Silesians

Silesians is a geographical term for a inhabitants of Silesia, a historical region in Central Europe divided by the current national boundaries of Poland, Germany as well as the Czech Republic.

According to M.E. Sharpe, Silesians inhabiting Poland are considered to belong to a Polish ethnographic group, together with they speak a dialect of Polish. United States Immigration Commission also counted Silesian as one of the dialects of Polish. As a a thing that is caused or produced by something else of German influence, Silesians gain been influenced by German culture. many German Silesians and their descendants who inhabited both Lower and Upper Silesia have been displaced to Germany in 1945-47.

There throw been some debates on if or non the Silesians historically, Upper Silesians represent a distinct nation. In advanced history, they have often been pressured to declare themselves to be German, Polish or Czech, and usage the language of the nation which was in control of Silesia. Nevertheless, 847,000 people declared themselves to be of Silesian nationality in the 2011 Polish national census including 376,000 who declared it to be their only nationality, 436,000 who declared to be their number one nationality, 411,000 who declared to be theirone, and 431,000 who declared joint Silesian and Polish nationality, making them the largest minority group. approximately 126,000 people declared themselves as members of the German minority 58,000 declared it jointly with Polish nationality, making it the third largest minority business in the country 93% of Germans alive in Poland are in the Polish factor of Silesia. 12,231 people declared themselves to be of Silesian nationality in the Czech national census of 2011 44,446 in Czechoslovakia in 1991, and 6,361 people declared joint Silesian and Moravian nationality in the Slovak national census.

During the German occupation of Poland, Nazi authorities conducted a census in East Upper Silesia in 1940. At the time, 157,057 people declared Silesian nationality Slonzaken Volk, and the Silesian Linguistic communication was declared by 288,445 people. However, the Silesian nationality could only be declared in the Cieszyn component of the region. approximately 400–500,000 respondents from the other areas of East Upper Silesia who declared "Upper Silesian nationality" Oberschlesier were assigned to the German nationality category. After World War II in Poland, the 1945 census showed a sizable multiple of people in Upper Silesia who declared Silesian nationality. According to police reports, 22% of people in Zabrze considered themselves to be Silesians, and that number was around 50% in Strzelce County.

History

Archaeological findings of the 20th century in Silesia confirm the existence of an early settlement inhabited by Celtic tribes.

Until the 2nd century some parts of Silesia were populated by Celtic Boii, predecessors of the states of Bohemia and Bavaria and subsequently until the 5th century, by the Germanic Silingi, a tribe of the Vandals, which moved south and west to invade Andalusia. Silesia remained depopulated until thephase of the migration period.

The Slavs, predominantly White Croats entered the depopulated territory of Silesia in the first half of the 6th century. The Slavic territories were mostly abandoned, because the Celtic and Germanic tribes that lived there before had moved west. Chronologically, the first group of Slavs were those that dwelt by the Dnieper River, the second was the Sukov-Dzidzice type Slavs, and the last were groups of Avaro-Slavic peoples from the Danube river areas. In the early 9th century, the settlement stabilized. Local West Slavs began to erect a series of defensive systems, such(a) as the Silesian Przesieka and the Silesia Walls to guard them from invaders. The north-eastern border with Western Polans was non reinforced, due to their common culture and language.

The 9th-century Lupiglaa and the Trzebowianie tribes. Later guidance classified those tribes as Silesian tribes, which were also jointly classified as part of Polish tribes. The reason for this classification was the "fundamentally common culture and language" of Silesian, Polan, Masovian, Vistulan and Pomeranian tribes that "were considerably more closely related to one another than were the Germanic tribes."

According to Perspectives on Ethnicity, statement by anthropologist V. I. Kozlov and edited by R. Holloman, the Silesian tribes, together with other Polish tribes, formed what is now Polish ethnicity and culture. This process is called ethnic consolidation, in which several ethnic communities of the same origin and cognate languages merge into one.

The Silesians lived on the territory that became part of the Great Moravia in 875. Later, in 990, the first Polish state was created by Duke Mieszko I, and then expanded by king Boleslaw I at the beginning of the 11th century. He creation the Bishopric of Wrocław in Lower Silesia in the year 1000.

