Polish community organizing the Polissia Rainbow festival in Zhytomyr

The 17th International Festival TKCZA POLESIA (Polissia Rainbow) will take place in the regional center from October 14 through 18. This is one of the measures undertaken within Poland’s chairmanship in the Council of the European Union, which The Day has already written about. On October 15, the memorial board of Ignacy Jan Paderewski was unveiled at the building of the music school No. 5, and the Oleh Olzhych Regional Universal Scientific Library launched an exhibition “I. J. Paderewski: a European, a statesman, an artist,” and the honored collective of Polish culture – the Dobrzynski Chamber Ensemble gave a concert in his memory. On October 16, the main concert of the festival took place in the Regional Philharmonic society, with the participation of Polish choir, dance and children’s collectives from different cities and districts of the Zhytomyr region; the best of them will be awarded, along with the winners of the Valentyn Hrabovsky 2nd All-Ukrainian Literary Competition. And today, there will be a big concert by the Polish National Song and Dance Ensemble “Silesia” on the stage of the regional music and drama theater. The region has the largest population of Polish community in Ukraine (more than 40,000), which caused such large-scale events. At the same time, some political groups took this, mildly speaking, reservedly. Specifically, the Zhytomyr regional organization of All-Ukrainian Union “Liberty” was against the immortalization of Paderewski. The motive is that he was the prime minister of Poland, which fought with the Ukrainian National Republic in the period of 1918-20. Without deepening into the twists of a complicated history of relations between our countries (which are very well highlighted in the book Wojny a pokoj (Wars and Peace from The Day’s library), we will note, however, that in the same years (but slightly later), Poland acted as UNR’s ally in the struggle against the Russian Bolsheviks.