Jacek rewinski by AA School

The Hunt in the Forest Białowieża Primeval Forest – the paradise of illusion Jacek Rewiński

Without heart, without soul, such are the skeletons of humanity; O Youth! Give me wings! Let me fly over the world Into the paradise of illusion ADAM MICKIEWICZ,

Ode to Youth, 1820

Contents

Prologue

CHAPTER ONE

The Origins of the Forest

CHAPTER ONE

Acts of the Hunt

CHAPTER THREE

Paradise of Illusion

CHAPTER FOUR

Deus ex Machina

Backstage

Bibliography

Epilogue

Prologue

In May 2016, Poland’s conservative government, represented by the environment minister, Jan Szyszko, an avid hunter and former forester, began logging in the relic of ancient woodlands, the last primeval forest in Europe, located on the contemporary border between Poland and Belarus. The decision, as the first act of the 10-year plan to fell an area of 188,000 cubic meters of Białowieża Forest, sparked anew the debate around the enlargement of the existing national park over the entire forest, a United Nations World Heritage site, turning the entire area shredded with 20 nature reserves and a commercial forest into a protected zone. The advocates of the strict protection of the last vestige of the immense forest that once stretched across Europe draw on its noble history, on its past as a royal hunting ground and project its function as a laboratory where scientific experiments can be conducted. The focus of the work is to uncover the conflictual history of the forest and understand how the machinations of power have enabled or disabled the expression of values of certain actors. It is assumed that royal hunting and the legal protection of the forest as a hunting reserve is the main cause of its survival as the best preserved pristine forest of European lowlands. Hunting, however, is also seen as a paradigm, a ritual that provides a symbol of appropriation and exclusion of certain actors from the access to the forest’s resources, as well as from its myth in which the Białowieża Forest has resurfaced as the quintessential back-cloth of Catholic Poland primordial nationalism where congruities of blood, speech and custom are forged in memories of royal bear and bison-hunting, blood-letting, forest uprisings against the Russians, and heroism. Yet the myth that history concocts is always selective, much is forgotten, yet that which is remembered is reinforced by recurrence and ability to resonate across space and time. As David Lowenthal teaches us, it is more heritage than history.1 In the wake of melting of the last ice sheets, in the early Holocene epoch, the socalled Preboreal, some 9,000 years ago, the drying terrain was overgrown by pine and birch forests. As the warming continued, the growing rainfall, about 7,000 years ago, stimulated the growth of thermophilic trees, such as linden, elm, oak, ash

David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

and hornbeam, as well as hazel shrubs. A thousand years later primeval forest reigned all over Europe.

Figure 1: Hunting of Birds with a Hawk and a Bow, The South Netherlands, 1515-1535.

The forest, in early Medieval Period, meant the enclosed land for the use of the monarch as a hunting ground2. The territory excluded from the common use for the purpose of hunting was designated as forestes. On such designated territory, the royal legislation forbade not only hunting, but any form of occupation. The term that initially designated a land, soon acquired a legal meaning and functioned independently from the ownership of the land as sole proprietorship. The tool that allowed the monarch to legally denominate a land as forestes was the feudal bannum – the prerogative of passing orders and interdictions. It was the king, the ultimate fountainhead of power and voucher of legitimate authority, who possessed forestes and who could grant a privilege of afforestation in the demesnes of the Church and nobility, his liegeman. As such, forestes delineated the territory excluded from the common use. Difforestation, conversely, was the act of returning the territory to the common use of men. The Białowieża Forest, or Puszcza Białowieska (Polish word puszcza – ‘the primeval forest’ – in Old Polish meaning ‘empty, wild land,’ ‘desert’3) in the fourteenth century became the domain of the king and designated a royal forest served as a hunting reserve. The forest, enclosed with villages settled by royal forest guards, foresters, rifleman and beaters responsible for preventing any unauthorized access and surrounded with cultivated land,4 meant not only the

Agnieszka Samsonowicz, Łowiectwo w Polsce Piastów i Jagiellonów (Warszawa: Warszawska Firma Wydawnicza, 2011), 198. 3 ‘Puszcza’ in Witold Doroszewski, Słownik języka polskiego, Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1996. 4 Tomasz Samojlik, Ian D. Rotherham and Bogumiła Jędrzejewska, “The Cultural Landscape of Royal Hunting Gardens from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century in Białowieża Primeval 2

wooded area, but the whole apparatus that enabled its function as a game reserve for the court. Although geographically the Białowieża Forest was a place outside of the city, out in the countryside, a very public arena, its infrastructure and legal protection allows for very close comparison to walled, mysterious, artificial domains represented by the paradise of ancients and the hunting parks of the Middle Ages. In the Greek texts those gardens, parks and preserves were called paradeisos which has the meaning of ‘enclosure’ or ‘domain.’5 The Białowieża royal forest as a secured environment, a private abode of the king closed to outside scrutiny was a paradise, a verdant pleasure park for the king, a territory excluded from the common use for the pursuit of pleasure and game and a symbol of sovereignty. Giorgio Agamben, in the essay In Praise of Profanation, speaks of the Roman jurists for whom the things removed from the free use and commerce of men were sacred or religious. By virtue of consecration, the things would be removed from the sphere of human law; profanation, conversely, was the act of returning them to the free use of men: Profanation…neutralizes what it profanes. Once profaned, that which was unavailable and separate loses its aura and is returned to use. Both are political operations: the first guarantees the exercise of power by carrying it back to a sacred model; the second deactivates the apparatuses of power and returns to common use the spaces that power had seized.6 The use to which the sacred is returned, however, does not coincide with utilitarian consumption. On the contrary, use refers to things that cannot be appropriated, that cannot become objects of possession. The emblematic place where use, dwelling, experiencing is rendered impossible is the Museum, “not a given physical space or place but the separate dimension to which what was once – but is no longer – felt as true or decisive has moved.”7 In this sense, a territory that is declared a park or a nature preserve, is a Museum, the space and function once reserved for the Temple as the place of sacrifice.

Forest, in Cultural Severance and the Environment, ed. Ian D. Rotherham (Dordrecht, Heidelberg, New York, London: Springer, 2013), 192. 5 Thomas Allsen, The Hunt in Eurasian History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 34. 6 Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation,” in Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 77. 7 Agamben. “In Praise of Profanations,” 84.

The Białowieża Forest covered by its myth and the past of royal hunting preserves, is a sacred ground. But, enclosed by the strict nature reserve (to which access without an official guide is prohibited), it is also a Museum, drawing tourists from around the world to celebrate on themselves a sacrificial act that consists in the destruction of all possible use. The advocates of the enlargement of the Białowieża National Park seduce the local population with the project of incomparably greater incomes from participating in the absolute impossibility of profaning that those of using the forest as a resource. At the back of this work lies a belief that the outlined search will bring about a mean of using the territory, a way of its profanation.

