Between two shallow coastal lagoons on the Pomeranian shore lived, well into the twentieth century, a West Slavic, Lutheran population whose language nobody speaks today. The Slovincians are not legend and not distant prehistory: their disappearance lies within reach of photographs, sound recordings and family memory. This article sets out what is documented, what remains disputed, and where the familiar accounts of them do not hold.
The museum in Kluki that preserves their culture today puts it without embellishment in its own self-description: the Slovincians are a people who possess only a past tense. There is no Slovincian-speaking community left, no institution that speaks in their name, and no undisputed answer to the question of whether the Slovincians ever existed as a distinct people in the sense in which the nineteenth century used that word.
That is precisely why their history repays attention. It shows how a language disappears, how scholarship first names a group and then shapes it, and how the political borders drawn in 1945 rolled over people who fitted none of the categories on offer.
The core area lay in eastern Pomerania, in the then district of Stolp, between Lake Garde (Jezioro Gardno) and Lake Leba (Jezioro Łebsko) – two shallow lagoons separated from the Baltic by narrow spits. The principal places were Groß Garde (Gardna Wielka), Schmolsin (Smołdzino), Klein Garde (Gardna Mała), Giesebitz (Izbica), Zezenow (Cecenowo), Glowitz (Główczyce), Rowe (Rowy), Stohentin (Stojcino) and above all Klucken (Kluki) on the southern shore of Lake Leba.
Dunes and coast closed the area off to the north, river marshes, swamps and bogs to the south and east. Neighbours described the location with a simple direction: behind the morass. Only metalled roads and, for a wider public, the opening of the Lauenburg–Leba railway line in 1899 made the region easier to reach.
The name "Slovincians" is the first point at which the popular account breaks down. It derives from the word "Slavs", much as Slovaks or Slovenes do. It appears as early as 1783 in Karl Gottlob von Anton, who drew on notes made in 1767 by Christian Ludwig Haken, provost of Stolp; Pavel Josef Šafařík (1826) and Izmail Sreznevsky (around 1851) also knew it. In the nineteenth century Pomeranian clergymen used it, among them Provost A. T. Kummer of Groß Garde (1835) and Provost Gottlieb Leberecht Lorek.
It was the Russian Slavist Alexander Hilferding who turned it into the scholarly standard term. He believed the form to be the old self-designation – and on this point today's majority view does not follow him. The commoner and older self-designation was "Kashubians". Franz Tetzner, who travelled the villages himself in 1896, expressly noted that he had not found the special names among the people; the Lutheran Leba Kashubians regarded themselves as the genuine Kashubians. A German nickname for the speakers was "Istker", after their word istka for "is".
In 1856 Hilferding travelled from St Petersburg into the Kashubian-Slovincian region. His findings appeared in 1862 in St Petersburg as Ostatki Slavjan na južnom beregu Baltijskogo Morja – "The Remnants of the Slavs on the Southern Shore of the Baltic Sea"; between 1862 and 1864 he also published a German version in Bautzen. Some accounts give 1857 as the year of publication; the usual date is 1862. Hilferding collected vocabulary, customs and sixty-two folklore texts. His conclusion took the form of a prediction, and the prediction came true.
„auf der linken, westlichen Seite aber, in Pommern, ist sie in einem vollständigen Aussterben begriffen und wird ohne Zweifel in fünfzig Jahren spurlos verschwunden sein."
„On the left, western side, however, in Pomerania, it is in the process of complete extinction and will without doubt have vanished without trace within fifty years."Alexander Hilferding on the Kashubian-Slovincian language, printed in Franz Tetzner, Die Slowinzen und Lebakaschuben, Berlin 1899, p. 20; translation: Glanz & Gravur
At the same time Hilferding must be read with care. As early as 1899 Tetzner accused him of viewing every Slavic remnant through a magnifying glass. Conversely, linguists such as Hanna Popowska-Taborska regard the designations he collected as authentic. Both can be true at once: good linguistic data, coloured interpretation.
From the 1530s onwards the Lutheran Reformation established itself in Pomerania. This created a dividing line that mattered more for the later history than any language boundary: the Slavic population of eastern Pomerania became Lutheran, while the Kashubians further east, in Pomerelia and later West Prussia, remained Catholic through the Counter-Reformation. Two groups with almost identical speech now lived in separate ecclesiastical, educational and social worlds. This rift explains why the Slovincians took no part in the nineteenth-century Kashubian literary movement – and why in 1945 their confession was read as evidence of "Germanness". For the wider context it is worth looking at the Pomeranians and the Kashubians.
