Białowieża Forest – Remarkable Remnant of Europe’s Primeval Past
Straddling the border of Poland and Belarus, there is a reminder of what Europe used to look like before the arrival of man. Białowieża Forest is the largest remaining part of a vast primeval forest that stretched for thousands of miles from corner to corner of the European plain. Something very large and very rare still stirs within the forest.
Although the forest is shared by Poland and Belarus, the border running directly through it, it is now a single UNESCO World Heritage Site. As these photographs show, little has changed here for thousands of years. It is still home to Europe’s heaviest land mammal – the Wisent. Yet the area has been witness to tumultuous social and political changes, one of which was to see the wisent eradicated from the confines of the forest. Białowieża saw little peace in the twentieth century.
Its geography was not always pivotal to the future of the region. Although the forest is visited today by many thousands of people, the only passage through it was by boat until the fourteenth century. Then, when it came in to the hands of the Polish King Władysław II, the worth of the woodland and its wildlife was recognised. It was protected and used as a source of food for the Polish army. Anyone caught poaching wisent would be summarily put to the sword.
The forest was further protected by Władysław IV in 1639. He freed all the peasants living in the area on a single condition; that they would become royal foresters and look after the place for the king. Unusually for an absolute monarch at this time, Władysław also relieved them of paying any taxes.
The late 1700s was a dreadful time for the Poles. The once thriving Polish-Lithuanian was obliterated and the country was partitioned no less than three times in the space of a few decades. Russia, Prussia and Hapsburg Austria carved up the country and Białowieża fell in to the hands of the Russians.
From then until the First World War the vast forest was under the protection of the tsars. It became a royal playground again with many of the major predators wiped out and deer and moose imported from other parts of the empire. The last royal hunt took place in 1912 but it the outbreak of the Great War which was to be catastrophic for Białowieża.