The Origins of the Forest The oldest traces of men found in the territory of the Białowieża Forest date from the Neolithic Period. Flint tools, fragments of vessels buried in the riverside dunes of Narew River that cuts through the forest, as well as stones axes and arrowheads suggest that apart from gathering, hunting was one of the ways of gaining food by Neolithic people. Cro-Magnons, the tribe that about 35,000 years ago in the Upper-Palaeolithic Period settled in Europe, dwelled in caves, as well as long, roofed, multi-family huts, using mammoth bones and other materials. Hunting was a mean of gaining meat, skin, tendons and bones, for which they chased their prey in bands. The oldest information about people occupying the territory of the Białowieża Forest comes from Herodotus, who in the fifth century BC among the peoples living in the ‘barbarous’ land mentions the Neurs, a Slavic tribe, who inhabited the present Podolia and Volhynia regions, among them the banks of the Narew River and the southwestern part of the forest, whereas the southeastern part was inhabited by another Slavic tribe – Dregoviches, mentioned by Nestor. The ProtoSlavs inhabited the most fertile land. They lived in one- or multi-family settlements and occupied themselves with agriculture and herding, mostly of cattle. They built forest settlements for hunting and beekeeping, as well as wood tars and charcoal production. Both Neurs and Dregoviches were ruled by a council of adult men, or Elders, rather than a single leader. The Proto-Slavs worshipped gods identified with the forces of nature, the most important of which was the thunder-god Prowe. The places of worship were hilltops, holy groves and sacred spots, one of them found in Białowieża Forest and opened for tourists in 1995 as the Magic Power Centre. Among the other contemporary tourist destinations in the forest are the ancient burial sites identified by mounds, or tumuli, found near the eastern edge of the village of Białowieża, as well as on the Batory Hill and in the vicinity of Czerlonka and Hajnówka. The other grave-mounds are accessible only to scientists or workers of the National Park, located within the strict reserve near the Dziedzinka forester’s lodge, on the Łutownia River and at the confluence of the Narew and Braszcza in the Browsk forest division.

At the time when Neurs and Dregoviches occupied the current territory of Białowieża Forest, the stretch of land between the Baltic Sea and the Bug River, which forms part of the contemporary border between Poland and Ukraine, was mostly covered with dense, primeval forest. The humidity of the atmosphere and soil was not absorbed by arable land, wood was not part of the tribes’ economies, the swamps were not drained. Forests and swamps were home to the Prussian tribe of hunters and warriors, the Sudovians (Jaćwingowie, whose name derives from jetis, meaning ‘spear’), about which Ptolemy spoke in the second century AD and of which a more detailed decription was provided by Ibrahim ibn Yakub, a merchant who travelled to the land of Slavs in ca 970. The Sudovians, separated from the Slavs of Ruthenia by a one hundred kilometres wide belt of primeval forest and swamps cut by numerous streams, a no-man’s land, built their settlements and strongholds in the most inaccessible forest ranges rear rivers, and occupied themselves with agriculture on areas cleared of forest, or cattle and horse breeding, some with warfare. They covered great distances along animal paths, fallen trees and tree branches to attack other tribes. Their raids plagued the neighbouring lands from the late twelfth century until it was seized and defeated in 1283 after multiple armed expeditions of Poles, Lithuanians, Ruthenians and Teutonic Knights. Their land was razed to the ground to make space for the slow invasion of forests in the following hundred years. Warfare and plunder was a regular occupation of all the peoples that lived around Białowieża Forest at that time. It replaced trade by prompting the flow of goods, slaves and land from hands to hands. Plundering expeditions were made not only by the Sudovians, who kept their tribal and kinship structure as well as pagan beliefs, but also by their adversaries who were better armed and more numerous and who had a state system and a religion. After several changes of borders and interplays of power, in the thirteenth century Białowieża Forest came under the rule of Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The ruling class – Lithuanians – which is an ancient ethnic group settled in their land since the Iron Age, developed in relative isolation from influences of neighbouring countries and its legal, societal and cultural autonomy persisted long after the Duchy entered the personal union with Poland in 1385, as well as Christendom, which make them the last pagan society in Europe, and the political union in 1559, giving rise to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. What made the Lithuanians different from

western European patterns was the country’s remarkably high proportion of forested areas and long tradition of Grand Duke’s ownership over vast areas of land, including forests, that the reigning monarchs toured together with their entourage, moving between their manors.8 That way of exercising power by the king influenced all the aspects of political, social and economic life of the country, as well as the hunting practices, the structure of the royal services and the infrastructure of the hunting preserves. One of the groups of the royal attendants were the mobile hunting services responsible for organising the chase. The locality called Białowieża is first mentioned by Jan Długosz in the tenth book of his chronicles under the year 1409, when Władysław Jagiełło, the King of Poland and Lithuania from the Jagiellonian dynasty, accumulated reserves of meat for the Battle with the Teutonic Knights of Grundwald. The Białowieża Forest, the domain of the Grand Dukes, protected by the Lithuanian code of laws (Statues of Lithuania) and in 1385, with the union between Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania, by its royal status – the personal property of the king – served as a source of venison and other benefits for the court, but for the first king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth hunting was not only a mean of provision. The warrior Jogaila, later known as Władysław Jagiełło, considered hunting a passion, an escape and relaxation, as well as an expression of military prowess and valour. For him hunting and war were interdependent, complementary – the hunter was a warrior and warrior hunted even during periods of conflict or, as pointed by Thomas Allsen, hunting apart from a marker of social standing, “was

Daniel Z. Stone, The Polish-Lithuanian State, 1386-1795 (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2001), 379.

Figure 2: Jagiełło striking the bison, N. S. Samokisz, from G. Karcow, Puszcza Białowieska, 1903.

one of the principal ways of taking measure of monarchs, of assessing their individual fitness and their ability to exercise political and military authority.”9 Although during the reign of the first king of the Jagiellonian dynasty hunting continued to have an important economic function, as a source of nutriment and trade goods, it also performed an array of political functions and was a tool of both internal and foreign affairs. The hunts presented the noble subjects, those permitted by the king to participate in the game, with an occasion to establish informal relationships with the king and come into contact with the court’s cultural practices. The dense and extensive space of the forest also provided an intimate and safe ground for informal diplomacy, outside of the protocol10. As such, the hunt in the forest provided a space and a tool for exercising political authority and the diffusion of culture. In the Medieval Period, however, the epoch of the gesture and the symbol, hunting as a source of venison and fur, the essential element of the noble garment of that time, enabled another form of social relationship and communication: the gift. Munificence was one of the fundamental virtues and duties of the monarch which he performed by gifting his subjects. Generosity confirmed his solicitude, as well as his affluence and majesty. In the context of international politics, munificence was a mean of expressing wealth and status of the benefactor and the whole country.11

Thomas Allsen, The Hunt in Eurasian History, 124. Antoni Czacharowski, “Rola Władysława Jagiełły w pertraktacjach polsko-krzyżackich przed Wielką Wojną,” in Poloni et vicini in medio aevo. Księga ku czci Bronisława Włodarskiego (1895-1974), ed. Kazimierz Jasiński (Toruń: Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika, 1990), 51-71. 11 Rafał Jaworski, “Łowy Władysława Jagiełły,” in Z Biografistyki Polski Późnego Średniowiecza (Warszawa: DiG, 2001): 66. 9

Acts of the Hunt At the time when the first king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was proving his political authority in the Białowieża Forest, the European nobility was already well instructed on the social importance of the hunt by the manuals of cynegetic instruction. The handbooks written between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries, emphasized the pleasures and profit of the sport, its nobility, and the importance of technical excellence and ceremony12. Written as treatises or dialogues, often allegorical and symbolic, they constituted codes of behaviour and moral attributes of the participants of the hunt. They also comprised of technical knowledge which proper use during the performance of the chase defined the ability of playing a very particular social role.

