Qualla: Lusatia

Lusatia: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Knarf-bz, Public domain. Ask for the capital of Lusatia and you will get four answers, all of them defensible. Bautzen, if you mean Upper Lusatia, which has looked to it for centuries. Luckau or Lübben, if you mean Lower Lusatia, whose administrators sat there. Cottbus, if you mean the biggest city, though Cottbus was a Brandenburg exclave from 1445 and therefore not properly Lusatian at all. Or Żary, which has been advanced as the capital of Polish Lusatia since 1945, when a chunk of the region ended up on the far side of a new international border. The reason there is no single answer is simple: Lusatia has never once been a single administrative unit. It is a place that exists because the people in it say so, which is exactly the kind of place that tends to outlast the states that keep carving it up.

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Image: Knarf-bz | Public domain

Lusatia: Swamp, in the Original

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Johann Hübner & Johann Baptist, Public domain. The name is Slavic and unglamorous. Łužicy means swamps, or water-hole; Germanised it becomes Lausitz, Latinised, Lusatia. The region runs from the Bóbr and Kwisa rivers in the east to the Pulsnitz and the Black Elster in the west, drained by the Spree and the Lusatian Neisse, an...

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Image: Johann Hübner & Johann Baptist | Public domain

Lusatia: Ten Owners in Nine Hundred Years

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Poznaniak, Popik, CC BY-SA 3.0. Slavs began moving into this country in the seventh century, among them the Milceni, whose descendants are still here. After that, ownership becomes a list. Meissen took it, Poland held it from 1002 to 1031, Meissen again, then Bohemia from 1075. In 1319 it was split between Bohe...

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Image: Poznaniak, Popik | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lusatia: The Language on the Second Line

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. More than 80,000 Sorbs live in Lusatia, one of Germany's four recognised indigenous minorities, and the road signs carry their names below the German ones. The 1900 census counted 93,032 across the region: 55.8 per cent of the district of Cottbus, 37.8 per cent of Hoyerswerda, 17...

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Image: A.Savin | FAL

Lusatia: Brown Gold

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lothar Weber, CC BY-SA 4.0. What shaped Lower Lusatia more than any dynasty was the lignite beneath it. Open-cast mining ran through the second half of the nineteenth century and the whole of the twentieth, and it worked at a scale that treats villages as overburden: dozens of settlements were simply remove...

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Image: Lothar Weber | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lusatia: Where the Line Fell

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bomenius, CC BY-SA 4.0. The war ended here in the spring of 1945, and it ended badly. At Horka on 26 April German troops attacked a marked field-hospital column of the 9th Polish Armoured Division and killed some 300 men, most of them wounded soldiers and the medical staff caring for them. Then Potsdam ...

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Image: Bomenius | CC BY-SA 4.0