orsha. As a reward he received something rare for an Orthodox noble: royal permission to build stone churches in Vilnius. His son Vasyl-Kostiantyn founded the Ostroh Academy, invited the printer Ivan Fedorovych, and in 1581 published the Ostroh Bible, the first complete printed Bible in Church Slavonic. This is the foundation of a culture that would become Ukrainian.

Then came the grandchildren. Janusz Ostrogski was a Catholic. His relative Anna Alojza handed Ostroh over to the Jesuits, who opened their college there. According to legend, she had her Orthodox father’s remains exhumed and reburied in the Catholic rite. Even if the story is apocryphal, it is precise as metaphor: taking the living was not enough; the dead had to be re-baptized too.

In popular Polish history the Ostrozkys stood for centuries among the “magnates of the Commonwealth”, another jewel in the crown. Whose culture they had actually built was never part of the question.

IV. Yuri of Drohobych: a signature nobody read

1481 – 1483

Yuri Kotermak of Drohobych served as rector of the University of Bologna, one of the oldest in Europe, in 1481–1482. In 1483 his Prognostic Judgement of the Current Year 1483 appeared in Rome, the first printed book by an author born on Ukrainian lands. He signed himself unambiguously: Georgius Drohobich de Russia.

Yet for decades popular publications listed him as a “polski uczony”, a Polish scholar. The same happened to Paul the Ruthenian of Krosno, one of the first humanists at Kraków University: “Ruthenus” was written into his name, but never read. The pattern never changes. A talent from Ruthenian lands becomes a Polish achievement because it was recognized by Polish institutions. The land itself remains a province awaiting “civilization.”

V. Romanticism: take the song, leave the singer

1820s – 1840s

From Ukraine, Polish Romanticism took not people but an aesthetic. There was a whole “Ukrainian school” of Polish poetry. Malczewski wrote Maria, set in Ukraine. Goszczyński, in The Castle of Kaniv, turned the Koliivshchyna rebellion into Polish Gothic horror. Słowacki, born in Kremenets, thought in Ukrainian steppes. Tomasz Padura went further, writing in Ukrainian and touring manor houses with a torban, playing at being a Cossack.

The result is best seen at any Polish wedding. Someone always sings “Hej, sokoły”, a song of Ukrainian origin whose chorus longs for “green Ukraine.” In Poland it is treated as a beloved, almost native folk song. Ukrainian longing became Polish karaoke.

Curiosity about another culture is no crime. The problem is asymmetry. The Ukrainian steppe became a Polish landscape, and the Ukrainian peasant became scenery or threat. The poetics were borrowed; agency was not granted. Ukraine was allowed to be the muse, never the author.

VI. The interwar years: when absorption became law

1919 – 1938

In the twentieth century soft rewriting turned administrative. The Second Polish Republic officially renamed Eastern Galicia “Małopolska Wschodnia”, Eastern Lesser Poland. A land with a Ukrainian majority was meant to sound like part of Poland’s core.

The 1931 census went further, splitting “Ukrainian” and “Ruthenian” into two separate language categories. One people was cut in half so that neither half looked too large. The Ukrainian chairs at Lviv University were closed, and in 1921–1925 Ukrainians ran their own Secret University, like an underground in their own city.

The Grabski Act of 1924 turned Ukrainian schools into “bilingual” ones. The number of Ukrainian primary schools in Galicia fell from about 2,400 before the First World War to fewer than 500 by the late 1930s. In 1930 came the “Pacification”: punitive units wrecked reading rooms, cooperatives and hundreds of villages. And in the summer of 1938, around 130 Orthodox churches were destroyed in the Chełm and Podlasie regions.

VII. Operation Vistula: the churches stayed, the people vanished

1947

In 1947 communist Poland deported around 140,000 Ukrainians, Lemkos and Boykos from their ancestral lands and scattered them across former German territories. The aim was not resettlement but dissolution: no more than a few families per village. Those deemed unreliable were sent to the camp at Jaworzno. Nearly 4,000 Ukrainians passed through it; more than 160 died there.

The people vanished; the churches stayed. Some were dismantled, others left to rot. Many were handed to the Roman Catholic Church and served as Latin-rite churches for decades. Icons from abandoned churches ended up in museum storerooms. In 2013 the wooden tserkvas of the Carpathian region were added to the UNESCO list as shared Polish-Ukrainian heritage. Good. But few people tell the tourist photographing a Lemko church in the Beskids where its builders went.