Figure 3: The Hunt in the Forest, Paolo Uccello, 1470.

The late medieval royal hunt lost its function as a mean of provision and became an element of the court’s entertainment, a social play in which the participants’ conduct, both individually and collectively, were regulated by norms and rules allowing the participants to communicate13. And as such, the space of the forest, of the hunting ground, was a site of dissemination of values through which a specific group was homogenized. The conventionalized patterns and sequences of social behaviour are commonly referred to as rituals or ceremonies.

12 13

Marcelle Thiébaux, “The Medieval Chase,” Speculum, vol. 42, no. 2 (April 1967): 263-265. Paweł Dobrowolski, “Polowanie w Anglii XIV wieku: rytuał i topos,” in Kwartalnik Historyczny, vol. 89, no. 4 (1982): 585.

Ritual, as a concept, is a form of a ceremony that marks a change before a community, one that ‘invokes sacred forces, or values held by the community.’14 It must be evaluable to the spectator, involve the acquiescence of the agents, as well as a pattern that provides its recognisability. Ritual is performed for an audience, either real or imagined, and possesses the power to impress ideology on the spectator. Functioning on the boundaries between the sacred and profane, it contains the capacity to change or transform participants, particularly their status. Embedded in its performance is always a message of power.15 Hunting as an element of the court’s entertainment was a performance that was fundamentally constituted by and through a ritual. The aesthetic and social rationale can be found in the book of Gaston of Foix, Le livre de chasse, who counts each stage of the chase, from the unharbouring to the quarry and the distribution of the fees, as a beautiful diversion and an art. Similarly, The Art of Hunting by William Twiti, published in England at the end of the fourteenth century, describes the royal hunt (chasse royale) and the chase for deer with horse and hounds, the diversion acknowledged to be the most noble, that advanced in ten stages: The Unharbouring of the Game, The Gathering, Posting the Relays, The Departure and Laying on the Pack, The Change, The Recheat, The Game Exhausted, The Bay, The Death, The Quarry16. After having arrived to the forestes, the huntsman together with the forester, or other local official had to delineate the hunting ground and organise the divisions for chase. Early in the morning, when the deer was still on their lairs, the harbourers set out on foot with their scenting hounds, dogs trained to make no noise, each on his separate quest in the assigned division. As the harbourer went his way, he dropped branches to mark the places where the stag had passed, and leave branches dangling from the trees to show its possible route. After the preparation had been finished, the harbourer would return to the waiting party, or the gathering to make his report. The latter was often a breakfast in the forest during which the huntsman familiarised the monarch with the plan of the hunt. Before the party set out, relays were posted. The valets would let two or three hounds to their post, of which there were three positioned at intervals along the company’s expected route.17

Susan Crane, Animal Encounters (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia, 2013), 104. James Loxley, Performativity (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 123-131. 16 Thiébaux, “The Medieval Chase,” 265. 17 Thiébaux 265-266 14 15

Having mounted their horses, the company led by the harbourer would move to the place where the deer had been last seen. The hounds of the pack, having been leashed until now, were released, and ‘the apel consisting of three long notes was sounded, and the pack was urged on to the pursuit. A great point was made of caressing one’s hounds and speaking to them affectionately at all times in order to recall similar treatment of them during their training days.’18 If the dogs hadn’t lost the scent, the next stage of the chase was to look for the condition of exhaustion of the stag perceptible to the huntsman by a few signs. The game would run in the direction of the wind in order to keep its scent from the hounds and do a series of short deceiving runs. Whereas earlier it had run with its mouth open and its toes spread, now both mouth and toes were tightly closed. However, the real sign of forthcoming death was the bristling of the animal’s hair along spine and rump. When the ruses had served no use, and the deer was near the end of its strength, it would turn at bay. ‘Hallali’ was the last shout before the death, inviting the monarch to join the last stage of the death. At the last, the game usually sought shelter under a tree or in a covered thicket. The manual tells the knight to dismount from his horse, approach the deer cautiously and then finish it by piercing its neck with a sword that in some instances might have already be injured by the bowman who had shot the stag with arrows. The blowing of the Death was a single long note. The dead game was moved into the agreed place and placed one next to the other, their heads pointing in the same direction. What followed was the last act of the hunt, the ritual of the Quarry, in Old French curée, 19 the breaking of the deer, elaborately described by the hunting books, performed in strictly defined stages, accompanied by iterated gestures. Fourchie was the custom of passing the noblest person the finest

Figure 4: Curée, drawing from G. Phoebus, Livre de Chasse, 1389.

18 19

Thiébaux, 268. William Twiti, The Art of Hunting, ed. Bror Danielsson (Stockholm: Almqvist och Wiksell International, 1977), 52; Thiébaux, 271.

parts of the butchered animal on a forked branch. Those were so-called hastellettes,20 the heart, the shoulder and the head together with the antlers. Essential was also to reward the dogs with the liver and entrails given on a piece of skin of the killed deer. Telling, however, was that the worst part of the meat, the ridge, was put aside for the peasants.21 The gesture signified that in the very particular structure of the gift, the alms, was predicated on the hierarchical social order. The ritual of the division of the meat referred back to the structure outside of the forest reminding that the exquisite game was the privilege of the nobles, the play of the group that during the hunt manifested its internal hierarchy and status. As such, the hunt was a social play in which actors acted out the roles prescribed by the hunting manuals in a fixed scenography of the forest. The play belonged to the court’s custom and as such was an undisputable pastime, but for some the hunt was also a pursuit of their occupation. The structure of the ritual as presented in the hunting manuals, however, removes from the foreground the sizeable group of beaters and peasants and commands them to appear only in moments necessary for the unruffled staging of the act, to disappear quickly in the thicket of the forest.

20 21

William Twiti, The Art of Hunting, 52. Paweł Dobrowolski, “Polowanie w Anglii XIV wieku: rytuał i topos,” 590.

