Lusatia
Lusatia, otherwise known as Sorbia, is a region in Central Europe, territorially split between Germany and Poland. Lusatia stretches from the Bóbr and Kwisa rivers in the east to the Pulsnitz and Black Elster rivers in the west, and is located within the German states of Saxony and Brandenburg and the Polish voivodeships of Lower Silesia and Lubusz. Major rivers of Lusatia are the Spree and the Lusatian Neisse, which defines the border between Germany and Poland. The Lusatian Mountains of the Western Sudetes separate Lusatia from Bohemia in the south. Lusatia is traditionally divided into Upper Lusatia, the hilly southern part, and Lower Lusatia, the flat northern part.
The areas east and west along the Spree in the German part of Lusatia are home to the Slavic Sorbs, one of Germany's four officially recognized indigenous ethnic minorities. The Upper Sorbs inhabit Saxon Upper Lusatia, and the Lower Sorbs Brandenburgian Lower Lusatia. Upper and Lower Sorbian are spoken in the German parts of Upper and Lower Lusatia respectively, and the signage there is mostly bilingual.
Tacitus states that this entire region was part of Germania and that in and before the second century was populated by Germanic tribes. From the seventh century Slavs began migrating into this region. Subsequently it has been ruled variously by Germany, Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary.
The Lusatian Lake District is Europe's largest artificial lake district. The village of Herrnhut is the seat of the Moravian Church. Muskau Park in Bad Muskau and Łęknica is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Tropical Islands Resort, a large water park housed in a former airship hangar that is the biggest free-standing hall in the world, is located in the north of Lusatia. The closest international airport to Lusatia is Dresden Airport in Klotzsche.
The largest Lusatian city is Cottbus, with nearly 100,000 inhabitants. Other notable towns are the former members of the Lusatian League: the German/Polish twin towns of Görlitz and Zgorzelec, Bautzen, Zittau, Lubań, Kamenz, and Löbau ), as well as Żary, the German/Polish twin towns of Guben and Gubin, Hoyerswerda, Senftenberg, Eisenhüttenstadt, and Spremberg.
Etymology
The name derives from the Sorbian word łužicy meaning "swamps" or "water-hole", Germanized as Lausitz. Lusatia is the Latinized form which spread in the English and Romance languages area.Geography
Lusatia comprises two both scenically and historically different parts: a hilly southern "upper" section and a "lower" region, which belongs to the North European Plain. The border between Upper and Lower Lusatia is roughly marked by the course of the Black Elster river at Senftenberg and its eastern continuation toward the Silesian town of Przewóz on the Lusatian Neisse. Neighbouring regions were Silesia in the east, Bohemia in the south, the Margraviate of Meissen, and the Duchy of Saxe-Wittenberg in the west as well as the Margraviate of Brandenburg in the north.Upper Lusatia
Upper Lusatia is today part of the German states of Saxony and Brandenburg ; part east of the Neisse River around Lubań now belongs to the Polish Lower Silesian voivodeship. It consists of hilly countryside rising in the South to the Lusatian Highlands near the Czech border, and then even higher to form the Zittau Hills, the small northern part of the Lusatian Mountains in the Czech Republic.Upper Lusatia is characterized by fertile soil and undulating hills as well as by historic towns and cities such as Bautzen, Görlitz, Zittau, Löbau, Kamenz, Lubań, Bischofswerda, Herrnhut, Hoyerswerda, and Bad Muskau. Many villages in the very south of Upper Lusatia contain a typical attraction of the region, the so-called Umgebindehäuser, half-timbered-houses representing a combination of Franconian and Slavic style. Among those villages are Niedercunnersdorf, Obercunnersdorf, Wehrsdorf, Jonsdorf, Sohland an der Spree with Taubenheim, Oppach, Varnsdorf or Ebersbach.
Lower Lusatia
Most of the area belonging to the German state of Brandenburg today is called Lower Lusatia and is characterized by forests and meadows. In the course of much of the 19th and the entire 20th century, it was shaped by the lignite industry and extensive open-pit mining. Important towns include Cottbus, Eisenhüttenstadt, Lübben, Lübbenau, Spremberg, Finsterwalde, Senftenberg, and Żary, which is now considered the capital of Polish Lusatia.Between Upper and Lower Lusatia is a region called the Grenzwall, literally meaning "border dyke", although it is in fact a morainic ridge. In the Middle Ages this area had dense forests, so it represented a major obstacle to civilian and military traffic. Some of the region's villages were damaged or destroyed by the open-pit lignite mining industry during the DDR era. Some, now exhausted, former open-pit mines are now being converted into artificial lakes, with the hope of attracting holiday-makers, and the area is now being referred to as the Lusatian Lake District.
