Anna MAJEWSKA, University of Lodz, Faculty of Geographical Sciences, Institute of the Built Environment and Spatial Policy, Poland
Until the end of the Second World War, Warmia, Masuria, and some of Powi?le were part of the Province of East Prussia – an exclave of the German Reich. The 1945 alteration in their territorial affiliation and, especially, the socio-political consequences of that alteration, caused a number of changes in the cultural landscape there. One of the leading processes of that was the gradual depopulation of localities, resulting in the disappearance of settlement from many of them.
The subject of the speech are the transformations of rural areas of settlement units abandoned between 1944 and 2020, located in the part of former East Prussia that was incorporated into Poland in 1945. The main objectives were to identify the depopulated localities in the research area, and then to determine the types, degrees, and directions of transformation of their spaces as a result of the dramatic events of the 20th century.
A key part of research was comparative analysis of cartographic materials. On the basis of that analysis, almost 800 uninhabited localities were identified! This was a consequence of a series of events and processes initiated by the violent escape of local people from East Prussia at the end of World War II. Many of the localities had already been completely destroyed towards the end of the war, and were not settled after it ended. Villages were deserted also as a result of post-war migrations and displacement of Germans and Masurians.
The next stages of the research concerned, inter alia, distribution of the depopulated localities, and multi-layered studies of changes of their landscape components: remnants of homesteads, cemeteries, military buildings, vegetation. Methods were applied, e.g.: analyzing LiDAR data, GIS analysis, photographic documentation of relics. During the research, material remnants of settlement structures were registered, based on which it is possible to deduce the material dimension of the broken continuity of settlement in this area.
Mots clés : historical geography|landscape studies|LiDAR|rural settlement|political changes
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