Polesia czar (The Spell Of Polesie) - Polish tango, 1927

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• published: 17 Jan 2010
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Polesia czar (The Spell Of Polesie) (Muz. i sł. Jerzy Artur Kostecki), Tango from the year 1927, performed by an uncredited Polish Choir from the USA, in 1950s/60s (?) NOTE: In Polish memory, Polesie - the eastern region of Poland before 1939, located in Volhynia and being a meeting point of four cultures: Polish, Lithuanian, Belorussian and Ukrainian - will remain a lost-forever mysterious country of swamps, marshes, wild forrests and silent people, who led their fishermen's lives in simple wooden villages or in flat bottom swamp boats, in the area near the sources of river Prypeć (in Byelorussian: Prypyat' - a tributary of the River Dnieper, which it joins 80 km above Kiev). Prypeć was navigable for most of its length, and canals built in the XIX/XXth c. by Polish water engineers (e.g. Ogiński canal) linked it to the Bug, Vistula, and Niemen (Nemunas) rivers, creating a unique inland river-communication system between Baltic ports and the Black Sea. Therefore, during the Second World War that area and its capital in Pińsk, had special strategic importance. In September 1939, as soon as Soviet Army invaded Poland, a well-developed pre-war Polish River Fleet with its River Port of Pińsk and all the professional inland-sailors crew, was annihilated. All inhabitants of Polesie, who declared themselves being Polish, were executed by NKVD, deported into the Archipelago Gulag in USSR or, if by miracle someone happened to survive all this, murdered by the Ukrainian Nationalist Army, who in this area, between 1939-45, carried on its ethnic cleansing actions against Poles. As result, Polesie (now in Belarus and northern Ukraine) is a rather neglected, in large part meliorated area. Pinsk - overloaded with pseudo-modern Soviet architecture has completely lost its lively character of the provincial Polish town full of fishermen's or Jewish commercial life and wonderful baroque architecture, dominating its panorama. The spell of a rich multi-national culture of one of the most unique and fascinating regions of Europe before 1939 has vanished, while in some pockets still exists the marshes' wildlife, willingly visited by the conoisseurs of silence and loneliness from the West of Europe. See prewar Polish documentary movie from so-called Water Merket in the regional capital town of Pińsk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHs5Pg-Qopo --------------------------------------------------------------------- After 1945, during the comminist regime in Poland, this tango with its lovely poetical text, calling back the nostalgic beauty of prewar Polish territory, which was annexed and destroyed by Soviet Russia - could be listened to only on rare opportunities from someones old record or played on the piano, from some old music sheets. I copied this recording from a tape with the radio concert I registered in the the late 1980s - just before the collapse of communism, when radio censorship was becoming weaker. But name of this excellent choir remains a mystery for me. From the speakers comment I remember something he mentioned about a Polish choir from Chicago, or a sort. I dont doubt, YT friends will not fail and, as usually, will help us identify this recording! By the way: please, forget this could possibly be Chór Dana, as I read in someones site in the web. This is NOT Chór Dana!! , neither it is any of prewar Polish revellers groups! The recording is obviously postawar and its perfectly-styled prewar singing manner carries a light trace of a pastiche and definetely, comes from later years.