Lusatian capitals
As Lusatia is not, and never has been, a single administrative unit, Upper and Lower Lusatia have different, but in some respects similar, histories. The city of Cottbus is the largest in the region, and though it is recognized as the cultural capital of Lower Lusatia, it was a Brandenburg exclave since 1445. Historically, the administrative centres of Lower Lusatia were at Luckau and Lübben, while the historical capital of Upper Lusatia is Bautzen. Since 1945, when a small part of Lusatia east of the Oder–Neisse line was incorporated into Poland, Żary has been touted as the capital of Polish Lusatia.Lusatian Lake District
The Lusatian Lake District is an artificially created lake area. By the end of the 2020s, Europe's largest artificial water landscape and Germany's fourth-largest lake area are to be created by flooding disused brown coal mines in the Lusatian brown coal mining area. Some of the largest lakes are connected to each other as a chain of lakes by navigable canals.The new lakeland is largely created from remaining holes from former brown coal opencast mines. These are flooded and converted into lakes. Some of the resulting lakes have already reached their final water level, others will not be completely flooded for a few years.
Other lakes are artificially dammed lakes. While the Quitzdorf Dam was created to provide enough process water for the Boxberg Power Station, the Spremberg Dam was primarily planned for flood protection in the lake district, but was also used for process water for power plants. The Bautzen Reservoir was also artificially created in order to be able to continuously supply the Boxberg Power Station with water.
The ponds of the Upper Lusatian Heath and Pond Landscape Biosphere Reserve, which are also located in the Lake District area, were partly created in the Middle Ages, but also during the GDR period for agricultural reasons, as the moor-rich land was restructured and made usable. These very shallow waters are mostly used for fish farming.
The ponds of the Muskau Arch are also located between the large opencast mining holes. They arose from faults in the terminal moraine of glaciers from the Ice Age, and partly through the mining of soil raw materials such as sand, clay and coal even before industrialization. In general, these ponds are not created intentionally by humans, but are filled with water due to a lack of drainage.
Muskau Morainic Arch
The Muskau Morainic Arch is a terminal moraine formed during the Elster glaciation, which together with its immediate surroundings forms the "UNESCO Global Geopark Muskau Morainic Arch".A glacier on the inland ice that was up to 500 m thick compressed the sand and brown coal layers in front of and below it over a length of more than 40 km to form a small-scale fold arch with a compression terminal moraine up to 180 m high and 700 m wide. The structure is currently preserved as a flat, undulating hill range and is almost unique in the world. The meltwater lake that subsequently emerged within the horseshoe was filled with clays. Ice advances in the following cold periods eroded the higher parts of the terminal moraine. Due to oxidation and the associated loss of volume in the areas near the surface of the brown coal seams, furrows of 3 m to 5 m, a maximum of 20 m deep, 10 m to 30 m wide and up to several kilometers long were formed. Known as "Gieser", they form long stretches of drainless ditches that are either filled with standing water or often peat-covered.
After already centuries of extraction of clay and sand, brown coal was mined in the area of the Muskau Arch in the 19th and 20th centuries, partly in pillar mining and partly in opencast mining. Due to the location of the mined seams, noticeably elongated lakes formed in the remaining holes north and east of Weißwasser after the end of mining.
Upper Lusatian Heath and Pond Landscape
The Upper Lusatian Heath and Pond Landscape is the region richest in ponds in Germany, and together with the Lower Lusatian Pond Landscape forms the biggest pond landscape in Central Europe.History
Early history
According to the earliest records, the area was settled by culturally Celtic tribes. Later, around 100 BC, the Germanic Semnones settled in that area. The name of the region may be derived from that of the Ligians. From around 600 onwards, West Slavic tribes known as the Milceni and Lusici settled permanently in the region.In the 10th century, the region came under the influence of the Kingdom of Germany, starting with the 928 eastern campaigns of King Henry the Fowler. Until 963 the Lusatian tribes were subdued by the Saxon margrave Gero and upon his death two years later, the March of Lusatia was established on the territory of today's Lower Lusatia and remained with the Holy Roman Empire, while the adjacent Northern March again got lost in the Slavic uprising of 983. The later Upper Lusatian region of the Milceni lands up to the Silesian border at the Kwisa river at first was part of the Margraviate of Meissen under Margrave Eckard I.
File:Polska 992 - 1025.png|thumb|Poland under Bolesław I the Brave with Lusatia and marked battles of the German–Polish War
At the same time the Polan duke of the later Kingdom of Poland raised claims to the Lusatian lands and upon the death of Emperor Otto III in 1002, Margrave Gero II lost Lusatia to the Polish Duke Boleslaw I the Brave, who took the region in his conquests, acknowledged by Henry II first in the same year in Merseburg and later in the 1018 Peace of Bautzen, Lusatia became part of his territory; however, Germans and Poles continued to struggle over the administration of the region. It was regained in a 1031 campaign by Emperor Conrad II in favour of the Saxon German rulers of the Meissen House of Wettin and the Ascanian margraves of Brandenburg, who purchased the March of Lusatia in 1303.
In 1367 the Brandenburg elector Otto V of Wittelsbach finally sold Lower Lusatia to King Karel of Bohemia, thereby becoming a Bohemian crown land.