Białowieża

Before 1426 a wooden hunting lodge was built for King Władysław Jagiełło in the middle of the forest; painted white, it gave the village and the forest their name, which means "White Tower". From 1538 the forest was protected by royal law, and a royal hunting court stood on today's Białowieża Glade from around 1594. Plague in 1710 burned out the settlement. Augustus III built a new hunting palace in the mid-18th century and held a great hunt in 1752, recorded on an obelisk that still stands, and Stanisław August Poniatowski led the last royal hunts here in 1784.

The Third Partition of 1795 brought Russian rule. The village emptied and was repopulated more than once — after the foresters joined the November Uprising almost to a man, their posts were abolished — and from 1888 it became a tsarist estate. A large hunting palace was built in 1889–1894, with an English park in 1895, the Orthodox church of St Nicholas, a railway station and houses for the court.

German troops took the area in 1915 and built a sawmill and a railway. The Białowieża reserve was created in 1921 and became a national park in 1932. In 1939 the Soviet Union occupied the village and deported many residents; from 1941 the German occupiers carried out mass killings, and the forest sheltered Polish and Soviet partisans. The retreating Wehrmacht blew up the palace in 1944. The national park was re-established in 1947, and the forest became a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a biosphere reserve.

Białowieża belongs to the Orthodox, Belarusian-influenced borderland of Podlaskie. Most residents are Eastern Orthodox and identify as Poles, with a smaller group identifying as Belarusian, and there is also a significant Catholic community. The local dialect is of Ruthenian origin, a mix of Belarusian and Ukrainian with Polish and some Russian elements, but it is fading as more people speak standard Polish. The red-brick Orthodox church of St Nicholas, with its porcelain iconostasis, stands near the Catholic church of St Teresa, which has a chapel of St Hubert, patron of hunters.

The village's identity is bound up with the forest and the bison, and much of local life is organised around showing them to visitors. Birdwatching with local ornithologists, bison watching, and sledge and carriage rides with a bonfire are among the experiences offered to visitors, and the national park and several scientific institutes are based in the village.

The midsummer Kupalle festival brings Ukrainian and Belarusian songs and a staging of East Slavic customs on the bank of the Narewka. Before the Second World War a Jewish community, which arrived as the timber industry grew, lived along Stoczek Street, with a wooden synagogue that was dismantled in the 1960s.

Białowieża is the seat of a rural municipality in one of the least populated parts of Poland, and at the same time one of the most visited places in the east of the country, with almost 100,000 visitors a year. The village has four hotels, several inns and guesthouses and dozens of agritourism rooms run by residents. Tourism began to grow between the wars, when visitor numbers were already estimated at more than 45,000 a year by 1939; the railway line to Hajnówka closed in 1994, and today buses and cars bring the visitors.

The main research bodies include the Białowieża Geobotanical Station of the University of Warsaw and the Mammal Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the national park's offices occupy buildings of the old tsarist estate.

The border has shaped recent years. Since the border crisis that began in 2021, migrants have tried to cross from Belarus, and deaths from exposure have been recorded in the forest; in 2022 Poland built a steel wall along the border, and access to areas close to the border has at times been restricted.

Białowieża's cooking is that of Podlaskie. The best-known regional dish is babka ziemniaczana, potato babka: grated potatoes, eggs, onion and pieces of bacon and sausage, baked in a crock and often served with a sauce of sour cream and pork. Sękacz, known in Lithuania as šakotis, is a spit cake of butter, eggs, flour, sugar and cream, baked in layers on a rotating spit so that a slice shows rings like a tree.

The forest is also the source of the region's most famous drink. Żubrówka, the bison-grass vodka, contains a blade of bison grass in every bottle; the grass is gathered in the Białowieża Forest, and the vodka has been produced commercially at the Białystok distillery since 1928.

Places to eat in the village are few and simple — restaurants near Palace Park and in the centre, and one in the restored railway station of 1903 — and many visitors also stay in agritourism rooms run by residents.