What is "kresy"

Kresy Wschodnie or Kresy (, Eastern Borderlands, or Borderlands) was a historical region of the Second Polish Republic during the interwar period constituting nearly half of the territory of the state; where the ethnic Poles, being the largest group, were roughly equal in their number to the size of the national minorities (with notable exceptions). Administratively, the Kresy macroregion was composed of voivodeships which included Lwów, Nowogródek, Polesie, Stanisławów, Tarnopol, Wilno, Wołyń, and the Białystok Voivideships. Today, these territories are divided between Western Ukraine, Western Belarus, and south-eastern Lithuania, with such major cities as Lviv, Vilnius, and Hrodna. In the Second Polish Republic the term Kresy roughly equated with the lands beyond the so-called Curzon Line, which was suggested after World War I in December 1919 by the British Foreign Office as the eastern border of the re-emerging sovereign Republic following the century of partitions. In September 1939, after the Soviet Union joined Nazi Germany in their attack on Poland in accordance with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the territories were incorporated into Soviet Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania in the atmosphere of terror.

Following the failure of German Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet gains were ratified by the Western Allies at the Tehran conference, the Yalta conference and the Potsdam conference. When the Soviet Union broke up, the former Kresy remained a significant part of the former Soviet republics as they gained independence. Even though the Eastern Borderlands are no longer in Poland, the area is still inhabited by Polish minorities, and the memory of Kresy is still cultivated among them, though the attachment to the "myth of Kresy", including the prewar vision of the region as a peaceful, idyllic, rural land, has been criticized in the Polish political discourse after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Economically the region was less developed than the western part of interwar Poland, and had the lowest literacy level of the nation, which was the result of more than one hundred years of Austro-Hungarian and Russian imperial rule. Education was not compulsory in the Russian Empire.

Kresy refers to the former Polish eastern borderlands.

Kresy may also refer to the following villages:

• Kresy, Łódź Voivodeship (central Poland)
• Kresy, Podlaskie Voivodeship (north-east Poland)