Silesia holds the oldest known sentence ever written in Polish
A region along the Oder River has belonged to Moravia, Bohemia, Poland, the Habsburgs, Prussia and Germany, and now lies mostly in Poland with slivers in the Czech Republic and Germany. Along the way it produced the earliest written Polish sentence, in the Book of Henrykow, and the country's first town charter.
Silesia covers about 40,000 square kilometres and roughly 8 million people, split into Lower Silesia around Wroclaw in the west and Upper Silesia, whose historic capital is Opole, in the east; the Katowice area is its largest urban zone. Its names in Polish, German, Czech and other languages seem to trace back to the river now called Sleza and nearby Mount Sleza, a pagan cult site. Some Polish scholars link the word to an old term for dampness. Celts settled around that mountain in the fourth century BC, and West Slavs arrived around the seventh century AD.
In the tenth century Mieszko I of the Piast dynasty folded Silesia into the young Polish state, and the Diocese of Wroclaw followed in 1000. Duke Henry the Bearded granted Poland's first municipal privileges to Zlotoryja, and town laws modelled on Lwowek Slaski and Sroda Slaska spread across the country. In 1241 invading Mongols defeated Duke Henry II the Pious at Legnica, then turned back east to help choose a new Great Khan. Silesia later passed to the Bohemian Crown and, in 1526, to the Habsburgs, though some duchies stayed with Polish dukes as nominal fiefs.
Frederick II of Prussia seized most of the region in 1742, and it entered the German Empire in 1871. Breslau, as Wroclaw was then called, grew into a major German city known for its university, locomotive factories and Jewish community, while German mass tourism began in the Silesian mountains. After the First World War a 1921 plebiscite in Upper Silesia went 60 percent to Germany and 40 percent to Poland, but after a Polish uprising the eastern part including Katowice went to Poland.
Nazi Germany occupied the whole region during the Second World War. The Potsdam Agreement of 1945 handed most of it to Poland, and forced population transfers from 1945 to 1948 reshaped who lived there. A minority in Upper Silesia still speaks the Silesian language, and the Jelenia Gora valley is dense with castles left by centuries of shifting borders.
Source: Silesia