So that congregations would understand the gospel, Lutheran pastors had Slavic church books printed. In 1586 the hymnal of Simon Krofey (Szymon Krofej, c. 1545–1590), pastor at Dampen (Dąbie) near Bütow, appeared in Danzig from the press of Jakob Rhode: Duchowne piesnie D. Marcina Luthera y ynszich naboznich mężow. In 1643 there followed, also in Danzig, Luther's Small Catechism in the translation of Michael Brüggemann, known as Pontanus or Mostnik (1583–1654), pastor in Schmolsin. One linguistic point is frequently reported wrongly: these prints are not written in Slovincian or Kashubian but in a regional variant of Polish with a scattering of Kashubian words. Krofey's book was rediscovered only in 1896/97, by Tetzner in the parish archive of Schmolsin.
In 1669 the Lutheran synod of Stolp responded to the linguistic situation with an administrative division: parishes with German services formed the circulus teutonicus, parishes with Slavic services the circulus vandalicus, the Wendish or Kashubian circuit. In 1784 Ludwig Wilhelm Brüggemann described how preachers there had to deliver their sermons in both languages, one service following immediately upon the other.
The system had a structural weakness. The pastors had been trained at German-speaking universities, were usually Germans themselves, and often had only an inadequate command of the Polish church language and of the divergent local dialect. Older parishioners told Tetzner that they had simply been unable to follow many sermons.
In 1899 Tetzner compiled a list of when the Kashubian church language ended in each place – the densest chronology we possess: around 1700 Stolp, around 1778 several parishes around Lupow and Freist, 1787 Mickrow, 1799 Rowe, 1816 Stohentin, 1832 Schmolsin, around 1845 Garde, around 1850 Leba, around 1856 Bütow, 1865 Osseken, 1871 Charbrow, 1876 Zezenow and finally 1886 Glowitz. An independent Polish account gives the same years for Schmolsin, Garde, Leba, Charbrow, Zezenow and Glowitz – a rare case in which two strands of transmission agree.
The widespread claim that Slavic preaching ended in Schmolsin "in the middle of the nineteenth century" is therefore dated too late: for Schmolsin the year is 1832. At the same time the record reports Slavic services – alongside German ones – as late as 1896 in the three Klucken settlements and in Żarnowska (Czarnowske). The two statements do not contradict each other: the list records the church language of whole parishes, not every individual service.
Slavic everyday speech survived longest where the soil was worst. The northern strip between dunes, lakes and bog was sandy and wet, lay far from the towns and held little attraction for German settlers. Those who stayed lived from fishing, from a little arable farming, and from the moor.
Two working festivals are well attested. In winter people fished communally under the ice on Lakes Leba and Garde, using net winches and working in fixed teams of twelve younger fishermen under an elected leader, supported by older men; large fish went to market, small ones were shared out. In early spring peat was cut together for the coming winter. The Slovincian word for this is often rendered as "black wedding" – a misleading translation, since the expression literally means something closer to "joyful time"; no wedding customs were involved. People lived in thatched clay-and-timber-framed houses, which some considered "typically German" – a false inference, since building traditions follow climate, available material and groundwater, not ethnicity.
The Prussian surveys serve only as limited evidence. The census of 1858 recorded fewer than 450 people in eastern Pomerania who described themselves as Kashubians – while 4,880 people still commanded the Kashubian language. The gap between the two figures is the actual finding: linguistic competence and self-classification diverged sharply.
Tetzner put it curtly in 1899: the Leba Kashubians had one and all allowed themselves to be counted as Germans. His own estimate for 1896 came to some 200 people. Anyone reconstructing a population history from such figures is not measuring people but categories laid down by an authority.
Older Polish and Russian accounts read the decline as national oppression, older German ones as a self-propelled, natural process. Both simplifications fall short. Several causes are demonstrable at once: the depopulation of Pomerania in the Thirty Years' War and the subsequent settlement of German-speaking farmers; German as the language of school once Prussian compulsory education ceased to make allowance for minority languages; a temporary legal ban on Slavic speech in the district of Lauenburg in 1811; military service and work on merchant ships; and the low social standing of the dialect, which Hilferding illustrated with a landowner who dismissed it as chattering.
