Houses of the Polish-Belarusian borderland as areas of value

Abstract

Nowadays, as a result of globalization processes, the sense of identity and relationship between humans and their place of living is increasingly losing its importance. Today’s thinking about the house as a centre of the world is becoming less obvious in comparison to the symbolism of a house in the folk culture. Wooden houses on the Polish and Belarus border are an example of a temporal continuum – both in the spatial and in the spiritual aspect. Because of their architecture, decoration on facades and spatial layout, they are a distinctive feature of the local landscape, and ethnic communities inhabiting them, to this day have maintained a strong identification with their own roots and place of residence. The greatest threat to the continuity of local tradition as well as wooden architecture of borderland villages is their progressive extinction. That is why the issue of protection of the cultural heritage and the generational memory of local residents is one of the key issues in maintaining the identity of those areas. The aim of the article which is based on ethnographic sources and field researches is to present the symbolism of traditional wooden houses in the villages of the north-eastern Poland as areas of material and spiritual values and to bring attention to the need of protecting them in the context of contemporary civilization changes.

Keywords

• borderland
• wooden houses
• protection
• cultural heritage
• intergenerational transmission