Introduction

Poland is one of the main migration countries for Ukrainian citizens, who currently constitute the largest group of foreigners, before the 24th of February 2022 (the Russian invasion of Ukraine) estimated at least 1.3 million (Bukowski Duszczyk, 2022: 11). Many newcomers from Ukraine decided to stay in Poland—they set up companies, bought flats, applied for citizenship, and sent their children to Polish schools.

Nevertheless, migrants from Ukraine do not hit the ethnic “vacuum,” because, in each of the larger urban centers they choose, there are Polish-born Ukrainians, whose ancestors were not migrants, but autochthonous inhabitants of south-eastern and eastern Poland, forcibly displaced from there in 1947 within the borders of Communist People’s Republic of Poland (PRP). Among the many aspects of encounters of Ukrainian migrants and local Ukrainians in Poland, the one that concerns the heritage of the local community and how it is used in constructing local Ukrainian identity and diasporic discourses seems particularly interesting. The centuries-old presence of the Ukrainian autochthonous community in Poland seems to be a point of reference for at least a part of the activity of migrant leaders. On the other hand, the growing number of migrants from Ukraine is a challenge for the Ukrainian local community, whose leaders have been reflecting more and more often in recent years on its prospects and the meaning of the past in the constructions of the identity of Ukrainians from Poland. The latter issue can be considered as a discussion on local Ukrainian heritage, involving not only local Ukrainians, but also leaders and activists of the migrant community.

Although the scientific literature devoted to various aspects of the presence of migrants from Ukraine is constantly growing (now including war migrants), as well as studies devoted to the Ukrainian minority in Poland, so far researchers have not noticed the cultural consequences of encounters of local Ukrainians with their migrant co-ethnics, at least at the level of leaders’ activity and main organizations. The worlds of migrants and local autochthonous Ukrainians are almost always described separately (but cf. Triandafyllidou, 2008). Moreover, some authors already use the term diaspora (Markowska-Manista & Pietrusińska, 2021) without the necessary reflection on the conditions for forming diaspora identifications and discourses. What caught our attention differs, therefore, from the previous research on Ukrainian migrants, especially their adaptation and problems encountered in Poland (e.g., Grzymała-Kazłowska & Brzozowska, 2017; Fedyuk & Kindler, 2016). Instead of taking it for granted that the Ukrainian diaspora exists in Poland, we want to take a step back and problematize its formation. For this purpose, we propose a term of diaspora-forming processes, which will be further elaborated on the example of heritage as one of such processes, i.e., in this case, study the heritage of local Ukrainians, used and modelled in relations with migrants from Ukraine.

This article aims at contributing to migration studies and critical heritage studies with an anthropological perspective on the role and ways of using heritage in forming a diaspora. One of the main research questions was if the heritage of the local Ukrainian community is a point of reference for migrants and if it has a unifying power for different Ukrainian communities. Also, we wanted to inquire about the role of this heritage in diasporic encounters in Poland.

We start by discussing the theoretical background. Then, the fieldwork and methods are presented. The next part refers to diasporic heritage and the ways it is used by Ukrainians in Poland. Drawing on the research material it is shown that for the autochthonous Ukrainians, the heritage has been a set of practices, encompassing something more than just a tangible and intangible legacy. We claim that heritage-related and other identity-reproducing practices of local Ukrainians are not ossified residues brought by their ancestors to new lands but are a direct product of displacement and living in exile. As such, they were “objectivized” and made normative, and only recently have been questioned when confronted with migration processes. Therefore, we suggest broadening the meaning of heritage in diasporic practices towards lifestyle, diasporic lived experiences and positioning stimulated by encounters with migrants. Then, on the example of heritage as one of the processes that may form a diaspora, we show that going below the superficial agreement on “common identity” among “the same” people, i.e., co-ethnics, may reveal deep processes of othering and bonding in forming a diaspora that would be hidden otherwise. Finally, we conclude with the argument that heritage in diasporic encounters helps to create symbolic borders much more effectively than previously argued and that there is a need to broaden its meaning.

