Who were the Olędrzy?

Although we planned to narrow our focus to the single village Deutsch-Wymysle, it seems best, upon reflection, to keep our field of vision wide for at least one more post. The context will prove helpful in the long run as we weigh competing claims about who actually founded Deutsch-Wymysle in the first place.

The plural term “Olędrzy” in the post title is a new one, but its singular form (Olęder) and variations (also Holenders or Holęder; German: Holländer or Hauländer) hints at its meaning: it has something to do with people from Holland. In fact, the Olędrzy were people who emigrated  to Poland and lived in villages “organized under a particular type of law” (here).

A typical Olędrzy house, this one built between 1800 and 1825.

The law under which they were organized is by now familiar to us: they enjoyed personal freedom (they were not serfs), community self-government, the granting of long-term (typically forty years) leases to the land, and the right to pass on the rights of the lease to heirs. As one might expect, Dutch Mennonites constituted a sizable percentage of the early Olędrzy, but we should not mistakenly think that all Olędrzy were Mennonites.

This was especially true as time went on, and eventually the term came to be applied to any group of colonists, regardless of their ethnicity, who lived and worked as the earliest Oledrzy had done. So it was that many Germans and Poles, as well as some Hungarians, Czechs, and Scots, also settled in Poland and enjoyed the privileges of the law first extended to the original Dutch Olędrzy. From the beginning of Olęder immigration in the 1500s through 1864, at least 1,700 Olęder villages were established;* only 300 were settled by ethnic Dutch (here), which gives a good sense of how the ethnic composition of the Olędrzy shifted over the centuries.

The original Olędrzy were welcomed into Poland for a simple reason: to turn unprofitable riverland into productive farmland. Jerzy Szaùygin writes:

They were always settled either along rivers, or in lowland and marshy areas. Due to their centuries-old experience in fighting the floods in their native country, the colonists were able to turn barren land, seemingly unsuitable for cultivation, into a state of flourishing agriculture. They achieved this by establishing a complex system of channels, dams, and weirs. Based on cattle-raising and fruit farming, their agriculture was characterized by good work organization, and was much more advanced and productive than that of the local serfs. Therefore, the colonization of the previously uncultivated land was of great benefit to the local landowners.

The means by which the original Dutch and then their heirs reclaimed the land will be the subject of another post. For now we end by emphasizing several important points.

1. When the colonists of Poland are identified as Olędrzy or “the Dutch,” one should not assume that the colonists’ ethnic background is in view. Especially for the mid-eighteenth century on, the term is more probably a reference to a specific legal status and way of life, that of free people reclaiming and farming land from Poland’s river bottoms.

2. Although all Mennonites were Olędrzy (speaking loosely), not all Olędrzy were Mennonites. In fact, the largest numbers of Olędrzy in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries apparently were German Lutherans, often called “Evangelicals” in the literature. Naturally, the Mennonites typically lived in their villages and the Lutherans in theirs, but both were considered part of the Olędrzy class.

All of this background, but especially these final observations, will be helpful as we finally turn our attention to the village of Deutsch-Wymysle in the following post.


Note
* Nearly two hundred Olęder settlements were established in the Mazovia (Mazowsze) region; this ratio (200/1,700) offers evidence that Olęder settlement was a widespread phenomenon throughout Poland, not merely a regional development.

Works Cited

Olędrzy. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Available online here.

Szaùygin, Jerzy. Introduction to Catalogue of Monuments of Dutch Colonization in Poland. Available online here or here.