Lubusz Voivodeship

The functions of regional capital are shared between two cities – Gorzów Wielkopolski and Zielona Góra. Gorzów serves as the seat of the centrally-appointed voivode (wojewoda), or governor, and Zielona Góra is the seat of the elected regional assembly (sejmik) and the executive elected by that assembly, headed by a marshal (marszałek). In addition, the voivodeship includes a third city (Nowa Sól) and a number of towns.

Lubusz Voivodeship borders West Pomeranian Voivodeship to the north, Greater Poland Voivodeship to the east, Lower Silesian Voivodeship to the south, and Germany (Brandenburg and Saxony) to the west.

It was created on January 1, 1999, out of the former Gorzów Voivodeship and Zielona Góra Voivodeship, pursuant to the Polish local government reforms adopted in 1998. The province's name recalls the historic Lubusz Land (Lebus or Lubus), although parts of the voivodeship belong to the historic regions of Lower Silesia, Greater Poland, and Lower Lusatia.

History

During the formation and early expansion of the Polish state under its first rulers, Mieszko I and Bolesław I the Brave, the entire territory of the present Lubusz Voivodeship became part of Poland by 1002, including the historic Lubusz Land, part of which is located on the western bank of the Oder River, including its capital Lubusz, now Lebus in Germany. The oldest towns in the region, dating back over 1,000 years, include Trzciel, Skwierzyna, Iłowa, Szprotawa, Jasień, Krosno Odrzańskie, Międzyrzecz and Żary, with most other towns also founded in the Middle Ages, including the current regional capitals of Zielona Góra and Gorzów Wielkopolski. The youngest towns are Łęknica, Czerwieńsk, Nowa Sól, Szlichtyngowa and Zbąszynek, all either first mentioned or established in the later periods.

Following the fragmentation of Poland into smaller provincial duchies, various portions of the present Lubusz Voivodeship were part of various duchies, initially the duchies of Greater Poland and Silesia, and later also Poznań, Legnica, Głogów, Lubusz and Żagań, ruled by various lines of the Piast dynasty. Over time, portions of the present Lubusz Voivodeship were lost by Poland. In 1250 the Lubusz Land was acquired by the Ascanian margraves of Brandenburg. In 1319–1326 it was contested by various Polish and German rulers, before falling back to Brandenburg. After Brandenburg passed to the Bohemian Crown in 1373, Poland made a peaceful attempt to regain the northern portion of the area. In 1402, the Bohemian rulers reached an agreement with Poland in Kraków. Poland was to buy and re-incorporate the northern outskirts of the present Lubusz Voivodeship, but eventually the Bohemian rulers sold the area to the Teutonic Order, who in turn sold it back to Brandenburg in 1454 to raise funds for war against Poland. The southern part of the current voivodeship remained part of the duchies of Żagań and Głogów, ruled by the houses of Piast and Jagiellon, with the Żagań duchy eventually passing to houses of foreign background, including Czech, Saxon and French, whereas other areas were gradually incorporated directly into the Kingdom of Bohemia. In 1635, most of the south-western part of the present Lubusz Voivodeship passed from Bohemia to Saxony, and from 1697 formed part of Poland-Saxony. In the 18th century, Wschowa was an important royal city of Poland, as it often hosted Polish kings and several sessions of the Polish Senate, hence being dubbed the "unofficial capital of Poland". King Augustus III of Poland also often stopped in Brody. Wschowa and Gubin had important mints that struck Polish coins.

In 1701, the Kingdom of Prussia was established, which included Brandenburg-held Lubusz Land, and various areas were eventually gradually annexed by Prussia in the following centuries, starting with the south-eastern part of the current voivodeship in 1742, followed by eastern portions (western outskirts of Greater Poland) in 1793 (briefly regained by Poles in 1807–1815 as part of the short-lived Duchy of Warsaw), and the south-western part in 1815. Within Prussia and Germany the territory was divided between the provinces of Neumark/Brandenburg, South Prussia/Posen, and Silesia/Lower Silesia.

During World War II, the Oflag II-C, Stalag III-C, Stalag VIII-C and Stalag Luft III major German prisoner-of-war camps for Polish, French, British, Belgian, Canadian, Serbian, Italian, American, Australian, New Zealander, Soviet, Norwegian, Czech, Slovak, South African, Dutch, Greek, Yugoslav, Senegalese, Algerian and Moroccan POWs were operated in the territory. The latter was the site of the "Great Escape" in 1944. There are museums at the site of the camps in Dobiegniew and Żagań, and a memorial to the victims of the Stalag Luft III murders in Żagań. Particularly infamous camps in the region were the Oderblick labor education camp in Świecko and the Sonnenburg concentration camp in Słońsk, in which Polish, Belgian, French, Bulgarian, Dutch, Yugoslav, Russian, Italian, Ukrainian, Luxembourgish, Danish, Norwegian, Czech, Slovak and other prisoners were held, and many died. There were also eleven subcamps of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp and a subcamp of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, in which mostly Jewish and Polish, but also French, Russian, Czech, Italian, Greek, Yugoslav, Dutch, Romanian, Hungarian, Lithuanian and German prisoners were held. Obrzyce was the place of Aktion T4 murders of mentally ill and disabled people. The region was the site of fierce fighting during the war in 1945. During the liberation of the Stalag III-C camp, Soviet troops killed some American POWs mistaking them for enemy troops. On 18 March 1945, the Germans shot down an American bomber near Bucze.