Paradise of Illusion There is no historical sources allowing to assert that the medieval manuals of cynegetic instruction were read on the court of the first Jagiellonians.22 There is also no indication as to how the ritual of the royal hunt was performed and if the symbols and gestures accompanying the hunting spectacles of the European nobility were known to the hunters of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It can be assumed, however, that the practices of the Jagiellonian court were a synthesis of antithetical systems of values developed at the confluence of different cultures. Both in Poland and Lithuania common was the belief that it was not only skill, strength and reflex that had on effect on the abundance of the prey, but also the favour of the invisible world, the ghosts permeating the space of the puszcza, the waterside shrubbery, the marshy wilderness. The hunter made an invocation to the forest’s spirit for its blessing that was to protect him from the lurking perils and succour with the profusion of the quarry.23 It was also the faith in conjuration, the gestures and the hunting rituals that developed under the influence of norms from different cultures. The ritual of the hunt was a synthesis of the old, traditional, folk practices and the ceremonial noble diversions which themselves grew from paganism and faith in magic gradually blending into the Christian culture with its concepts, ethics and the system of values. The ethos equating the monarch with the hunter was a synthesis of two traditions of sovereignty: Western, Latin, shaping the Polish court at least since it entered the Christendom in 966 and Eastern, Lithuanian-Ruthenian, that itself was a result of a collision of cultures. The tradition of the Byzantine Empire emphasized the ceremonial importance of the hunt and the virtues of the hunter – gallantry, courage, artfulness – for whom to subdue nature was almost equal to conquest a nation.24 In Ruthenia, where hunting played a crucial role in the economic system of the country, hunting was perceived as a testimony of the subjugation of a territory. Similarly, the attempt to breach the hunting privilege of the knight was perceived as an attack on his authority.25 Conversely, hunting was an exercise of

Agnieszka Samsonowicz, Łowiectwo w Polsce Piastów i Jagiellonów, 351. Samsonowicz, 352. 24 Rafał Jaworski, “Łowy Władysława Jagiełły,” 56. 25 Jaworski, 56. 22 23

political authority and a source of knowledge of the territory under the control of the monarch. As Machiavelli teaches us, the ruler In addition to having his troops well organized and well trained, he should be fond of hunting and thereby accustom his body to hardships, learning at the same time, the nature of topography, how mountains slope, how they are cut by valleys, how the plains lie, and the nature of the rivers and swamps.26

Figure 5: Stefan Batory in Białowieża during the Departure of the Drive, W. I. Nawozow, drawing from G. Karcow, Puszcza Białowieska, 1903.

For two centuries Great Poland had been able to boast it was the most territorially extensive, if by no means institutionally strongest state in Europe. Until the end of the seventeenth century, it profited from its indeterminate space in between weak neighbours, Muscovy to the east still juvenile and chaotic, Bohemia to the south torn apart and depopulated by the devastating wars of religion and the German states to the west. However, itself it grew more and more incoherent, with its aristocracy and gentry, the szlachta, selling huge grain harvests to Dutch traders in

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. and trans. Thomas G. Bergin (New York, 1947), chap. XIV.

Danzig, the shop window of all Europe,27 and the great masses of subordinated peasants, enlisted in ‘neo-Serfdom’ feeding the feudal machine. The great magnate dynasties thought of themselves as a free and independent equestrian class, cultivated editions of the warrior hordes. Though the Polish nobility – the families of Radziwiłłs, Lubomirskis, Ogińskis, Potockis, Tarnowskis, Zamoyskis – began to imitate the manners of their Western counterparts, in their hunting techniques they sustained the illusion that Sarmatian blood coursed through their veins.28 In fact they prided themselves on ignoring the elaborate rules and regulations prescribed by the Medieval hunting books. Instead, the customs of the blood sport remorselessly primitive, as noted by Baron Julius von Brincken in his Mémoire descriptif sur la forêt impériale de Bialowieza, en Lithuanie written after his visit to Białowieża, perceived by him as the very picture of ancient Sarmatia: a sylvan arcadia that long vanished from even the wilder regions of Prussia and Saxony: The hunter pursues his game as he pleases without submitting to any rules whatsoever; his equipment consisting solely of a poor gun which he loads, as he wishes with shot or with bullets; a game-bag and a hunting horn made from juniper wood. For the chase he uses only hunting hounds that come from a stock so strong and so brave that they will attack wolves and even bears. Mastiffs that might well be of use in hunting big game are never used and the many species of tracking dogs are hardly known.29

Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 273. 28 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 44. 29 Baron J. von Brincken, Mémoire descriptif sur la forêt impériale de Bialowieża en Lithuanie (Warsaw, 1828), 81. 27

Figure 6: Location of Białowieża with two marked Hunting Gardens, map from royal cartographer Michał Połchowski, 1784.

Białowieża, home of the żubr, was one of the most spectacular of those resorts of illusion. Domain of the Polish Kings, the paradise was protected not only by law, but also by the royal serfs of three categories – the osockie (beaters), strzeleckie (shooters) and bobrownickie (beaver-trappers) – settled on arable land at the forest boundary. The inhabitants of the villages assigned to the forest, having paid an annual fee in cash or kind, had the right to utilise the forest resources: to collect deadwood for heating and small-sized timber only for their own use, to pasture cattle on a limited scale, to tear inner bark (mainly of the lime-trees), to gather resinous chips, and to collect plants, mushrooms and forest berries.30 Intimately familiar with the forest and large game, beaters were obliged to organise the royal hunts by selecting the backwoods (ostęp), which were parts of the forest designated to hold grand ducal and royal hunts, where utilisation of resources – logging trees, installing beehives, haymaking – were forbidden, to create hunting gardens.31 The area of 5-10 km2 covering various forest habitats, cut by a stream – a source of water for the animals – was positioned at most 10 km from the royal hunting mansion. The enclosure

Tomasz Samojlik, Conservation and Hunting: Białowieża Forest in the Time of Kings (Białowieża: Mammal Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, 2005), 26. 31 The Polish word ogród has the same ethymology as the English garden, and originally meant an area surrounded or guarded by fence. 30

with a fence made of felled trees and pales stuck in the ground with transverse rods, having several wide openings to enable large game to go in and out freely in long periods between hunts, was first mentioned by the poet Nicolaus Hussovianus in 1523 in Carmen de Statura, Feritate ac Venatione Bisontis, one thousand and seventy lines of the most grandiloquent Latin verse: Wishing to kill it, we – people of the North – Adhere to the following, established guides: We fell trees to encircle wide space. And keep the beast trapped within. Twelve miles and more counts the perimeter of the fence, If we keep to the Latin measures, The guards then surround the place, So that the quarry will not escape. Not always is that labour new to us; Old enclosures wait open in woods, The beast, which used to freely enter them For grazing, easier gets entrapped. In such parks we hunt, equally enclosed. The fates are on the same scale: ours and the beast’s.32 In the centuries when the use of rifles changed the techniques of hunting, the garden was further divided into compartments by wooden fences, or by stretching nets across strategic points, if the animal was to be captured alive33 and transported into a monarch’s hunting park close to the court. The invention of firearms gradually changed the traditional form of the hunt as described by Hussovianus to more safe and congenial to the eighteenth-century lifestyle, as in the case of King Augustus III who came to Białowieża on the twenty-seventh of September 1752 with his queen Maria Józefa and his two sons, Xavier and Karl, to hunt bison and elk. When a royal hunt was announced, the thousand-strong army of beaters and peasants, making as much noise as possible, with a number of dogs would gradually form a semicircle and drive game toward the hunting garden in the woods to gather ‘beasts’ in the enclosed area, complete with an ornate pavilion where the

