WITAJĆE K NAM DO ŁUŽICY / WELCOME TO LUSATIA !

Travellers and visitors to Lusatia nowadays are first made aware of the individuality of this region by the bilingual names on maps and street-signs or by bilingual notices giving the names of villages, towns, and railway-stations. They may well wonder whether they have stumbled upon some unknown land in the middle of Europe, but that is not the explanation. Nor have they unexpectedly arrived in Poland. This part of Germany is the home of a Slavonic people, citizens of Germany but with a Slavonic mother-tongue.

Lusatia (in German die Lausitz) is the geographical term for the area between the rivulets of the River Spree (the Spree Forest) in the north and the Mittelgebirge (Lusatian Mountains) in the south. You can find it on the map in south-eastern Brandenburg and eastern Saxony. The name Lusatia is of Slavonic origin. It means "water-hole or pool" and refers to a watery region. In the 6th century AD a tribe of the West Slavs known as the Lusici settled in present-day Lusatia. At the same time the entire territory between the rivers Saale and Elbe in the west and the rivers Queis, Neisse, and Oder in the east were settled and cultivated by Slavonic tribes. In Upper Lusatia it was the tribe of the Milzeni that settled around the point of intersection between the Spree and the ancient trade-route from Cologne to Kiev. Many castle mounds are witnesses of this epoch.

Centuries of volatile history followed, leading to the surprising outcome that descendants of these Slavonic tribes are still living in and, to a greater extent, in the vicinity of the towns of Bautzen, Kamenz, Hoyerswerda, Weisswasser, Spremberg, Cottbus, Lübbenau, and Guben in Upper and Lower Lusatia. They have kept their language, individuality, and culture, and constitute the little nation of the Lusatian Sorbs, also known as Wends. The name Wends comes from the Latin and was in the Middle Ages the term used by outsiders to refer to various Slavonic tribes and peoples. Their existence is all the more surprising when we consider that they have never had the protection that would have resulted from having their own state. And so their numbers and their territory gradually dwindled until today there are about 60,000 of them. Their status is that of a minority in their own country. Other forces have had a lasting influence in the history of the Sorbs. These have included the Frankish (Germanic) tribes which denied them political independence in the 10th-11th centuries and sealed their fate as a subject nation, the conversion to Christianity which (perhaps as compensation) allowed them to share in the cultural development of Central-European civilization, and the immigration at the end of the 12th century of Franconian, Flemish, Thuringian, and Saxon peasants. These forces established the constant juxtaposition and combination of western (German) culture, on the one hand, and eastern (Slavonic) culture, on the other. There has also been industrialization since the middle of the 19th century, which began the dissolution of the traditional, rural and agricultural structures and led to the modern monsters of steel which came to plough the homeland in order to find what the devil had buried, as Sorbian young people sing in a song about brown coal. This gave a new stimulus to the history of colonization.

In the course of time various developments have led to regional peculiarities in Lusatia. At present we may distinguish five Sorbian regions: the flat country between the northern edge of the Lusatian Mountains and the pond-filled landscape of Central Lusatia is the region of the Protestant Sorbs of the Bautzen area; westwards to the Elstra Mountains and north to the neighbourhood of the farming town of Wittichenau, enclosing fertile fields and hills, is the region of the Catholic Sorbs; the Hoyerswerda heath and forest region takes its name from the town of Hoyerswerda; similarly the Schleife region is named after the village and parish of Schleife. In both of the last-named regions, and also in Lower Lusatia (the fifth and largest region), slag-heaps and open-cast mining disfigure what was once a compact landscape of heath and forest. Probably the best known area is the Spree Forest, which is part of Lower Lusatia and consists of an especially charming landscape of meadows formed by hundreds of rivulets, ditches, and tributaries of the River Spree.

Among the external distinguishing characteristics of the regions are, on the one hand, the natural conditions (whether rich arable land or sandy soil, forest or wetlands, hills or plains) and, on the other, the traditional building methods affecting the forms of houses and estates. In 19th-century Lusatia four building styles predominated and examples of them can still be found everywhere. The log-house style was used to build not only thatched farm-houses, but also churches. The landscape is also dotted with single-storeyed houses built in rows, three- and four-sided yards made by houses with walls divided into panels (Fachwerk), sometimes with massive ground-floors. In the Lusatian Mountains there are also Umgebinde houses and Fachwerk houses, which came in with the Franconian and Saxon peasants. The clinker buildings in Central Lusatia, where whole villages were rebuilt in this manner following fires, date from the end of the 19th century.

A further external distinguishing characteristic may be seen in the folk-costumes, which, among other things, indicate the wearer's religious denomination. It is known that in the heyday of the folk-costume at the beginning of the 19th century there were eleven different costumes, whose use was partly locally determined. After the beginnings of industrialization costumes were used less and less as everday wear, but in four of the five Sorbian regions folk-costumes are still worn and take their names from the corresponding regions. If you are lucky, you may still see here and there elderly women dressed in the timeless fashions of these locally distinct costumes. This will probably be the last generation to wear them as everyday attire, but on special occasions the younger generation are appearing in these costumes with increasing frequency.

Many roads lead to Lusatia.

The medieval "Via regia" (also known as the Saltzstrasse or Salt Road) takes us to Bautzen (in Sorbian Budyšin), a thousand-year-old town with many towers. This is the place where most Sorbian cultural institutions are today to be found. Following the River Spree downstream we pass through the furrowed Lusatian Heath until we come to Cottbus, where the Lower Sorbs in the surrounding villages today still call themselves Wends.

The visitor intent on getting to know the land and its people will have little trouble in finding original Sorbian life, which on examination will be found to be quite distinct from that of other parts of Germany and Central Europe. Since industrialization it has, it is true, been pushed more and more into the private sphere, but, mainly in the cultural domain, it may still also be seen in public. Especially in this domain the Sorbian people by their own efforts have been able to keep up with general developments. Sorbian and bilingual play-groups and schools as well as as higher education and mass media in Sorbian are, together with the parental home, important means of maintaining and developing the Sorbian language and Sorbian culture. Sorbian-language Catholic and Protestant church services with spirited singing - pointing to the close link between religiosity and nationality - are just as much proof of vigour as the abundant cultural activities of professional artists and institutions, of voluntary activists in clubs or groups, and of village communities and individuals; it is much more than mere spare-time activity or the representation of individual interests. They all have one thing in common - they are important builders and protectors of Sorbian national consciousness and of the Sorbian identity.

The question whether our grandchildren will still regard the Sorbian language and Sorbian culture as their own will be decided by the question whether society regards their Sorbian parents and grandparents as an enrichment or a burden and whether these parents grandparents consciously intend to continue to live as a minority.

Marko Kowar, Budyšin/Bautzen

Further information may be obtained from:

Sorbian Cultural Information Centre
Póstowe naměsto 2
D-02625 Budyšin / Bautzen
Łužica / Lusatia
Germany

tel. + (03591) 42105
fax. +(03591) 42811
email. stiftung-ski@sorben.com