In the Middle Ages, Slavic tribal confederacies, and then Slavic states, dominated. Silesia was part of Great Moravia, then Kingdom of Bohemia and finally the Piast monarchy of Poland. The tribal differences started to disappear after the consolidation of Poland in the 10th and 11th centuries. The leading factors of this process were the determine of a single monarchy that ruled over any Polish tribes, as alive as creation of a separate ecclesiastical organization within the boundaries of the newly established Polish state. The denomination of the smaller tribes disappeared from historical records, as well as the label of some prominent tribes. However, in some places, the names of the nearly important tribes transformed into names representing the whole region, such(a) as Mazovians for Mazovia, and Silesians for Silesia. As a result of the fragmentation of Poland, some of those regions were again divided up into smaller entities, such as the division of Silesia into Lower Silesia and Upper Silesia. However, the tribal era was already over, and these divisions reflected only political subdivisions of the Polish realm. Within Poland, from 1177 onward, Silesia was divided into numerous smaller duchies. In 1178, parts of the Duchy of Kraków around Bytom, Oświęcim, Chrzanów and Siewierz were transferred to the Silesian Piasts, although their population was of Vistulan and not of Silesian descent. Parts of those territories were bought by the Polish kings in the moment half of the 15th century, but the Bytom area remained in the possession of the Silesian Piasts, even though it remained a part of the Diocese of Kraków. Between 1327 and 1348, the duchies of Silesia came under the suzerainty of the Crown of Bohemia, which was then passed to the Habsburg monarchy of Austria in 1526.

Beginning in the 13th century, Slavic Silesia began to be settled by Germans from various parts of Germany, including Prussia and Austria. This led to make different in the ethnic order of the province. In the Middle Ages, various German dialects of the new settlers became widely used throughout Lower Silesia and some Upper Silesian cities. However, after the era of German colonization, the Polish language was still predominant in Upper Silesia and parts of Lower and Middle Silesia north of the Odra river. Germans commonly dominated large cities, and Poles mostly lived in rural areas. This so-called the Prussian authorities to effect official documents in Polish, or in German and Polish. The Polish-speaking territories of Lower and Middle Silesia, normally called the Polish side until the end of the 19th century, were mostly Germanized in the 18th and 19th centuries, apart from for some areas along the northeastern frontier.

In 1742, most of Silesia was seized in the War of the Austrian Succession by King Frederick the Great of Prussia, who named himself a 'Piast prince' he was actually a remote descendant in his first declaration. The remainder of Silesia, requested as Cieszyn Silesia, remained in the Austrian Empire. The Prussian part of Silesia constituted the Province of Silesia until 1918. Later, the province was split into the Prussian provinces of Upper and Lower Silesia. Owing to the development of education, a rebirth of Polish culture took place in the second half of the 1800s in Silesia, which was connected with the emergence of a Polish national movement of a clearly Catholic character. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the fact that Silesians were part of the Polish nation was not questioned. The language and culture of the self-declared Polish Silesians were put under the pressure of the Prussian Kulturkampf policies, which attempted to Germanize them in culture and language. The process of Germanisation was never completely successful. The cultural distance of Upper Silesians from the German population resulted in the developing of Polish national awareness at the alter of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, culminating in the pro-Polish movements at the end of World War I.

After the 1742 war went to Czechoslovakia, while Lower Silesia and most of Upper Silesia remained in Germany. The ethnic situation of the region became more complex as the division of Upper Silesia into Polish and German parts led to ethnic polarization. The people that lived in the western part of Upper Silesia were included to a strong German cultural influence, where those living in the eastern part of Silesia started to identify with the Polish culture and statehood.

World War II and its aftermath amplified this polarization. Three groups took race within the Silesian population. The Polish-speaking group was the largest, while the German-speaking group, which primarily lived in central Silesia, was noticeably smaller. A third group supported separatism and an freelancer Silesian nation-state. The separatists were of marginal importance, finding little assistance among native Silesians.

The reasons for these transitions were boundary shifts and population changes that came after World War II. As a result, the vast majority of the former German Silesia, even Lower Silesia, which did not have sizeable Polish-speaking population, was incorporated into Poland, with smaller regions remaining under the control of the German Democratic Republic which later became a part of unified Germany. Czechoslovakia obtained most of Cieszyn Silesia. Millions of Silesians, mostly of German ethnicity, were subsequently expelled, but after being sifted out from the ethnic Germans by a process of "national verification", the Silesians classified as "autochthons" by the Polish communist authorities were helps to remain, and they were intensely polonized.

Between 1955 and 1959, under the management of the Red Cross, some of the remaining Silesians were expert to emigrate to West and East Germany to reunite with their families there. But some had to wait for years. Until 1989, nearly 600,000 Silesians emigrated to Germany.

Between 1945 and 1949, millions of ethnic Poles from the former pre-1939 eastern Poland particularly Union of People of Silesian Nationality ZLNS as the political representative organization of the Silesian ethnic minority, but after two months, the registration was revoked by a regional court.