Polesia

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Polesye Landscape, by Ivan Shishkin (1884).
Polesye Landscape, by Ivan Shishkin (1884).

Polesia or Polesie is one of the largest European swampy areas, located in the South-Western part of the Eastern-European Lowland, mainly within the territories of Belarus and Ukraine but also partly within Poland and Russia. The swamp areas of Polesia are known as the Pripyat Marshes (after the Pripyat River) or Pinsk Marshes (after the major local city of Pinsk).

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The name Polesia is from a Slavic root and loosely translates as "woodland". Polesie is the Polish spelling; Belarusian: Палесьсе, IPA: [pa'lʲesʲsʲe], Paleśsie; Ukrainian: Полісся, Polissja; Russian: Полесье, Poles’e; Latin: Polesia.

An inhabitant of Polesia is called Palašuk in Belarusian, Polishchuk in the local Ukrainian dialect, Poleszuk in Polish, Poleshchuk in Russian.

Polesia is a marshy region lining the Pripyat River in Southern Belarus (Brest, Pinsk, Kalinkavichy, Homel), Northern Ukraine (in the Volyn, Rivne, Zhytomyr, Kiev, and Chernihiv Oblasts), and partly in Poland (Lublin) and Russia (Bryansk). It is a flatland within the watersheds of the Western Bug and Prypyat rivers. The two rivers are connected by the Dnieper-Bug Canal, built during the reign of Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Notable tributaries of the Pripyat are the Horyn (Goryn), Stokhod (Stokhod, Stokhid), Styr, Ptyč, Jasielda (Jasolda) rivers. The largest towns in the Pripyat basin are Pinsk, Stolin, Davyd-Haradok. Huge marshes were reclaimed from the 1960s to the 1980s for farmland. The reclamation is believed to have harmed the environment along the course of the Pripyat.

This region suffered severely from the Chernobyl accident. Huge areas were polluted by radioactive elements and are considered unsuitable for living.

Polesia has rarely been a separate administrative unit. However, there was a Polesie Voivodeship the Second Polish Republic, as well as a Polesia Voblast in Byelorussian SSR.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polesia"
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