Heritage-Diaspora Nexus: Theoretical Background

In studies on diasporas, heritage is usually treated statically and essentialistically, as a closed resource, a collection of contents from the past, which diasporic subjectivities simply reach for and around which identity is being formed (e.g., Sabenacio Nititham & Boyd, 2014; Dellios & Henrich, 2020). Most authors focus on either tangible, or intangible heritage in diasporic communities, or simply on “heritage” as synonymous to “cultural values,” or “ethnic traditions” (e.g., Amescua, 2013; Brinkerhoff, 2016; Mukherjee, 2021). Often heritage is provided with an adjective but non- or poorly problematized: “migrant heritage,” “ethnic heritage” (e.g., Emmerich, 2021), “diasporic heritage” (Eisenlohr, 2016), or “ancestral heritage” (Nikielska-Sekuła, 2019). Another optic is diasporic heritage tourism, also called heritage migrations (e.g., Dallen, 2011), and heritage promotion policies in diasporic communities supported by the states. The latter was for instance examined by Weinar, (2017), who argues that heritage or cultural heritage in/of diaspora is most often understood by actors as cultural ties, the celebration of folk culture, education, and language acquisition. Heritage in such a meaning may be discussed and deliberated, re-formed, contested, negotiated, and politicized. The political uses of heritage in diasporas for the most part are investigated from the perspective of diasporic institutions, such as socio-cultural organizations, museums, or cultural centers where heritage discourses are produced and disseminated. Therefore, the literature on the musealization of diaspora heritage is quite extensive (e.g., Naguib, 2013; Wang, 2020).

The still actual study by Ang, (2011) presents the problematic relationship between heritage and diaspora. Although she places the nexus in the perspective of the nation-state and national identity, her general overview may be useful in our case too. As she points out, heritage operates not only “as an overwhelmingly nationalizing cultural process” but also is “essentially a territorializing concept” locating value in objects and places as well as attributing heritage to a particular group that “possesses” it. That is why “applying heritage knowledge and procedures to diaspora tends to result in a reductionist understanding of the diasporic experience by highlighting its territorial attachments (to either homeland or host land)” (Ang, 2011: 86). This approach, nevertheless—argues Ang—ignores the cases which do not “fit” in the nationalist and territorially based frames “measured” by nation-states units.

Moreover, the reflection on the heritage in the diaspora does not present a broader perspective that goes beyond the material and non-material aspects as well as their mutual relationship as inherited, negotiated, and created within particular diasporic communities at the same time. However, as Ashworth already wrote many years ago, heritage is a powerful instrument of ideology, power, social control, and economic change. It is supposed to be the result of a political decision that presupposes what we, as a society, are to remember (Ashoworth et al, 2007). In this article, the heritage of the Ukrainians in Poland is shown from a historical perspective (how and as a result of which historical processes it has evolved) and by the examples of its uses (Smith, 2006; Graham et al., 2005). In the processual perspective adopted here, heritage is conceptualized as a dynamic phenomenon, discursively created by manifold social actors, politically modelled, and context-sensitive. It is also a process itself that affects identities (Gentry & Smith, 2019; Harrison, 2013; Smith, 2006).

The term diaspora-forming processes, which this article offers, is inspired by Tölölyan’s, (2007: 649) approach of “diasporization, a becoming-diaspora,” and “a process of collective identification and form of identity.” We follow these researchers who claim that a diaspora is not a unifying social formation which should be taken for granted as an existing rationale. In the literature on “forming” or “making” a diaspora, the authors mostly focus on diasporic discourses around which people organize themselves, with a dominant role of political discourses (cf. Toninato, 2009). However, in our view, this is a narrowing approach which oversees the foundations organizing diasporic discourses. In order to examine “forming” a diaspora, one needs to get below given discourses and identify the phenomena hidden beneath them.

Therefore, the term “diaspora-forming processes” offers a non-essentialist and processual approach which localizes diaspora in the sphere of social imaginings and cultural practices of people who live outside their homelands and believe that they live in a diaspora and are diaspora members. To make such beliefs and images mobilizing people as a diaspora, they need to be shared and treated as common. Nevertheless, since these social imaginings and cultural practices transform into diasporic discourses and claims (including idioms, stereotypes, and cliches), some of them mobilize only partially, i.e., particular communities, while being contested or even not accepted by others. The question of how these communities are established, on which issues they agree upon, and what claims can be made should be considered through the lens of intersectionality, since it allows for more complex characteristics of positionalities and circumstances to be considered than the simple distinction between different communities, e.g., autochthones and migrants. What is more, diaspora-forming processes may differ within different “groups” and “communities,” so do not entail “wholeness” or “unity,” even if they resound as “common,” such as heritage, culture, nationalism, or diasporic policy.

In order to capture the shape of the abovementioned bottom-up beliefs and images of diaspora, we explore discourses, cultural idioms, popular cliches, and stereotypes among Ukrainian “co-ethnics” in Poland. Also, it is discussed how migrants from Ukraine respond to the presence of heritage-centered claims in local diasporic discourses.

Methodology

The research material on which this article is based covers quantitative data collected in three Polish cities: Warsaw, Krakow, and Przemyśl since 2021.

The guidelines of multi-sited ethnography (King, 2018; Marcus, 1995) were applied when considering the links between people, their biographies and narratives, places and meanings, and the axes of diasporic discourses. Multi-sited ethnography was also implemented through the dispersion of observation points across different sites, cities (and of different scales), institutions, and the Internet spaces, which enable consideration of the multiplicity of discourses and localities, immersed in wider social processes that affect the lives of Ukrainians in Poland. Particular “fields,” understood as both physical and metaphorical places, illuminate and complement each other.

