- Polesia
Polesia or Polesie is one of the largest European
swamp y areas, located in the south-western part of theEastern-European Lowland , mainly withinBelarus andUkraine but also partly withinPoland andRussia . The swamp areas of Polesia are known as thePripyat Marshes (after thePripyat River ) orPinsk Marshes (after the major local city ofPinsk ).Name
The name Polesia is from a Slavic root and loosely translates as "
woodland ". "Polesie" IPA-pl| [|p|o|'|l|e|ś|e|] is the Polish spelling; other names include _be. "Pales’sye" (Палесьсе) [Help:IPA|IPA| [pa'lʲesʲsʲe] ] , _ua. "Polissya" (Полісся), _ru. "Poles’ye" (Полесье);Latin : "Polesia".An inhabitant of Polesia is called "
Poleszuk " in Polish; "Palashuk" in Belarusian, "Polishchuk" in the local Ukrainian dialect, and "Poleshchuk" in Russian. Polesie is widely acknowledged by scholars as the region where the oldest elements of ethnography and culture of Eastern Slavs are preserved.Geography
Polesia is a marshy region lining the
Pripyat River in Southern Belarus (Brest,Pinsk ,Kalinkavichy ,Homel ), Northern Ukraine (in the Volyn, Rivne, Zhytomyr, Kiev, andChernihiv Oblast s), and partly in Poland (Lublin ) and Russia (Bryansk ). It is aflatland within the watersheds of theWestern Bug and Prypyat rivers. The two rivers are connected by theDnieper-Bug Canal , built during the reign of Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last king of thePolish-Lithuanian Commonwealth .Notable tributaries of the Pripyat are the
Horyn (Goryn ),Stokhod (Stokhod ,Stokhid ),Styr ,Ptsich , Yaselda rivers. The largest towns in the Pripyat basin arePinsk ,Stolin ,Davyd-Haradok . Huge marshes were reclaimed from the 1960s to the 1980s forfarm land. The reclamation is believed to have harmed the environment along the course of the Pripyat.This region suffered severely from the
Chernobyl disaster . Huge areas were polluted byradioactive elements and are considered unsuitable for living.Polesia has rarely been a separate administrative unit. However, there was a
Polesie Voivodeship theSecond Polish Republic , as well as aPolesia Voblast inByelorussian SSR .The Polish part of the region includes the
Polesie National Park ("Poleski Park Narodowy"), established 1990, which covers an area of convert|97.6|km2|sqmi. This and a wider area adjoining it (up to the Ukrainian border) make up theUNESCO -designated West PolesieBiosphere Reserve , which borders a similar reserve (the Shatskiy Biosphere Reserve) on the Ukrainian side.There is also a
protected area calledPribuzhskoye-Polesie in the Belarusian part of the region.External links
* [http://terkepek.adatbank.transindex.ro/kepek/netre/279.gifMap of Polesia] hu icon
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