19th Century Poland in Six Maps: A Reconnaissance

“An excellent page in the chronicles of urban planning in Poland,” is what Wacław Ostrowski (1949) called the period of the Kingdom of Poland. The economical development under the rule of Prince Xavier Frances Drucki-Lubecki had far-reaching consequences for Polish cities. In 1818, the Department of Construction and Surveying opened at the University of Warsaw, and in 1826 preparatory courses for the Polytechnical School were introduced. These schools were intended to ensure that geometers—needed for measuring and drawing up foundations for maps—would not have to be brought in from abroad.

One such geometer was Filip de Viebig, who created a map of the terrains of the cloth halls being built in Łódź in the area known as the New City. The New City occupied the terrain around the octagonal main square, which resulted in some unusually shaped garden plots and constructions, but most of its structure was based on square and rectangular plots of land. The gardens, located to the east of the New City on the southern bank of the Łódka river were supposed to supply food. As Viebig’s map shows, they occupied a portion of the terrain of the Old City’s manor and grounds belonging to the parson, the village mayor, etc. (the owners received alternative plots).

From the very beginning of the industrial development of Łódź, density won with regulation, and instead of spreading out, industry was concentrated in the main part of the city, namely, on Piotrkowska Street. Nonetheless, it was possible for authorities to establish two separate organisms: the area next to the cloth hall region (196 plots) was set aside for a settlement for cotton and linen productions (Łódka, 473 plots running along Piotrkowska), a complex of large hydro-factory holdings (on the Jasień river) and a settlement of Silesian weavers (42 plots). This was monitored by the Chairman of the Commission of the Masovian Voivodeship (1815-1832) and the State Councillor Rajmund Rembieliński.

After the November Uprising (1830–1831) a new era began in Łódź. Despite the organizational efforts of city administrators, city planning was characterized by uncoordinated distribution, land speculation, chaos, and independently chosen locations for industrial workshops, followed by changes in communication infrastructure, the construction of railway tracks, and big industry in the second half of the decade. The mirror image of Łódź’s downtown was a disorganized neighborhood of poverty, Bałuty. The “excellent page in the chronicles of planning” is still discernible in the city’s topography, and Łódź remains the only large Polish city constructed on a grid, symbolically shown in Richard Kai’s poster Łódź (from the “Poland” series), referencing neoplastic compositions.

Born in Meklemburg, Juliusz Colberg was the scion of the Kolberg family (who had been writing their name with a K since 1840), known for their many important contributions to Polish culture. Colberg came to Poland at the beginning of the century with a project of drawing the map of Southern Prussia. After the creation of the Duchy of Warsaw, he embarked on the service of preparing a map of his administrative division. In the Kingdom of Poland, he became a Professor at the University of Warsaw, a teacher of surveying in the School of Forestry, and from 1828, in the Agronomics Institute in Marymont. He also occupied high ranking government position—a member of the Architectural Council in the Commission of Internal Affairs, he was also involved in raising the qualifications of surveyors and advised on issues of surveying influencing the Council of Architecture, Surveying, Roads and Waterways. During this period he also prepared the Map of Warsaw (1827) printed in numerous editions, as well as the Map of the Kingdom of Poland (published posthumously in 1832), and the Atlas of the Polish Kingdom (1827).

The Atlas was composed of eight hand-colored maps (which were also sold separately) placed in a folder in order beginning with the south (the Kraków Voivodeship), with the final one being the north-eastern quadrant, the Augustian Voivodeship. The map (scale 1:530 000, measuring 40x53cm) was characterized by a level of detail never before seen on Polish lands, especially for maps used by civilians: it delineated the boundaries of various administrative units, six different mail routes, and seven kinds of settlements, considering a settlement worthy of mapping if it was composed of a minimum of twenty houses (Colberg’s map also had small settlements). For his work, the author was honored with a diamond ring from Tsar Nicolas I, and not long afterwards (1829) – for the entirety of his contributions – with the coat of arms of Kołobrzeg.

On the map one can see the difficulties presented by the Augustian Voivodeship as the most expansive region. The distance between Ciechanowiec and the outskirts of Kowna is 260 kilometers (according to Google, by roads it is 208 kilometers). Considering the shape of the voivodeship and the arrangement of roads, the shape of the area, the density of forests and the complicated hydrographic nets, it becomes clear why the newly built Warsaw-Petersburg route (the only road connecting the two cities) cleaves to the border of the country, rather than cutting through the center of the voivodeship.

