The Lost Urzecze

A day of film at KINOMUZEUM will showcase Warsaw and its surroundings as a shared culinary landscape. The first segment, featuring the film The Lost Urzecze, will revisit the micro-region along the Vistula River, which for generations supplied the capital and developed its own culture of work, farming, and life along the Vistula.

After the film, we invite you to a discussion.

The Olędrzy were fascinating innovators who arrived in the 17th century from Friesland and the Netherlands to settle in what is now Warsaw’s Saska Kępa neighborhood. Skilled at draining the “pustki” – the wooded wastelands along the Vistula – they lived in a captivating symbiosis with nature. These skilled farmers made use of the fertile alluvial deposits carried by the Vistula River during floods. Here, in the lands known as Urzecze, they cultivated fields that yielded bountiful harvests.

Delicious vegetables, fruits, and bountiful grain harvests. Thanks to them, the region became Warsaw’s granary.

Building materials – sand, gravel, and stones – were shipped from here to the capital. When residents of Warsaw and Mazovia hear about Urzecze, they react with disbelief. A region? Just a few kilometers from the Palace of Culture and Science? How is it possible that the Olędrzy endured the floods so persistently, floods that often swept away their entire livelihoods?

Today, there are no longer any Olędrzy farmers in Urzecze. You won’t encounter them while walking or cycling along the banks of the Vistula. Their model farms, laid out parallel to the current of the nourishing and untamed river, are no longer there. They abandoned them just before the Red Army’s offensive in 1945. And they never returned to Urzecze…