Walddeutsche is the name for a group of people of mostly German origin, who settled between the 14th and 17th century on the territory of present-day Sanockie Pits, in southeastern Poland. The Walddeutsche peopled migrated to the Pit region which was previously only sparsely inhabited because the land was difficult to farm.
Nomenclature
The term Walddeutsche – coined by the Polish historians Marcin Bielski, 1531, Szymon Starowolski 1632, Bishop Ignacy Krasicki and Wincenty Pol – also sometimes refers to Germans living between Wisłoka and the San River part of the West Carpathian Plateau and the Central Beskidian Piedmont in Poland. The Polish term Głuchoniemcy is a sort of pun; it means "deaf-mutes", but sounds like "forest Germans": Niemcy, Polish for "Germans", is derived from niemy, and głuchy sounds similar to głusz meaning "wood".
History
In the 14th century a German settlement called Hanshof existed in the area. The Church of the Assumption of Holy Mary and St. Michael's Archangel in Haczów, the oldest wooden Gothic temple in Europe, was erected in the 14th century and was added to the UNESCOlist ofWorld Heritage Sites in 2003. Germans settled in the territory of the Kingdom of Poland from the 14th to 16th centuries, mostly after the region returned to Polish sphere of influence in 1340, when Casimir III of Poland took the Czerwień towns. Marcin Bielski states that Bolesław I Chrobry settled some Germans in the region to defend the borders against Hungary and Kievan Rus' but the arrivals were ill-suited to their task and turned to farming. Maciej Stryjkowski mentions German peasants near Przeworsk, Przemyśl, Sanok, and Jarosław, describing them as good farmers. Some Germans were attracted by kings seeking specialists in various trades, such as craftsmen and miners. They usually settled in newer market and mining settlements. The main settlement areas were in the vicinity of Krosno and some language islands in the Pits and the Rzeszów regions. The settlers in the Pits region were known as Uplander Sachsen. Until approximately the 15th century, the ruling classes of most cities in present-day Beskidian Piedmont consisted almost exclusively of Germans. . The typical Umgebindehaus – houses, about 150–200 km southeast of Kraków, around 18/19th century, built in the style of ancient mountain Walddeutsche atmosphere. The Beskidian Germans underwent Polonization in the latter half of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century. According to Wacław Maciejowski, writing in 1858, the people did not understand German but called themselves Głuchoniemcy. Wincenty Pol wrote in 1869 that their attire was similar to that of the Hungarian and Transylvanian Germans and that their main occupations were farming and weaving. He stated that in some areas the people were of Swedish origin, however, they all spoke flawlessly in a Lesser Poland dialect of Polish. In 1885, Józef Szujski wrote that the Gluchoniemcy spoke only Polish, but there were traces of a variety of original languages which showed that, when they arrived, the term Niemiec was applied to "everyone". In the modern Polish language, Niemiec refers to Germans, however, in earlier centuries, it was sometimes also used in reference to Hungarians, possibly due to similarity with the wordniemy or plural niemi for "mute" or "dumb".
