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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Wkład "Leksykonu Polaków w Republice Czeskiej i Republice Słowackiej" w zachowanie dziedzictwa kulturowego Zaolzia

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The article plays the role of justification of the multi-volume work devoted to Polish population living on the territory divided between two independent States nowadays - the Czech Republic and the Republic of Slovakia. It consists of two parts: in the first one, the author presents how the work itself came to be published - from the initial intentions to the State of their realization as it is today. Accordingly, he shows the successive stages of creating the work, explains the changes that followed in the conceptions over the span of several decades, as well as discusses difficulties in the realization of such complicated research enterprise. He mentions the goals and tasks, clarifies the mode and types of entries used in the publication. The second part of the article justifies the conception of not restricting the studies solely to Zaolzie, which is one of the biggest concentrations of Poles outside the borders of our country and is of the autochthonous character, supported in terms of its population by immigration of the Polish, chiefly from Galicia in the period of building the coal basin. The second concentration of the ethnic and autochthonous naturę of the Polish diaspora are the lands of Spis and Orava. The author discusses also other concentrations of Polish population in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia, which are far less numerous, explains the genesis of their foundation, factors of founding centres of Polish settlement there, Polish organizational life of these centres, as well as ethnic, cultural, religious, economic and social differentiation, within which the Polish diaspora is functioning.