Stara Wies, Lubartow

Stara Wies, which means 'Old Village', is a small village almost opposite the entrance to Kozlowka Palace in the Lubartow powiat of the Lubelskie wojewodztwo, Poland. It is located 9km west of Lubartow and 150km southeast of Warsaw. From the 14th century until the 19th century, people of this village were generally obliged to work on the Lords land for a certain number of days a year. The Russians, who controlled this part of Poland at the time, finally were obliged to free the peasants of this service. The palace was constructed in about 1740 and spent most of its time in the hands of the Zamoyskis, who also owned most of the land. After the family were obliged to leave the palace at the end of WW2, the land went to the state and many peasants were able to have their own land at last.

This page will be like a circular walk around the village, starting and finishing at the gates of the Palace of Kozlowka. At the bottom there is a map of the village and here the locations of the pictures are given.

(1) The palace of Koslowka was built by a family of  Polish magnates, but now it is a museum. It is one of only a few palaces to retain its interior and furniture. Outside the gates of the palace is a stand of trees. If we walk west, along the road, there is just open fields on either side of the road. The land is very flat as this is part of the Lubartow Plain. The principle farming is various crops, but each farmstead also has some cows.

(2) After a couple of hundred metres we come across some buildings, a garage workshop on our left and a prosperous farmstead on our right. The original wooden house is dwarfed by the modern farmhouse behind it. The wooden cottage is timber framed with wooden panelling consisting of upright planks of wood. Rooves were traditionally straw thatch on poorer houses and small wooden tiles on better houses. This one has had its roof replaced with asbestos. The small little piece of roofing on the front helps to prevent water leakage between the attic and the tops of the main wall uprights. The grey/blue of the walls is quite common for this part of Poland. If the walls were painted a pale blue, it would once have meant there were unmarried women living there.

(3) If we turn right off the tarmaced road just after the farm, we find ourselves on a clinker surfaced track. On our left is another wooden cottage, quite similar to the last one, but this time with a slightly different roof design. Here, the replacement roof material is painted steel sheting.

(4) Further up the track on the right we find an unusual building which is probably someones summer home. If you look carefully at the wall on this side in the area of the window you can see the shape of the original building. It is either an ex-rail carriage or ex-workmans caravan with the wheels removed. The house has been extended to the rear and a veranda added to the front.

(5) On our left we have a cluster of wooden and brick buildings, which is a series of farmsteads and workers cottages.

(6) After a couple of hundred metres, we reach the end of the village and before us is an open plain with fields on either side of the track. On the right there are chickens running about a small farmstead, whilst on the left we have a small black cottage. This cottage has been constructed like a log cabin by simply stacking up sawn logs to form the walls, with simple overlapping joints at the corners. This is the most traditional building style. Often these cottages are quite long, with a door in the centre of each long wall, connected inside by a wide hall. There would a room on either side of the hall, with the stove in the living/cooking/sleeping room in the middle of the hall wall The other room would be used as a work room and for storage. The hall would be wide as work would be done here as well. Most of the cottages in this village don't have the second room and only one door, and this is a good example. the white lines is what they use to seal the gaps between the logs. This cottage has an asbestos roof, but it probably started life with a straw one.

(7) If we turn back to take the track to the east, we will notice this structure at the junction. This is the villages main kapliczka (Ka-plicha-ka), which is Polish for 'shrine'. Villagers have to go either to another village to visit a church or, if they worked at the palace, they might have gone to the palace chapel. Kapliczka's served an important part of the religious life of villagers.

(8) Continuing down the track, we can look back at the part that we have just left and the tree dominating the junction we have just left.

(9) on our left we have a series of small cottages. The first is the same layout as the last we looked at, but this time it is of timber frame construction. The next two are probably of the log cabin style, but as they have been rendered with plaster to give them a more modern look, it is difficult to tell for sure. The white 'timber' uprights might simply be boxed in corner joints of the horizontal timbers. However, the gardens are the typically colourful mass of the typical Polish cottage garden, the plants a mixture of the decorative and the useful.


The object in the garden is plastic sheets to protect soft fruit bushes.

(10) The last building we shall look at, on the right is half hidden among trees. It is of the log cabin style, but here it has both the rooms, a high roof and low walls. Here the roof has been replaced with either wooden boards or steel sheeting. In order to lengthen the life, it has had asphalt shetting applied to it, giving the cottage a bit of a run down air.

Beyond this building we come to a small building where farmers come with their milk. The milk is stored until the tanker comes to collect it. After this we reach tarmac road once more, but we should not miss the other kapliczka almost hidden under a tree on our right, at the junction. This one is simply a tall, fabricated steel cross.
(11) If we follow the road to the right, we be heading back to where we started. The last building on our right is a pink house of brick or stone of a completely different design to the rest of the village.

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