Mikołaj Hussowski, Carmen de Statura, Feritate ac Venatione Bisontis (Poem on the appearance, ferocity and hunting of bison) (Białowieża: Białowieski Park Narodowy, 1994). 33 Samojlik, Rotherham, Jędrzejewska, “The Cultural Landscape of Royal Hunting Gardens from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century in Białowieża Primeval Forest,” 196. 32

royal family would take their shots at point blank range. The gorgeously dressed courtiers had little more to do than load the royal guns and hand them over. 34 The queen on that day dispatched twenty bison, almost half the grand total of forty-two, a fanfare sounding the death each time one of the beasts came crashing down. In between firing a rifle at the ill-fated żubr, Maria Józefa, evidently more earnest soul than her husband, amused herself by reading the octavo held in gloved hands.35 Thirteen elk and two roebucks were shot, all of which were, as custom required, arrayed on the ground for the inspection of the king starting with the worthiest trophy, the żubr. Each of the carcasses was then weighed and distributed to the beaters as pay. The heads, antlers and other parts that may have been prized as trophies were left to please the king and the other nobles privileged to take part in the spectacle, as the obelisk that the venery-crazed Saxon had erected on the riverbank recording the numbers weight and type of the kill.36

Figure 7: The Hunt of Stanisaw August on 31 August 1784, W. I. Nawozow, drawing from G. Karcow, Puszcza Białowieska, 1903.

Schama, Landscape and Memory, 44. Baron J. von Brincken, Mémoire descriptif sur la forêt impériale de Bialowieża en Lithuanie, 84. 36 Schama, 45. 34 35

Although the royal services, the foresters, gamekeepers, and beaters attached to the royal hunt, endowed with land and waived of the army service,37 had the right to hunt the smaller game in return for a paltry sum paid each year to the state, what was strictly protected was the big game, mainly the King’s biggest pride and worthiest trophy – the European bison, in Polish żubr, about which Hussovianus continues in his ode to the Lithuanian bison: A bristling beard hanging in shaggy lengths, Its eyes, shining with a fearful red rage And a terrible mane spreading from its neck And covering shoulders and knees and breast.38 The wildest beast, which unlawful hunt was penalised with death,39 was so mighty that three men can be seated between his horns; a creature of dark savagery with a blood-curdling, muscled hump on its back covered with black, shaggy dewlap descending to the hooves; a monstrous bulk with wiry mane and beard; the bulbous purplish-blue tongue; the eyes aflame with abysmal wrath causing distress to men and other animals in the herd; a one-ton prodigy of phenomenal display of strength, exhibiting the primitive ferocity of the untamed wilderness40; a miraculous relic of a presocial past – a tribal, arboreal world of hunters and gatherers, frightening and admirable. The żubr succoured by the puszcza wilderness, the green ark of mammals with tree roots of fallen oaks, many hundreds of years old, rising like spiked ramparts from the carpets of brilliant green algae and black water of deep bogs, became a talisman of survival, for as long as the beast and its habitat endured, so would the nation’s martial vigour.41

Samojlik, Rotherham, Jędrzejewska, 194. Mikołaj Hussowski, Carmen de Statura, Feritate ac Venatione Bisontis. 39 Regularization of the Białowieża Forest economy occurred under rule of Zygmunt II August. Statues designed to maximize profit from the forest to the State were drafted as early as 1537 and penalties, including the death penalty, were imposed for unlawful hunting of bison and beaver. Lesser punishments, such as the burning of settlements and withdrawal of rights to the forest were carried out for lesser infringements. 40 Hussowski, lines 885-900. 41 Schama, 41. 37 38

Figure 8: The Lithuanian Bison, engraving from J. von Brincken, La forêt impériale de Białowieża, 1828.

The bison was as important to the Lithuanian-Polish cult of knighthood as the bull was for the Spanish warrior caste at the other end of Christianity’s frontiers:42 …Meanwhile, one of the hunters, assisted by powerful hounds, approaches and draws the bison round and round the tree, playing it and teasing it until it drops its wounds or just from sheer exhaustion. Should the hunter falter whilst taking aim, or otherwise be threatened by danger, his colleagues distract the bison by weaving large red carpets, since red is a colour which drives it to fury. Thus tormented, the bison releases the first man, and attacks the next one who is then able to finish it off.43

Figure 9: The Foray, Artur Grottger, litograph from Litwa.

The heroic savagery of the beast, in Latin belua, ‘monster,’ became associated with the immensity, darkness and depth of its original habitat.44 The animals came to be seen as fugacious, volatile, like the other heroes of woodland literature and history – outlaws and partisans – embodying both freedom and legitimacy, priestly guardians of the immemorial continuity of the romantic history of Polish resistance. In the primitive darkness, the later survivors of national disasters in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, would find asylum, reassurance, the promise of re-emergence. The realm of the bison, the depths of the primeval forest with its grand trees – ancestors, kin, friends – would be imagined as a naturally fortified shelter where the values that keep Lithuania alive – as idea as much as a place – would be preserved, where the nation had begun and to which it would finally retreat:

Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 192 43 Marcin Kromer, Polonia, sive de situ, moribus, magistratibus et republica R.P (1577), quoted in Davies, God’s Playground, 192. 44 Schama. 42

Comrades of Lithuanian kings, ye trees Of Świtez, Kuszelewo, Białowieża, Whose shadow once the crowned heads did cover … Ye woods! the last to hunt among you there Was the last king great Witold’s cap to wear, Last happy warrior of Jagiełło’s race, Last Lithuanian monarch of the chase. Trees of my fatherland! if heaven will That I return there, shall I find you still? My friends of old, are you alive today? Among whom as a child I used to play; And is the great Baublis living found By ages hollowed out, in whose wide round A dozen folk could sup as in a room?45 The mythologized version of the past, the imaginative geography of the primeval forest replete with dangerous beasts, served as a stage set against which a nation’s virility would be affirmed.

Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz; or, The Last Foray in Lithuania, trans. Kenneth Mackenzie (London: Polish Cultural Foundation, 1964), 76.