One structural feature was decisive. Unlike the Catholic Kashubians under Florian Ceynowa or the Sorbs in Lusatia, the Slovincians set no standardised written language and no cultural or political movement against the trend. Many younger people welcomed the shift to German themselves.
Almost everything we know about Slovincian we owe to one man. The German Slavist Friedrich Lorentz (1870–1937) recorded the dialects shortly before they died: the Slovinzische Grammatik and the Slovinzische Texte in 1903, and the two-volume Slovinzisches Wörterbuch in 1908 and 1912. Since the language had never developed a written tradition, he devised a phonetic notation of his own, recording vowel length, degree of aperture and diphthongs precisely. In the preface of 1908 he already noted that his informants, themselves elderly, used German without exception in ordinary intercourse.
The Poznań linguist Mikołaj Rudnicki followed in 1913. His findings for Klucken amount to a snapshot of language death: those over 68 commanded the dialect fully and fluently. From about 40 upwards people still understood it well but barely spoke it, and then with mistakes. From about 25 upwards there remained passive comprehension without the ability to express anything. The younger generation had nothing. In the other villages of the Schmolsin parish, where Lorentz had worked ten years earlier, it had already died out. It survived longest not in church, inn or market, but in fishing.
There is no precise date, and the figures in circulation contradict one another. Two names are given: Otto Kirk of Klucken, of whom it is told that in 1945 he addressed the arriving Soviet soldiers in Slovincian, and Heinrich Kaitschick of Kluki (1877–1959). A Polish account likewise dates the death of the last fluent speaker in Kluki to 1959. In both cases it is unclear how reliable their command of the language still was.
What is certain is this: when Polish linguists came to Kluki in the 1950s they found nobody who still had full command of the language. Zdzisław Sobierajski made recordings in 1951 and gathered 90 expressions; in 1959 researchers from Warsaw assembled 140 words, chiefly from fishing, basic vocabulary and topography. A further difficulty is that the Slavic heritage of the region was not researched but suppressed for ideological reasons during the Nazi period – in precisely the decades when the last speakers were still alive.
The dispute is still unresolved. Much speaks for a special position: Slovincian had a free, mobile word accent, a strikingly rich vowel system with diphthongs under stress, archaic features other West Slavic languages had lost, and it entirely lacked the ł characteristic of Kashubian and Polish. At the same time it stood under strong Low German and High German influence in vocabulary and syntax.
Lorentz, contrary to what is often claimed, saw in the Lake Leba dialects in particular a linguistically defensible special position on the transition towards the more westerly Pomeranian, with points of contact with Polabian. The classification current in Poland today runs the other way: as a Slovincian dialect within Kashubian, or as the easternmost remnant of the old Pomeranian dialects. Scholarship treats the whole of southern Baltic Slavic as a fluid dialect continuum without sharp boundaries – the same landscape in which the Rani and the Liutizians belong. In Polish scholarship after 1989 Jerzy Treder argued for a distinct ethnic status, Zygmunt Szultka denied it; Mariusz Filip criticises both for too objectivist an understanding of what a people is.
With the border shift of 1945 the region passed to Poland. Under the law of 28 April 1946 on the citizenship of persons of Polish nationality in the so-called Recovered Territories, people who had lived there before 1 January 1945 could demonstrate Polish affiliation before a verification commission and remain. By 1950 roughly a million members of various autochthonous groups had passed through this procedure.
The Slovincians counted as autochthonous and were in principle exempt from expulsion. In practice, however, that status stood against everyday reality: they spoke German, they were Lutheran, and incomers who had themselves been expelled from Poland's eastern provinces frequently saw them simply as Germans. Destruction of boats, oars and nets is recorded, along with seizures of farms, harassment by security organs and the temporary sealing-off of Kluki by militia patrols. At the same time authorities and activists pursued a policy of "repolonisation", in whose logic the local German-Slavic vernacular counted as a residue of Germanisation and was suppressed in the schools of the 1950s.
The result was emigration rather than expulsion. A survey of 1960 recorded, among 133 inhabitants of Kluki, 87 Slovincians alongside 8 Kashubians and 38 people displaced from the east. During the 1950s and 1960s departures under family-reunification arrangements increased, and in the early 1970s the last long-established families left the village. The hamlets of Kluki Żeleskie and Kluki Ciemińskie ceased to exist altogether. A Slovincian association was founded in Hamburg. A Polish gazetteer of 1983 still listed some thirty Slovincian families for Kluki – a figure that does not square with the museum's own account and probably carried forward outdated data.
