Study tour “Between the sea and the borderland”
On 5-7 November, the first annual Polish-German study trip for employees of the partner institutions in the Mare – Pomerania – Confinium project took place. The study strips aim not only at getting better knowledge about the monuments and the past of the old Pomeranian borderlands and at collecting material for further teaching and research, but their goal is mainly to establish interpersonal relations and to foster experience-based exchange between the employees of the institutions participating in the project.
The route led from the Baltic zone of former Pomerania – a region little known to the inhabitants of today’s Polish-German borderland: Iwięcino, Darłowo, Krupy – through the territories of the former Pomeranian borderland – the land of Białogard and Szczecinek with the Episcopal principality and the state of the Teutonic Knights and then the Kingdom of Poland with the properties of the von Podewils family (Żukowo, Ostrowiec, Krąg), then to Wielin and Szczecinek, and finally enabled the participants to spend some time getting knowledge about the heritage of the old borderland in the tri-junction – the Drahim starosty (of the Kingdom of Poland), the Duchy of Pomerania and New March (Siemczyno, Czaplinek, Drahim Castle, Białowąs, Ostre Bardo, Połczyn-Zdrój, Sława). Beside well-known places and objects, such as the castle in Darłowo, we also visited places which are almost forgotten, such as Ostre Bardo, which from the 14th century until 1945 belonged to one family who founded a magnificent furnishing of the local church and built a small defensive structure – a tower on a mound surrounded by a moat, which was in use until the 19th century – or Krupy, where the oldest half-timbered buildings in Polish Pomerania are located: a church from the end of the 14th century and a Saxon cottage from the 18th century. These examples show how much we still have to do in order to deepen the knowledge about the older history of Pomerania and how much effort is still needed so as to preserve its heritage and promote it efficiently.
We invite you to watch the photo reports from each day of the study trip:
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3