Deus ex Machina With the rule of the last king of Poland, Stanisław August Poniatowski, the discarded lover of Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, the Enlightenment came to the Polish-Lithuanian woods in the person of the treasurer-general, Antoni Tyzenhaus who was the first official custodian of the forest not to see it simply as a place where kings could play the Sarmatian warrior at the expense of the elk and the bison, but as a unique ecological and economic resource. Because of its sacred place in the theology of the royal hunt, the Białowieża ancient forest had been spared the kind of industries that elsewhere in Europe had cut huge slices out of their acreage. There were no charcoal burners, no breweries, no glassworks, no iron forges. In Białowieża, the headquarter of the royal treasury, its currency being skins furs and meat,46 packed into oak barrels, salted and shipped abroad via Narew and Vistula river systems,47 the only commercial activities had been the occupation of apiculture – honey gathered by the foresters from woodland beehives and the spongy bark stripped from linden trees to make sandals and clogs – and the use of firewood for sulphurous potash, fouling the air with the smell of rotting eggs, as well as collection of mushrooms, lime basswood, resin and hazelnuts, 48 replenishing the royal treasury with revenues from taxation. Tyzenhaus carried out the first statistical survey on the royal forests, instituting the scientific plans for timber cuts and replanting, dredging clogged rivers so that the lumber could be rafted to ports on the Baltic. The forests were suddenly seen as an immense capital asset. Forestry management focused on the long-term management of wood and revenue supply.49 The forest was seen as an assemblage of individual objects where non-merchandisable species were seen as unwanted competition. 50 Trees were regarded as crops, minimum diversity signalled monocultures, and the balance sheet demanded efficiency not just in the growing cycle, but in taxation of forest produce. Tyzenhaus’s activism earned him hatred of all the major aristocratic proprietors, all the magnates who dominated the political system and to whom the Polish-Lithuanian forests beyond the core of the royal

Otton Hedemann, Dzieje Puszczy w Polsce przedrozbiorowej (Warszawa: Instytut Badawczy Lasów Państwowych, 1939), 22. 47 Simona Kossak, Saga Puszczy Białowieskiej (Warszawa: Muza SA, 2001), 52. 48 Hedemann, Dzieje Puszczy w Polsce przedrozbiorowej, 154. 49 Carl Alwin Schenck, Forest Policy (Daarstaadt: C.F. Winter, 1911), 21. 50 David Demeritt, “Science, Social Constructivism and Nature,” in Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millenium, ed. Bruce Braun and Noel Castree (London: Routledge, 1998): 183-4 46

game reserve had, over centuries, been alienated either as outright land ownership or lease, the latter so vaguely defined that the noble houses treated their woods as their exclusive property. In Stanisław’s Białowieża, the slaughter of the Białowieża stopped. This was not less from his relative indifference to the hunt than from the aggressive economic eye of the general administrator of the royal household. His belief in the scientific forestry led to the gradual abolition of rights of pannage and pasturage. Boundaries were drawn around and within the forest by clerks and scribes sent to inventory the crown’s possessions and to see what enterprises might be initiated. The main objective was the removal of wchody51 – rights to pasture and utilise the forest resources – dating back to times before Białowieża Forest became regulated by laws, when the first settlers used unclaimed area, often long strips of existing meadowland in stream basins extending towards the south of the forest.52 At that time, assarts or wchody were the marked areas in the forest, such as hunting grounds, beaver colonies, streams for fishing and mills, clearings for hay and areas kept for bee-keeping. The state treasury, headquartered in the forest in the midsixteenth century, began the process of appropriating economic benefits from the forest away from the settlers into the coffers of the state. Not clearly marked borders, however, allowed for unregulated colonisation and sparked disputes between lesser szlachta and the state, as well as between rural proletariat and the gentry, attempting to extend their clearings in the forest, rights to fishing and hunting. The burst of rationalism under Stanisław August left Białowieża divided into districts drawn so that each extended to the forest’s outer edge. Free access to the forest was prohibited and to protect it against poachers and looters, guards and shooters were located on the boundary of the woods.53 It was not until the Partitions,54 however, that the sleeping forest of Białowieża was being roughly wakened by the kiss of modernity. That ancient forest, the marvel of variety, mostly uncleared old growth with natural zones of wild-green clearings,

Wchody relate to the old English practice of making ‘assarts’ or small clearings of temporary cultivation that occurred, constantly but illegally, in the medieval Royal Forests; see Herbert L. Edlin, Trees, Woods and Man (London: Collins, 1956), 83. 52 Hedemann, 22. 53 Georgij Karcow, Puszcza Białowieska (Sankt Petersburg: Pracownia Artystyczna A. F. Marksa, 1903), 34. 54 Three partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, conducted in 1772-95 by the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia and Habsburg Austria, which divided up the land among themselves progressively in the process of territorial seizures, resulted in the elimination of sovereign Poland and Lithuania for 123 years. 51

created by fallen dead giant oaks allowing sunlight to speckle the woodland floor, itself textured with fern and moss and layers of leaves; trunks lying across the course of streams creating black ponds and odorous peat-swamps covered with a grey coating of algae; the crazed jumble of ash, aspen, maple, oak, linden, willow, birch, elm, hornbeams and spindle trees, pine and fir, the dreadful irregularity amidst rotting trunks, roots and limbs needed a methodical forestry that would, over time, bring it into some kind of proper hierarchy. For Julius von Brincken, the official forester of the Kingdom of Poland who came to Białowieża in September 1820, what the forest represented was revenue, latent productivity and enterprise. What it needed, as set out in the appendix of his Mémoire, was scientific management. Varieties would be massed together and graduated in age so that different kinds could be efficiently harvested and others cultivated by the foresters who would not need to wander looking for trees of designated kind or maturity. Potash and pitchworks would be situated in regular sites. The woodsmen should no longer help themselves to anything that moved, an incentive to destroy entire stocks of game.55 Discipline had to supplant chaos. A state forestry department was formed in 1789 extracting wood for ship’s masts and building timber until 1831,56 but problems of transportation and regulation prevented excessive timber yields together with formal bans imposed by the tsar to protect the bison. In the aftermath of the November Uprising against the Russians, when Białowieża turned into a stronghold of resistance after the main body of nationalist insurrection disintegrated, the imperial woodlands were now administered from St. Petersburg. But whether in the hands of the state or those private owners among whom Catherine distributed the rights to the forest after the Partitions, the object was to extract as much profit out of the forest as it could possibly yield. Felling intensified between 1845-1861 when 140,000 cubic meters of building wood was cut and 11,000 cubic meters of poles for masts were extracted, transforming parts of the forest into a checkerboard.57 Timber exploitation was justified by compromise in cutting the outside of the forest while leaving the interior for the żubr. To delineate the bison’s habitat, the foresters erected a wooden fence dividing the wilderness from the timber plantation. Although Białowieża had not seen the noble rifle until the reign of Alexander II, its reputation as a huntsman’s

Schama, 49. Mieczysław Podgórski, “Puszcza Białowieska,” in Dzieje lasów, leśnictwa i drzewnictwa w Polsce, edited by J. Broda (Warsaw: 1965), 602. 57 Georgij Karcow, Puszcza Białowieska, 97. 55 56

paradise in Moscow, the mystique of the puszcza as a sacred preserve of the arboreal past, left its core untouched. The logging flourished until the reign of Alexander III when Białowieża became once more the personal domain of the tsar and a perfectly organised hunting machine. Mathematics began to control the forest. A grid was drawn on the map dividing the forest into 923 divisions, each measuring 1x1 versta, a Russian unit of length equal to 1.0668 kilometres. Three fathoms wide strips were carved through the woods in straight lines and rectangular patterns inscribed and numbered, starting from the northern edge in rows from west to east, the intersections of the grid lines marked with concrete poles58 as they remain in Białowieża today. Meandering hunting roads were cleared and grassed to deaden the noise of the tsarist coach and the clop of the mounts’ hooves. All the dirt roads known to the locals since time immemorial and used for deliveries of forage to hayracks spread around the forest were lined with poles and guards. A beaker-like catch pen was constructed to eliminate specimen disturbing harmonious existence of the herd. A railway line was built all the way from Moscow to transport the parties of grand dukes and generals of the imperial court, and a grand château erected in the 1880s, three stories high beneath ornately decorated Belarussian timber gables and a fantastic, spired tower at the end of one wing. The hunting machine not only comprised of elaborate infrastructure maintained throughout the year, but each of the hunts required a detailed plan which would be designed to provide for any contingency. The base of the plan was the amount of game, in particular in the segments designated for hunting, that was mapped within each of the 923 divisions with a different colour assigned to each of the species. Designed by the huntsman-in-chief, the plan after the approval by the board of the domain might have needed further developments or adjustments before the chase itself, as factors like the weather conditions might affect the proceedings: a heavy rain could force the organisers to move the hunt to another segment of the forest or a change in the direction of the wind reverse the course of the chase.