So far, 79 in-depth interviews were carried out, lasting from 1 to 4 h, based on a previously developed set of guidelines with leaders, activists of both migrant and local Ukrainian organizations, and members of both communities who were neither leaders nor activists, but participated in the organizations’ initiatives.

Interlocutors were reached by purposeful snowball sampling (e.g., Barglowski, 2018), starting from Ukrainian organizations’ leaders and activists/employees. Extended participatory observations (Boccagni & Schrooten, 2018) during different events allowed for progressive immersion in Ukrainian organizational life. Researchers started to be recognizable for Ukrainian leaders and warmly welcomed during different activities. Once Russia attacked Ukraine, the authors engaged in humanitarian help provided both in Poland and directly in Ukraine, which undoubtedly ensured our research participants that we do not only “exploit” their communities for scientific purposes, but also are eager to engage themselves in aid activity. We consider it crucial due to our ethic principles of the fieldwork.

The group of interviewees was strongly diversified in terms of age (between 24 and 65), gender (the number of men was comparable to the number of women), and social status, which allows observing different positionalities crucial for applying intersectional perspective (Amelina & Barglowski, 2019). The differentiation of interviewees was necessary also in order to capture not only the leaders’ vision of official Ukrainian discourses in Poland, but also the resonance their activities elicit. However, in this article, a limited range of material collected is used, including participant observations, interviews, and informal conversations with leaders and activists only. Therefore, we do not discuss the perspective of people not involved in organizational life and newcomers.

In this research, thematic analysis of the data is used to identify and study the main patterns of themes and their relevance to the research questions (Braun & Clarke, 2019).

“The Embedded in History” Encounter “Modern” Migrants

The autochthonous Ukrainians in Poland live dispersed, mostly in western and northern Poland, as well as in the biggest cities. Their ancestors were displaced forcibly from south-eastern Poland where they traditionally had lived: first in 1946 to Soviet Ukraine, and later in 1947 (Operation Vistula) to the former German lands, now in Poland. Some of their relatives fought with Poles and Soviets in 1943–1947 for independent Ukraine in the ranks of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), some of them later ended up in the Central Labour Camp in Jaworzno, where those suspected of collaborating with the Ukrainian underground, as well as some Greek Catholic and Orthodox priests and other intelligentsia representatives, were imprisoned. Operation Vistula was the last act of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict of 1943–1947. In 1947, over 150 thousand Ukrainians were displaced and uprooted (Motyka, 2022). Not only the centuries-old neighborhood and settlement structures, but also family, neighborly and social ties, entrenched cultural patterns and ways of conceptualizing the world, and the rhythm of village life, work, and celebration were destroyed.

Along with the lack of military justification and application of the principle of collective responsibility, the assimilation goal of Operation Vistula prompted Motyka, (2023) to consider it a “communist ethnic cleansing.” It was forbidden to teach Ukrainian, engage in cultural activities, perform the Greek Catholic rite, or change the place of settlement. And although with time the living conditions improved, the odium of uprooting was to become a part of the life of Ukrainians in Poland, as well as their collective trauma.

In Communist Poland, i.e., between 1947 and 1989, they were politically marginalized and often discriminated against as Ukrainians, i.e., perceived as collectively responsible for the Polish-Ukrainian conflict during WW2. Subsequent generations from their childhood experienced discrimination as Ukrainians, being called rezuny (murders) and banderowcy (Banderites) thus incarnating numerous negative stereotypes that affected Ukrainians, heated for years by Communist propaganda (Drozd & Halczak, 2010). They functioned in the conditions of dispersion and the need to hide their ethnic roots, the past of their family members, and their own generational experiences of discrimination, identity problems, double life—officially a Pole, and in the privacy of a Ukrainian. They were brought up and socialized in the privileged culture of the majority and educated in the Polish school and language.

For decades, the Ukrainian autochthonous community in Poland has been developing the memory of the family and community trauma of the displacement. At home, young generations listened to the stories of their parents and grandparents about the former life of Ukrainians, interrupted by a brutal deportation. This memory revolves around the displacements and their cultural consequences, i.e., the disappearance of relatives and neighbors, the fight in the ranks of the UPA, sentences, imprisonment, assimilation pressure, and the necessity to hide the past of their family members. Successive generations of Ukrainians cultivate stories of the former seats, of their original homeland, its loss, and the consequences of this loss (Wangler, 2012; Lehman, 2010).

The moment of partial liberalization towards Ukrainians in PRP came in the 1950s. The Ukrainian Socio-Cultural Society (USCS) was established, which was a formal recognition of the existence of the Ukrainian community, but within a strictly state-controlled framework. The weekly “Our Word” (Nashe Slovo) was founded. A few primary and secondary boarding schools with Ukrainian as an additional language were established in different towns. Song and dance groups were brought into being, and poetic evenings and a festival of Ukrainian culture were organized. Outside the area from which the Ukrainians were displaced, masses in the Greek Catholic rite were held legally (Wangler, 2012).