“By nature dry and acerbic, each of his actions, each step, is endowed with a characteristic reluctance, discontent, and for those who knew him only superficially, it would be easy to accuse him of a lack of feeling, a lack of engagement in national issues” – this is how Stanisław Barzykowski described General Wojciech Chrzanowski in his History of the November Uprising. An excellent staff officer, the author of a plan of attack during the time of the 1830 rebellion (ruined through no fault of its author’s), after the disaster of the uprising he found himself abroad, where, alongside accusations of betraying Poland to the Russians (a rather unoriginal mar in the biographies of 19^th century public figures), he aligned himself with Adam Czartoryski and “joined those who never stopped thinking about inciting a new explosion of military force on Polish lands” (Bronisław Pawłowski). Aside from his contributions as an organizer or leader in wars happening at the time (Turkey, Piemont), the General’s most important accomplishments were as a writer and editor. Among the many brochures he wrote, a particularly important one is titled On Partisan War, published in 1835. It presented one of the first theories of leading a guerrilla fight and serves as a kind of guide. The General also described the characteristics of partisanship:

“In parts of the country covered or crosscut with paths, where there are forests, swamps, dams, gorges, trenches, that is where war is fought by the infantry, exactly the way it is in mountainous regions; in open country, and flat regions, it must be fought on the same principles with cavalry.”

From the beginning of the 1840s, thanks to the written accounts of Ludwik Michał Pac, General Chrzanowski, along with several officers who were members of the former Army Corps prepared a Map of Former Poland, with surrounding areas of neighboring countries, according to updated materials, containing 48 leaves. This is how, in 1859, “the only topographical map of Poland and its historical borders, created and published during the Partitions by Poles with Polish cooperation” comes to be (Piotr Grabowski). Indeed, one could say that this map, depicting the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of 1772 (as conceived alike by emigrants, conspirators, and national activists), was created so as to be used during the next national uprising. “Unfortunately, it did not serve its purpose, because only a few copies made it to the country, and what is more, it unfortunately did not indicate where the forests were” (Jan Wendt). This flaw can be clearly seen on the sheet depicting the Radom area.

It would seem that everything has been said about the importance of the Lindleys’ work . It vastly overreached the dimensions of their own time, not only because they built a modern system of waterworks and sewage. As Paweł Weszpiński noted, they also spurred “the creation of a large scale cartographic system,” though it was not necessary for their main purpose. Created between 1883 and 1913, in a scale from 1:200 to 1:25 000, the maps not only made possible a specialized usage, but also set the principles of Warsaw cartography, especially its administrative layout (among other things, they decided on the dome of the Protestant tabernacle as the center of the map). Six of the Lindleyan maps were published in print, and the three most popular ones were reprinted several times. The authors reconciled utility and aesthetics, which, in typically quarrelsome Polish fashion, was held against them. As one commentator wrote: “chasing after a few millimeters of accuracy in their measurements and levels, attaching too much importance to beautiful paintings, all of this bespeaks theory over practice, leading the city into unnecessary costs with no results.”

The fragments shown here come from a sectional map (scale 1:2500). Lindley’s drawing is seen as “the peak of Warsaw cartography, an artistic drawing with a precision that had no equals in Warsaw cartography” (Weszpiński). Aside from including settlements, differentiated as made of wood or stone, and indicating different modes of use, one notices the green, both of entire terrains, including parks and cemeteries, as well as individual trees. In 1897, the suburbs are green, as are most of the courtyards, awaiting the next wave of economic development. The handwritten version of the map was used later; newly constructed developments and buildings in the suburbs were sketched in.

A good basis of comparison for the Lindley’s maps is to look at the newly emerging cartography of commercial developments, with its conventions of colors, generalizations, etc. In the former, the city space is a task to be completed and an entry point for further projects, whereas in the latter it is a reckoning with a set of problems, or even a way of making them more acute. The publishers attest to a lack of thought, will, and means for the permanent transformation of a city, which is composed of layers and conditions of past eras.

According to Karl Schlögel, the idea of a national atlas, which became a popular and standard practice in 19^th century nation-states, is a collection of maps that everyone comes to know by participating in the process of education:

“The people, the nation, thereby knows what the world looks like: where the boundaries are between friend and enemy, where the centers of crisis are, where battles are fought, where losses are encountered and what places remain to be conquered.”

