A region where villages could disappear

On maps of Lower Silesia you can find places that, as recently as a hundred years ago, were ordinary villages: with a church, a school, farms and a cemetery, and today are just a point marked as a "non-existent settlement". Polish Wikipedia keeps a separate category, "Abandoned villages in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship", which lists 44 such places, from Barszów in the north of the region to Karłówek in the Table Mountains. That is more than in any other region of the country, because after 1945 Lower Silesia went through a population exchange on a scale unknown in any other part of Poland.

Not every one of these villages disappeared for the same reason. Some were depopulated because, after the war, no one could be found who was able to farm in the difficult mountain climate. Others were demolished deliberately, to make way for industrial developments. Still others emptied out gradually over decades, until the last resident simply moved away.

1945 and the great population exchange

The starting point for most of Lower Silesia's abandoned villages is 1945. From the territories attached to Poland at that time, including the whole of Lower Silesia, a total of around 3.5 million Germans were expelled by the end of 1950. Even before the organised expulsions, in early 1945, around 3.6 million residents of these areas had already left on their own, in a panicked flight from the approaching front. The formal, organised expulsions only began after the decision of the Allied Control Council for Germany of 20 November 1945 - the earlier departures were spontaneous.

The property left behind by the expelled population, meaning all private, municipal and state property, was taken over by the Polish state under the agreement with the USSR of 16 August 1945. New settlers, mainly from central Poland and from the eastern territories that after the war fell within the borders of the Soviet Union, were meant to move onto the abandoned farms. In many lowland and suburban villages that is exactly what happened - the settlements survived and still exist today, though with a different population and a different history. The problem arose where farming conditions were difficult: in the higher parts of the Sudetes, in areas with poor soil, or far from roads and railway lines. There, settlers either never arrived at all or gave up quickly.

A village no one could keep going: Biała Woda

A good example of this mechanism is Biała Woda, the former German Weißwasser, located in the Śnieżnik Massif, a few kilometres from Stronie Śląskie, at an altitude of 700-840 metres above sea level. Before the war it was both a farming village and a small holiday resort - in 1840 it had around a hundred residents, eighteen farms, a water mill and a distillery. After 1945, Poles resettled from the eastern territories settled here, people who did not know the particulars of mountain farming and were unable to keep up the local farms or the village's spa tradition. The village began to empty out from 1947 and was eventually depopulated completely.

Today the only surviving building is the brick Chapel of St Anne from the first half of the 19th century, in front of which stands a stone cross with a memorial plaque. All the other buildings have collapsed down to their foundations, which are now overgrown with vegetation.

A village abandoned by its first settlers: Karłówek

A similar fate befell Karłówek in the Table Mountains, north-east of Szczeliniec Wielki, in the municipality of Radków. This weavers' settlement was founded around 1747 as part of Frederician colonisation, and its population was never large - in 1933 it had just 49 residents. After 1945 the existing residents were expelled to Germany, and their farms were abandoned and overgrown by forest. The difficult climate and poor conditions for farming had limited settlement here from the start, so after the war no one settled permanently in the empty houses. Today, hiking trails cross at the site of the former village, and the Pośna waterfalls can be seen nearby.

A village demolished for an industrial development: Barszów

A different scenario for a village's disappearance is represented by Barszów in Polkowice County. Unlike Biała Woda and Karłówek, this village survived the first postwar decades - in May 1939 it had 154 residents and even had its own railway station. Earlier, in the 18th century, it was home to a convent for girls from noble families, founded by the Italian ballerina Barbara Campanini, which operated until the end of the First World War. The end of Barszów, however, came in the 1970s: the village was evacuated and demolished, and the Żelazny Most flotation tailings reservoir, serving nearby copper mines, was built on its site. Barszów's fate is an example of a village that did not fall victim to postwar chaos, but to an industrial decision taken decades later - Lower Silesia also has settlements that disappeared under the waters of dam reservoirs and others that subsided because of mining damage, though in these cases sources rarely give exact names and dates.

A separate case: Miedzianka

Among the Lower Silesian settlements that have ceased to exist, a separate place is held by Miedzianka in the Rudawy Janowickie, a small town that literally collapsed into the ground as a result of postwar, reckless uranium mining. This story is described separately on the portal, because it differs from the fate of depopulated or flooded villages: here the cause was dangerous mining carried out underneath an inhabited town, not a lack of settlers or a decision to build a reservoir.

How to find the vanished villages today

Traces of the former villages are easiest to find on prewar German maps, where they appear under their names of the time, and on Polish Wikipedia, which keeps a full list, with coordinates, in its category devoted to Lower Silesia's abandoned villages. On the ground, usually little is left of such a village: the outline of foundations merged into the grass, a wild orchard that still bears fruit despite no one tending it, sometimes a fragment of a cemetery with fallen gravestones, and, longest-lasting of all, a brick wayside chapel or a roadside cross - these were the only structures that tended to be built solidly and away from the residential buildings, so they have survived where the houses crumbled away long ago.

Why they are worth remembering

The vanished villages of Lower Silesia are the physical record of one of the largest population transfers in postwar Europe: several million Germans who had to leave these territories, and hundreds of thousands of new settlers who in many places failed to put down lasting roots. Foundations in a forest and a lone chapel in the middle of a meadow are, for today's visitor, the most literal trace of the fact that the borders and population of this region changed more within a single generation than anywhere else in Poland.