The idea of a museum arose in 1958; from June 1959 a team of ethnographers under Maria Znamierowska-Prüfferowa carried out fieldwork, building on earlier surveys made by Bożena Stelmachowska between 1949 and 1955. On 22 September 1963 the museum farmstead in Kluki opened, with 318 objects in its first inventory. It stood in the middle of a village in which the people whose culture was on display still lived.
This constellation is the sore point of the museum's history, and it is discussed openly in Poland to this day. When the last long-established inhabitants moved away in the early 1970s, the authorities decided to demolish most of the old timber-framed houses; only a struggle by the Słupsk museum staff between 1974 and 1976 saved six farmsteads. Today the open-air museum covers around five hectares in the middle of the village and has been called the Museum of the Slovincian Village since 1995, as a department of the Central Pomeranian Museum in Słupsk. It also maintains contact with former inhabitants living in Germany.
On 1 January 1967 the Slovincian National Park (Słowiński Park Narodowy) was created, initially covering 18,069 hectares; in 1977 UNESCO admitted it to the World Network of Biosphere Reserves, and in 2004 it was enlarged to some 32,744 hectares. It is famous for the shifting dunes near Łeba. The choice of name belongs to the context of Polish historical policy in the 1960s: remembrance of a West Slavic population was meant to underpin the claim to a territory inhabited in 1945 almost exclusively by Germans. That does not devalue the park, but it does place its name. It is a twentieth-century designation, not a historical self-description – and the museum, contrary to frequent statements, is not an institution of the national park but a museum department.
What remains are field names, a handful of Slavic words in the former everyday German of Pomerania, Lorentz's dictionary, Rudnicki's description, a few recordings from the 1950s, rescued farmsteads in Kluki – and families in Germany for whom all of this is origin rather than research material. Anyone wishing to take the Slovincians seriously should make them neither a heroically resistant people nor a footnote in linguistic history. Like the Obotrites or the Wagrians centuries earlier, they were people at a seam, claimed by two sides and in the end held by neither.
Documented are: the settlement area between Lakes Garde and Leba with Klucken as the last refuge; the Lutheran prints of Simon Krofey (Danzig 1586) and Michael Brüggemann/Pontanus (Danzig 1643), linguistically a regional variant of Polish; the division of the Stolp synod in 1669 into a German and a Wendish circuit; Tetzner's chronology of the extinction of the Kashubian church language from about 1700 (Stolp) to 1886 (Glowitz), confirmed in essentials by an independent Polish list; the census of 1858 with fewer than 450 self-designations against 4,880 speakers; Hilferding's journey of 1856 and his publication of 1862; Lorentz's grammar and texts of 1903 and his dictionary of 1908/1912 in a notation of his own; Rudnicki's age-group findings of 1913; the post-war recordings of 1951 (90 expressions) and 1959 (140 words); the verification law of 28 April 1946; the opening of the museum farmstead in Kluki on 22 September 1963; the founding of the national park on 1 January 1967 and its UNESCO recognition as a biosphere reserve in 1977.
Interpretation is, first, the name: "Slovincians" is in all probability not an ancient self-designation but an external term introduced by clergymen and scholars, which Hilferding mistakenly took for the original; the commoner self-designation was "Kashubians". Second, the status of the language: whether Slovincian was a language of its own or a Kashubian dialect remains open – Lorentz saw a special position, while Polish linguistics today generally speaks of the Slovincian dialect. Third, the notion of a self-contained Slovincian people with its own nationhood: that is a product of nineteenth-century national thinking. Fourth, the date of the language's death: it cannot be fixed, and the accounts of Otto Kirk and Heinrich Kaitschick (1877–1959) contradict one another. Fifth, the park's name: a piece of historical policy from the 1960s, not a historical name for the landscape. Sixth, a DNA test on exactly two individuals published by the museum is a single observation and says nothing about a population. And seventh, there are no Slovincian speakers left today – anyone who suggests otherwise is confusing them with the living Kashubians.
The Kashubians · The Pomeranians · The Polabians · The Wagri · The Sorbs · The Abodrites.
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