The proposition to publish such a national atlas was formulated by Ignacy Domeyko in 1888, buthad no political or technical possibility of being realized. It was the outbreak of the FirstWorld War that made the publication possible. The Geographical-Statistical Atlas of Poland came to being in 1916 and was authored by the greatest of Polish geographers, Eugeniusz Romer. Financed by Franciszek Stefczyk (who was Director of the Bureau of Savings and Loan in the National Division in Lviv at the time), it was meant to be used in the case of the end of struggles and eventual peace accords. The information presented by Romer was in keeping with his sense of the physio-geographic differences of this part of Europe, covering the territory of the country in its 1772 borders.

Stefczyk also financed Romer’s journey to the peace conference in Paris, where the professor created the Bureau of Geography attached to the Polish Peace Delegation. After the conference, maps intended for use in the discussions were published. They can be analyzed from the perspective of their rhetorical content and the force of their persuasive utterance, as an expression of propaganda and Polish political thought. But the atlas is also a unique cartographic saga of Poland. It contains stories of wrongs (three partitions), of constant uprisings (the Duchy of Warsaw, the Congress of Vienna), of military engagements (uprisings) and wars over civilizations (the Polish press and its publications). There are also old quarrels from the final pre-War years: the Polish educational system in Mińszczyźn and Mohylewszczyźn (the reach of the language as a measure of Polishness in Belarus), the Catholic Church’s organizations on the Eastern periphery (uniting Polishness and Catholicism), but also those from a more distant past, such as the location of conflicts in the January Uprising. There are efforts to obtain something at any price, there are blows below the belt—though we should remember that the enemy was also not fighting fair. In conflicts of national borders in the Vilnius region, Suwalszczyzna, Silesia and Spisz, ethnography is invoked, and, particularly beneficial to us, the perspectives of our neighbors: some of the Czechs and Prussians share our perspective. The maps presenting the course of these negotiations are a kaleidoscope of propositions, demands, lines: “Will this city end up on our side?” – “Then give us another one.”

Ultimately, almost everything has a happy ending – the Atlas contained copies of maps with borders decided upon in the Treaty of Versailles. But scattered throughout, there are question marks and hopes of vindication (the plebiscite in Silesia, the broken Polish-Czech border at Spisz and Orawy. The final triumph is the recovery of… a mess.

An interesting tidbit on the Facebook profile page of the “Extreme Cartography” group – that most villages beginning with the letter A are found on the terrain of the former Kingdom of Poland – evokes consternation, jokes, but also seemingly professional discussions on rules of declension in Slavic languages. In the end, someone cleverly notes that a large portion of these villages has the name Aleksandrów, coming from the names of three 19^th century Russian rulers, popular among the Polish aristocracy of the time.

Like every past age, the 19^th century continues to work its effects. The visibility of Partition borders, almost hundred years after their annulment, seventy years after the end of the Second World War, which tore everything up anew, still intrigues. Two spaces are a particularly common subject of visual representation: railroad lines, and election results. The Partition-era railroad map could once be seen in almost every train car; in recent years it has vanished.  Fans of the railroad acquired maps of the network from 1920 and 2002 – scanned and annotated by Zbigniew Taylor in The Development and Regression of Railway Networks in Poland and included on the profile page of “Extreme Cartography” – along with a plethora of observations. The civilizational gap between the Partitions and the present has been bridged. The difference between 1920 and 1981 (presented on our map) is not as clear as the difference between 1981 and the dawn of the new millennium, the real end of the Kingdom of Poland and Galicia thus happened in the last 25 years.

There are still open questions on other topics, which can be visualized on a map. Under the keyword “See the Partition,” the administrators of “Extreme Cartography” placed five maps alongside each other portraying industrial hiring practices, buildings constructed before 1918, population in the previous century, the network of railway lines, and support for liberal parties. The administrators warn Facebook users that this is “just for fun” and “there is no need to get worked up.”  But a fear of committing an error or of mockery does not hamper the ambitions of this group. These maps also serve well to meet the demands placed on them for a visual representation – realized in various ways – of the Second Polish Republic and the People’s Republic of Poland.

In especially sensitive cases, namely, parliamentary and presidential elections in the Second Polish Republic, maps that do not display the Partitions are gratefully received. As in the case of the last parliamentary elections, in which the victory of the Law and Justice Party was convincing enough to conceal previously known boundaries. Nonetheless, the map showing the number of people who did not vote in the Spring presidential elections revives the familiar and well-grounded division into the three empires (as in many other cases, though not in that of apartments fitted with bathrooms, Galicja and the Kingdom form a coherent whole of sorts) – the voter turnout in the Russian and Austrian portions is decidedly lower.