Over the weekend, there was a fascinating series of events at the Dom Spotkań z Historią centred around the launch of a new book about Poland's eastern pre-war borderlands - the Kresy. I have a long fascination with Polesie - that vast expanse of wetlands that was a notable feature of the central Kresy (today the borderlands between Belarus and Ukraine). Among the films shown during the weekend was one showing the poverty of peasants living in the Polesie wetlands in the photography of Józef Szymańczyk.
Though the scale of the flooding is nowhere near the scale of the Polesie wetlands, looking at the drowned fields made me think that a few decades of snowy winters, wet springs and summers could turn Poland's central plains into a Polesie-like swamp, disastrous for agriculture.
Let's hope for a drier spring and summer than the one we had last year.
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