Georgij Karcow, Puszcza Białowieska, 123.

Figure 10: The diagram of the catch pen, Georgij Karcow, Puszcza Białowieska, 1903.

Figure 11: The diagram of the tsarist chase, Georgij Karcow, Puszcza Białowieska, 1903.

Georgij Karcow in his enchiridion on the tsarist domain gives a meticulous account of the proceedings of the chase. Each day of the hunt, scheduled for ten to twelve days, would be organised within an area equalling two divisions, that is two versta2 ABCD. For the huntsman to be able to align the chase, in the ABCD segment, perpendicular to the longer, two versta side, and parallel to the line of hunters AB, three lines are marked: EF, IK, GH. The line EF splits the division into two equal halves; the other two divide the half of the quarter into three equal parts. The line LM, perpendicular to the line of the hunters, drawn through the middle of the quarter, allows for guiding the beaters straight ahead. The line indicates the position of the huntsman. The line LM is indicated by two rows of signs drawn on the trees, creating something like a corridor. The signs are drawn on the trees’ trunks as vertical stripes. The lines EF, IK, GH, however, are drawn as horizontal stripes. When a beater finds himself next to a tree signed with a horizontal stripe, he must stop, and the gamekeeper shouts ‘Halt, Align’ and the chase ranges quickly. The area chosen for the chase equals two divisions, that is two versta2 ABCD.59 On the line of the hunters AB sixteen standpoints are prepared, at the distance of ninety feet from each other. Each standpoint consists of several wooden poles, covered with plaited fir branches and stuck in the ground to form a curved shield, two arshins60 tall. In front of the barriers, usually situated behind the roadside ditch, two wooden boards are placed as a bridge. The standpoints need to be constructed, as well as the lines painted on the trees, up to two weeks before the chase for the animals to get used to them. From each standpoint two lines are marked, each at forty-five degrees, by removing the underbrush and fallen trunks, creating vistas of two hundred feet in length. The vistas allow the hunter to see the animal that is far

59 60

Karcow, 359. Arshin is a Russian unit of length equal to twenty-eight inches.

apart, or discern the direction of its movement, and sometimes a certain shot which is very difficult in the dense forest because of the potential ricochet of a bullet off a branch. If a breakfast is planned in the forest, an area not far from the place of the hunt is cleared and a tent put up for a dining hall. The beaters, usually amounting to five hundred, are selected from the troops quartering in the close vicinity to the Białowieża Forest, whereas the two wings are comprised of three hundred local peasants. Each of the wings together with the corresponding half of the drive is under the command of a huntsman proceeding along the line AD or BC. The middle of the drive is headed by the third huntsman. In the morning before the hunt the teams depart from the village of Białowieża along the grid lines. At the distance of two versta from the segment chosen for the chase, two groups out of the troops are formed and directed in a way as to approach the two corners C and D at the same time. After having reached the segment, the two groups stretch the trimmers along the wings in places visible for the animal which running in full speed should change its course. In the meantime, the peasants are positioned along the AD and BC lines at different distances: fifteen feet apart along the line AG and BH, gradually increase the distance to reach fifty feet interspace at the end of the lines EC and FD. At the same time, the beaters dressed in white shirts, visible for the game, are positioned along the short side of the segment, opposite the line of the hunters, starting from each of the corners C and D, at six to twelve feet distance, depending on the density of the forest. At 7.30 in the morning, one and a half hour before the arrival of the tsar, the drive starts. The beaters guided by the huntsmen walk at a slow pace to reach the perpendicular line EF before the apel is sounded, signalling the hunters have taken their positions. In this way, the game has already reached the threshold and the time of the drive halves. After having reached the line EF, the hunt stops in waiting for the next tone of the horn. The tsar’s carriage drawn by a team of three horses abreast, so-called troika, having left the palace at 8, stops at the distance of fifty arshins from the line of the hunters and is greeted by the director of the puszcza accompanied by the huntsman-in-chief and the huntsmen assigned to carrying the weapons and assisting those hunters who are not in possession of their own huntsmen. The tsar stands on one of the numbers closest to a wing, whereas the rest of the shooters draw lots. Once the tsar has had recognised it is the right time to begin the chase, the huntsmen gives a signal ‘Go ahead!’ and the command is relayed along the wings. The drive resumes

slowly and quietly. If an animal walking in the direction of the hunters is noticed, the drive continues; if it walks toward the beaters, the drive stops, awaiting the movement of the animal. It is advised the beaters patter their sticks against the trees, or cough faintly, or start conversing; the game, after having been at a standstill for few seconds, doubles back and runs in the direction of the shooters. The pace of the drive depends on the terrain, on the type of the growth and the understory, which should be considered by the huntsman responsible for aligning the chase. After the huntsman proceeding along the line LM has reached the last perpendicular line GH, he gives the signal â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Stop shooting,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; the hunters turn their backs and now only aim at the animals which have crossed the line of the shooters AB.

Figure 12: The map of the twelve-day imeprial hunt in 1900, Georgij Karcow, Puszcza BiaĹ&#x201A;owieska, 1903.

After the chase, which depending on the amount of game and the terrain lasts for thirty to forty-five minutes, the huntsman assigned to a hunter attaches a small plank with the name of the shooter to each of the dead game. In the meantime, the hunters having received the map with the plan of the hunt are taken in carriages to the next segment of the chase. After the third or the fourth chase the party drives down to the clearing in the forest where the breakfast awaits prepared in the cookhouse by the chef from the palace’s kitchen. After each chase, the dead game is moved onto a cart by a group of huntsmen and foresters. Prior to that the animals are eviscerated, the offal immediately buried in the ground, and moved on carts to the place in front of the palace, where they are weighed and lined in a specific order, according to the stature of both the hunter and the animal. First come the trophies of the Emperor: the żubr, elks, stags, fallow deer, does, boars, hares, all kinds of birds, and foxes. The rest of the game, caught by the other hunters, is arranged all together in the same order of the species. The animals are then decorated with festoons made out of oak leaves. The day ends with the Quarry. Behind the row of game align the hunting services of the puszcza facing the palace’s terrace. On both sides stand the personnel of the court dressed in red rubashkas with torches in their hands enlightening the ceremony with glary flames. Behind the court services gathers a crowd of curious servants and local peasants, as well as visitors who had received a permission to participate in the ritual. The gleaming trumpets sound fanfares welcoming the His Majesty who is being presented the report of the day. The huntsman-in-chief points with a cutlass at the worthiest trophy, and the trumpets change their notes to ‘the żubr fell,’ the orchestra following with melodies in honour of the elk, the stag, to end on lightest beats with admiration for the fox. After the Quarry, the animals are moved to the dissecting facilities in which the skulls are separated from the thoraxes and cooked for three days after which the antlers are attached to ornate plaques with names of their slayers to decorate the imperial chambers. The carcasses are gifted to the peasants, beaters, foresters, huntsmen, or the lower personnel of the palace and the management of the lusty puszcza.