A masterpiece of the genre is Nikifor. The Lemko Epifaniy Drovniak, deported with everyone else, walked back to Krynica on foot and painted there until his death. The world knows him as “Nikifor”, a Polish naïve painter. In 2004 the film My Nikifor came out, with the Polish actress Krystyna Feldman in the title role. The performance won ovations. The word “Lemko” stayed in the fine print of public memory.

VIII. Przemyśl: how to remove a cathedral’s dome

1946 – 2016

Przemyśl, Peremyshl, is an old Ruthenian princely capital. After 1946 its Greek Catholic cathedral was given to the Carmelites. When its return came up in 1991, the town erupted in protest. In the end John Paul II gave the Greek Catholics a different church. And in 1996 the Carmelites dismantled the dome that had been added during the building’s Greek Catholic period.

Keep the building; chisel away the traces that it once belonged to someone else. Twenty years later, in 2016, nationalists in the same Przemyśl attacked a Ukrainian memorial procession. The dome is gone, but the reflex remains.

IX. Dumplings, borscht and petty theft

Today

Even the kitchen speaks the same language. “Pierogi ruskie” are not Russian but Ruthenian, Galician dumplings with potato and cheese. Today they are sold as a symbol of Polish cuisine, while tourists and translators routinely render the name as “Russian.” The Ukrainian origin is erased twice: first by a Polish label, then by confusion with Russia.

In 2022 UNESCO inscribed the culture of Ukrainian borscht cooking on its list of heritage in need of urgent safeguarding. It happened in the middle of a war, and not by accident: when big things have been taken from you for centuries, you end up having to protect even your recipes.

X. Kresy: nostalgia as a deferred claim

1918 to today

And finally, Kresy. It is not a historical term but a whole memory industry: associations of “Kresy people”, songs about “Lwów zawsze wierny”, tours to “our” Olesko, Zhovkva and Berezhany. Lviv, founded by Danylo of Halych and named after his son Lev, becomes in this story a “Polish city” that was “taken away.” That the West Ukrainian People’s Republic was proclaimed right here on 1 November 1918 is mentioned, if at all, as an unfortunate obstacle.

The logic is Sienkiewicz’s. Ukrainians on these lands are not hosts, but either convenient almost-Poles or inconvenient savages who ruined the idyll.

XI. 2026: Kresy come back

June – September 2026

One could treat all of this as history. Poland read Giedroyc in the 1990s, opened its doors to millions of refugees in 2022, and the account is closed. But the summer of 2026 showed that the old reflex never went anywhere. It was simply waiting for a signal.

The signal came in June. Zelensky named a military unit after the “Heroes of the UPA”, and President Karol Nawrocki stripped him of the Order of the White Eagle. The decree left out one delicious detail: among the order’s very first knights, back in 1703, was Hetman Ivan Mazepa. Zelensky simply mailed the order back.

On 11 July in Radruż, on the anniversary of Volhynia’s “Bloody Sunday”, Nawrocki announced that his bill criminalizing “Banderism” had passed its first reading. The presidential statement accompanying the bill contains a phrase worth reading twice: Banderism, it says, targeted the Poles living in the “Kresy Wschodnie”, the Eastern Borderlands. Not “in Volhynia”, not “on the territory of today’s Ukraine”. In 2026, the president of an EU member state describes a neighbouring country using the map of 1939.

Then the street translated politics into its own language. In May in Warsaw, a group of attackers savagely beat a 16-year-old Ukrainian on the Świętokrzyski Bridge for speaking Ukrainian with his friends. In June, a 14-year-old Ukrainian boy was attacked in Warsaw. In early July in Wrocław, a 19-year-old was attacked for speaking Ukrainian on the phone. In Legnica, a woman went after three Ukrainian teenagers on a playground. In Bielsko-Biała, a 54-year-old city bus driver riding as a passenger hurled obscenities and threats at Ukrainian teenage girls. Police detained him the next day, but social media was already flooded with invented claims that the girls “provoked him”. At the end of July in Wrocław, in broad daylight, three men beat up 20-year-old Nastia and her boyfriend over her Ukrainian accent. Her ear had to be stitched; both were hospitalized with suspected concussions.

And here is the most honest episode of the whole story. On 11 July in Łódź, a man struck a passer-by twice in the head, breaking his nose and jaw, and told him his place was not in Poland. The victim was a Pole. The attacker had simply decided he looked Ukrainian.

In September, in Ostrava in the Czech Republic, a group of Poles beat up Kuba Heisig from Chorzów. He was on a charity bike ride, raising money for his partner’s cancer treatment. The trigger was a yellow-and-blue cap reading “Gōrny Ślōnsk”, in the colours of Upper Silesia. The attackers took it for a Ukrainian flag. As they kicked him, they shouted “Banderite”.

