What is "narewka"

Narewka is a village in Poland, in Podlaskie Voivodeship, Hajnówka County, Gmina Narewka. It is located near the border with Belarus. Many of the inhabitants belong to the Belarusian minority in Poland.

The village has Catholic and Orthodox churches. It used to have a synagogue, but it was destroyed by the local Jewish population, angered after the Red Army which invaded Poland in 1939 desecrated it by turning it into a storage building. Most of the Jewish population perished during the Holocaust.

There was also a large population of Belarusians and/or the Eastern Orthodox and Jews (743 in 1878). Jews first came into the area in 1690 and there were two Jewish cemeteries in the vicinity, one to the north of the marketplace (no longer existing) and one in the district of Jałówka.

It is in one of five Polish/ Belarusian bilingual Gmina in Podlaskie Voivodeship regulated by the Act of 6 January 2005 on National and Ethnic Minorities and on the Regional Languages, which permits certain gminas with significant linguistic minorities to introduce a second, auxiliary language to be used in official contexts alongside Polish.

The river Narewka (; Belarusian Нараўка) is a left-bank tributary of the Narew river in western Belarus and north-eastern Poland.