Under the terms laid down by Joseph Stalin in the Potsdam Agreement, the borders of Poland and Germany were redrawn and the area of the Lubusz Voivodeship fell within the new borders of Poland.

In 1998, the government of Jerzy Buzek decided to introduce an administrative reform, with its principles including the restoration of counties and a steep reduction in the number of voivodeships. A general consensus existed among scholars that the local administration exercised through the 49 existing voivodeships established in 1975 was inefficient, anachronistic, impractical, detrimental to maintaining regional identity, and untenable. However, the reform draft accepted by the government surprised the public and caused widespread outcry, as its authors foresaw creation of only 12 large voivodships, thus going much further than the widely expected reconstitution of the 17 voivodeships existing prior to the 1975 reform. As a consequence, the original draft made no provision for a separate Lubusz voivodeship – Gorzów was to become along with Kostrzyn, Strzelce Krajeńskie and Drezdenko a part of West Pomeranian Voivodeship, Zielona Góra was to be included along with Krosno, Nowa Sól, Żagań, Gubin and Żary in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship, while a narrow horizontal strip encompassing Międzyrzecz, Sulęcin, Świebodzin, Słubice and Sulechów was to be assigned to the Greater Poland Voivodeship as a bizarre sort-of corridor to the German border. However, mass protests broke out as a result in the cities such as Bydgoszcz, Koszalin, Opole or Kielce. Many of the people opposing the draft reform initially demanded retaining as many as 25 voivodeships (including the 2 ones seated in Gorzów and Zielona Góra), a number nevertheless widely regarded as a demand intentionally excessive to serve as an initial negotiating bargain, actually aiming to restore the 17 voivodeships existing prior to 1975 as an ultimate compromise. As Poland was at the time governed under political cohabitation, the opposition party constituting the political background of the President decided to capitalize on the popular discontent which erupted against the government on an unanticipated scale; the most obvious mean readily available for the opposition was a presidential veto, which in fact ensued. In order to salvage the reform from being killed altogether, the government was, in the face of lacking the supermajority required to overturn the veto at the time, forced to reconsider the original shape of the reform and to reconcile it with the reservations of the President and his political background, with the result of a compromise adjustment increasing the number of voivodeships to 16, with Lubusz Voivodeship included among the four additional ones created according to the agreement.

The path leading to such and outcome was far from smooth. The government made an effort to highlight and exploit the decades-long animosity between the approximately same-size two principal cities, spreading scare against its inevitable re-ignition and explosion in any of these two cities after designating the other one as the voivodeship capital, and hoping to use the engineered scare as the main argument in the ongoing discussions against creating the Lubusz voivodeship, The animosity, existing indeed between the cities, has been historically rooted in a widespread perception among Gorzów inhabitants that the 1950 decision to designate Zielona Góra as the voivodeship capital instead of their larger and more populous city, was taken by the anticlerical communist government due to a hidden motivation of punishing Gorzów for becoming the see of the newly established Roman Catholic apostolic administration governing the majority of the Recovered Territories, with the ensuing discrimination of the city by the voivodeship authorities in the years 1950–1975 in terms of establishing any new public cultural and educational institutions, other public investments or public funds allocations, in vivid contrast to the unjust favoring of their own seat, the city of Zielona Góra; a sentiment reinforced further by the surprise relocation of the see of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Gorzów to Zielona Góra in 1992, renamed as a result the Roman Catholic Diocese of Zielona Góra-Gorzów, and finally and perhaps most importantly, by the historical, perpetual and almost sacred rivalry between the motorcycle speedway clubs located in both cities. The objective of the local elites in Zielona Góra was in turn to become a single capital centre, reverting to the situation before 1975, while any prospect of sharing the governing institutions was for a long time treated with their hostility. In spite of that, the looming threat of a "everybody lose" scenario set to materialize in case of a possible implementation of the original reform draft, paved the way for neutralizing this argument through forcing both rival sides into the breakthrough reconciliation accord known as the Paradyż Agreement, brokered by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Zielona Góra-Gorzów and formalized in a document signed during a highly publicized local summit in the Gościkowo-Paradyż Abbey on 13 March 1998. This compromise agreement, was negotiated and concluded between the delegations of both rival cities, composed of the respectively aligned most powerful local and national scene politicians and business people, with its most important provision being the unusual arrangement to divide and distribute the governing institutions of the voivodeship more or less equally between the two cities. On the basis of this broadly supported agreement, an effective public pressure endorsed jointly by the two centers was successfully exerted on the central government which ultimately acquiesced to the demand of establishing Lubusz Voivodeship.

Nevertheless, creating any new type of public institution at voivodeship level in Poland continues to ignite almost automatically a fierce battle in the Lubusz Voivodeship regarding the seat of the institution. There have also been numerous attempts to relocate some of the existing public institutions under various pretexts from one city to another, in some cases successful, as well as of merging a pair of equal institutions of a type existing in both cities, in order to make one of them a branch of the other, with obscure or no justification in most cases for such merger. Nevertheless, a general local majority consensus prevails that the compromise, although unsatisfactory for any of the two cities, spared both of them the fate of a number of cities which lost in 1999 entirely the status of a voivodeship capital and all voivodeship-level institutions, along with the associated attractiveness and prestige of the city as a place to live, crucial for its growth, with the ensuing profoundly detrimental phenomena.