XII. The president stays silent, the comments applaud

July – August 2026

And the president? After the Wrocław beating, Prime Minister Tusk publicly called on Nawrocki to stop staying silent. He reminded him that he had once praised hooligan “ustawki” as noble manly combat. Among the detained attackers were a gangster with a prison record and a football hooligan who fights in MMA. The man who found time to strip Zelensky of an order and travel to Radruż to talk about the Kresy never publicly said a word about the beaten Ukrainians. The actress Joanna Szczepkowska called it tacit consent.

Social media, meanwhile, applauded. After Bielsko-Biała, the web was flooded with posts defending the attacker, claiming the girls had insulted him and spat on him. The transport company, having reviewed the camera footage, denied it. After Wrocław, a story spread that the Ukrainian had attacked first with a taser. Prosecutors replied that he pulled out the taser only during the assault and that the evidence does not show the couple provoked it. The fabrication was picked up by Russia Today and RIA Novosti all the same. Under news of the arrests, commenters wrote that the Ukrainians should be put on trial too. Right-wing politicians, instead of sympathy, posted lists of “Ukrainian crimes”, and the fact-checkers at Demagog found falsehoods in such posts.

On the bus in Bielsko-Biała, while a grown man swore at children, the passengers mostly stayed silent. The director Magdalena Łazarkiewicz called it a pre-pogrom mood. Poland’s interior ministry has acknowledged that ethnically motivated violence against Ukrainians is on the rise.

Meanwhile Ukrainians in Poland, according to Polish journalists themselves, have become afraid to speak their language in the street. A Ukrainian woman who has lived in Bielsko-Biała for over ten years said that for a year now she has forbidden her daughters to speak Ukrainian on buses. And the couple beaten in Wrocław gave their compatriots one piece of advice: bite your tongue. And the Confederation party is outraged that Ukrainian may now be taken as a foreign language in the matura exam. The language that interwar Poland split into two census categories has once again become a problem simply by existing.

This is the answer to why anyone should bother digging into Sienkiewicz. The Trilogy is no longer a bestseller, but its optics live on. In it, a Ukrainian is either convenient and silent, or dangerous and deserving of the club. The yellow-and-blue cap in Ostrava is Bohun, recognized by his colours.

In place of an epilogue

Poland did nothing unique. Every empire, large or small, feeds on the talent of its periphery. What is unique is that Poland remains convinced it was never an empire. It sees itself as the eternal victim of partitions, Russia, Nazism and communism. All of that is true. But a victim who cannot see whom it has wronged is doomed to repeat the same conversation: “We loved you, so why did you leave?”

An honest Polish epic has not been written yet. It will not be a book about Jarema, but about a Sejm that bred injustice for years and then sincerely wondered why everything fell apart.

What the other side will say

• Identity worked differently then. Before the nineteenth century, belonging was defined by estate and faith, not ethnicity. Wiśniowiecki, Orzechowski and the Ostrozkys chose political “Polishness” themselves, as membership in the noble nation. Calling them “stolen Ukrainians” is also an anachronism.

• Sienkiewicz wrote under the partitions. There was no Polish state at the time, and the Trilogy was meant to sustain a stateless people, not to justify territorial claims. Jerzy Hoffman’s 1999 film adaptation deliberately softened its anti-Ukrainian tone.

• The heritage really is shared. Lviv, Ostroh and Drohobych belong to several cultures at once, including Polish and Jewish. In Lviv itself, Poles formed the majority in the 1931 census. Lithuania and Belarus have an equal claim to parts of this legacy.

• The violence ran both ways. Poles point to the Volhynia massacres of 1943. Without them it is impossible to understand how postwar events, including Operation Vistula, were perceived in Poland.

• Modern Poland has changed. The Giedroyc–Mieroszewski doctrine recognized Ukraine’s borders and sovereignty while still in exile. After 1989 it became state policy, and since 2022 Poland has been one of Ukraine’s key allies, taking in millions of refugees.

• The state responds, and society is split. The Bielsko-Biała attacker was detained within a day, the interior minister publicly promised that “haters will not go unpunished”, and the city transport company moved to fire him. Foreign Minister Sikorski mocked the order decision. At the same time, even the interior minister called the “Heroes of the UPA” name a mistake, because for Poles it touches the memory of Volhynia.

A polemical essay. The author deliberately sharpens the argument; counterarguments close each version.