Backstage The paradise served the tsarist hunts until 1914 when the Russian Army following the battle at Tannenberg, where in 1410 the Teutonic knights had been annihilated by the Lithuanian army, was destroyed, the imperial line buckled and collapsed. At Białowieża, the eagles of Hohenzollerns replaced those of the Romanows in the state palace. The Germans constructed four hundred kilometres of railway and the newly settled unemployed labourers drafted from Prussia began the extermination of the Lithuanian trees. Before the I World War was over, the forest had lost five percent of its area. Five million cubic meters have been shipped to Germany. When the smoke cleared, to reveal a charred landscape of black stumps and grey ash, the sacred space of the puszcza had to surrender to the profane needs of the Polish economy. Białowieża exchanged the German lumber companies for the British ‘Century,’ which continued clearing of huge areas of wood during its fiveyear contract. In the same year the British departed, the żubr returned to its ancestral home, as part of the mission of a biologist, Jan Stolczman, who turned to the zoos of Europe that before the war had imported bison from the Białowieża Forest. The recreation of the breeding stock was accompanied by the emparkment crusade of the new aspirants to the paradise: the scientists. The renewed nation-building of the 1920s coincided with the search for material objects to affirm and engrave on a landscape a sense of national meaning and national pride. The exclusion was adopted as the model, reflecting the preservationist practices imported from the west that demanded people and human exploitation as the foundation of the new Białowieża National Park, envisioned by a botanist, Władysław Szafer. Soon, Białowieża Forest was to become a sanctuary once more, amid the extensive terrestrial exploitation of the backstage that surrounds it: It is obvious that the territories, which are known as strict reserves within our national parks, will be the most valuable areas for the biologist. The process of returning nature to a wild state will take place in that part of the forest which so far remains under the influence of man…it will be for the biologist the source of unique observations. What is a ‘primeval forest’ only by name, will through a cycle of transformations become a true primeval forest. This will happen (or at least should happen) under the scientific control of Polish biologists who will consistently follow the processes of the wild. They will observe

innumerable facts; they will discover a number of episodes of the struggle for survival; they will come to know the strategy of the plant and animal organisms taking part in this struggle. In short, conducting research as far as possible without gaps and major interruptions, they will record in a number of scientific papers the history of the birth of a true primeval forest from a semi-cultured forest as is today the Białowieża forest.61 Profanation of the 'primeval forest' returns the forest to its historic and current reality. If paradise was never found there, it is impossible to speak of the forest as an untouched, untainted ground, even more so to ask for a return to its 'primeval' state given that this very concept ontologically precludes a retroactive restoration. Yet this is not to devalue the preciousness of an intricate ecology, but to pose it to new imagination, where the primary narrative of the 'hunt – 'from the fancies of the sovereigns to the exploitation of the current government in logging – presents itself as a basis for uncovering the hidden or subjugated actors at the backstage of these processes. Behind the curtains of trees, the true subjects of the forest were the inhabitants that support the hunting machine, and the current local community that benefit little from the museumfication of the forest as it receives tourists from all ends of the world. It is only possible to enter into a new relationship with the forest through the disarmament of the hunt and its first principles of appropriation. Once the stage is emptied and the lights are dimmed, the scenography, no longer a backdrop for the tragedies and comedies of the hunt, loses its illusive aura and recedes to its reality, truly becoming part of the everyday landscape of the backstage. The trees and the animals of the Białowieża forest that form the fragile ecosystem can shed their primary status as scientific objects of investigation and preservation and enter into a new relation with human subjects, one that addresses man as part of the ecological framework and community. If there is a hidden secret to be revealed in the Białowieża forest, it is that that there is no separation between ecology and sociality, and that it is possible, in recovering the forgotten care within man's interdependencies that are not less precarious than that of the forest's ecosystem, to enter the forest in the full communion of trees by redefining the ritual of the hunt, for centuries the paradigm of the sovereign’s power, knowledge and control over his domain.

Władysław Szafer, 1922, cited in Janusz Faliński, Vegetation dynamics in temperate lowland primeval forests: Ecological Studies in Białowieża forest (Dordrecht: Dr W. Junk, 1986), 1.

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Figures Figure 1: Hunting of Birds with a Hawk and a Bow. 1515-1535. Wool and silk thread, 337.8 x 384.8cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. From: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, http://www.metmuseum.org (accessed December 8, 2017). Figure 2: N. S. Samokisz, Jagiełło Striking the Bison. Engraving. From: Georgij Karcow. Puszcza Białowieska. St. Petersburg, 1903. Figure 3: Paolo Uccello, The Hunt in the Forest. 1370. Oil on canvas, 73 x 177 cm. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. From: Wiki Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org (accessed December 8, 2017). Figure 4: Gaston Phoebus, Curée. From Gaston Phoebus, Livre de Chasse, 1389.

Figure 5: W. I. Nawozow, Stefan Batory in Białowieża during the Departure of the Drive. From: Georgij Karcow. Puszcza Białowieska. St. Petersburg, 1903. Figure 6: Michał Połchowski, Location of Białowieża with two marked Hunting Gardens. 1784. Central Archives of Historical Records, Warsaw, Cartographic collection AK147. Figure 7: W. I. Nawozow, The Hunt of Stanisaw August on 31 August 1784. From: Georgij Karcow. Puszcza Białowieska. St. Petersburg, 1903. Figure 8: Julius von Brincken, The Lithuanian Bison. Engraving. From: Julius von Brincken, Mémoire descriptif sur la forêt impériale de Bialowieza en Lithuanie. Warsaw, 1828. Figure 9: Artur Grottger, The Foray. Litograph. From: Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Figure 10: Georgij Karcow, The diagram of the catch pen. From: Georgij Karcow. Puszcza Białowieska. St. Petersburg, 1903. Figure 11: Georgij Karcow, The diagram of the tsarist chase. From: Georgij Karcow. Puszcza Białowieska. St. Petersburg, 1903. Figure 12: Georgij Karcow, The map of the twelve-day imeprial hunt in 1900. From: Georgij Karcow. Puszcza Białowieska. St. Petersburg, 1903.