Over the decades, the Ukrainians in Poland developed certain cross-linking strategies that resulted from dispersal. Thus, the community lived with the rhythm of cultural festivals, performances, and concerts which were attended and during which the community, its survival, and collective Ukrainian identity were celebrated. Cross-linking was necessary to strengthen the bonds between dispersed people and to counteract the processes of assimilation. This pattern also generated a system of key symbols, with the help of which local Ukrainians characterize themselves and their values: significance of the past (mainly deportations and their consequences, the past of the Polish-Ukrainian borderland), attachment to tradition, places of origin in the south-eastern and eastern Poland, churches, memory sites, and dialects of the Ukrainian language. The aforementioned key symbols make up the image of the “Ukrainian from Poland,” the “local Ukrainian,” and the model of Ukrainian patriotism developed by the community. Inevitably, it is the lens through which they perceive their and Ukrainian migrants’ positionality in Poland. Although this point of reference has been partially contested by young Ukrainian generations, it seems to be unchanged for decades.

The fall of communism in 1989 made it possible to address previously forbidden topics, such as the displacements and their consequences for the local Ukrainian community, and the commemoration of the Ukrainian victims of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict of WW2 and the post-war years. A debate began in the community about the effects of assimilation, the shape of the identity and future of Ukrainians in Poland, and going beyond the framework of action state-regulated in the PRP. USCS was renamed the Union of Ukrainians in Poland (UUP), and soon after the collapse of the USSR, cultural exchange with independent Ukraine and trips to this country began. Young generations benefited from this openness, experienced social contacts with Ukraine, travel and confrontation with the country dreamed of by their ancestors. These experiences of confrontation, together with the arrivals of migrants from Ukraine starting in the 1990s, and especially after the Maidan in 2005, began to “expose” Ukrainians in Poland to identity challenges: they undermined the local model of “Ukrainiannes”[2] and confront it with “real Ukraine.” This causes consternation, which is transformed into community solidarity with local ethnocultural values. Despite the increasing statistical and symbolic dominance of migrants in the public space, the calendar of local Ukrainian events has not changed significantly, and the well-coordinated patterns of cultural activity are still maintained: commemorating the anniversaries of Operation Vistula and events from the local history, festivals, and folkloristic events, publishing the newspaper “Our Word,” teaching the language, conducting bands and choirs. In Warsaw, the vast majority of Ukrainian cultural events have been organized by the migrant-run Ukrainian House. Migrants and war refugees significantly prevailed in 2022–2023; only the best-renowned productions attracted some local Ukrainians. On the other hand, some events are co-organized by the Ukrainian House and UUP. In such cases, the presence of local Ukrainians and migrants depends, generally, on the character of the event and topic discussed: the deeper immersion in Polish-Ukrainian history, the bigger representation of the local Ukrainian intelligentsia.

UUP deals with issues of key importance to the community: securing and promoting cultural heritage, Ukrainian education, media, the past and its commemoration, and the problem of assimilation. These issues define the area of “statutory Ukrainianness,” legally regulated and financed from the state budget and external grants[3]. In addition, despite the establishment of separate migrant organizations, primarily the “Our Choice” Foundation, which runs the Ukrainian House in Warsaw, UUP still helps migrants on an ad hoc basis, redirects them, co-coordinates various aid actions, lobbies for the rights of migrants, and intervenes in cases of discrimination (Tyma, 2023). For years, the organization has been involved in commenting on current political and media discourses, if they concern matters important to all Ukrainians in Poland.

What seems to be the most important in the situation of local Ukrainians is the intersection of identity and heritage in which Operation Vistula dominates, as the community did not experience other, equally formative events that would have a similar character as a keystone of identity. It affects lifestyles and the community’s patterns of functioning in the PRP. It covers not only the secular model of cultural and educational activity in the centers of residence of the Ukrainian community but also the sphere of religiosity. The Greek Catholic Church in Poland is perceived as the national Ukrainian church and the “essence of Ukrainianess.” However, Ukrainian society is much more religiously diverse than it seems stereotypically (a division into an Orthodox and Greek Catholics) (Razumkov Center 2020). In the case of migrants from Ukraine, especially the younger generation—and this is the overwhelming majority of migrants—the secularization process is also significant (Pew Research Center, 2020). In such conditions, the Greek Catholic Church is only a limited sphere of diasporic encounters. In the Greek Catholic church in Krakow, two elderly worshippers of the local community, Anna and Vasyl, described the presence of young migrants as a chance for the survival of the parish in general: “We are so happy they join the church! Before their arrival, there were less and less people in the church.” However, as Anna, once the prominent activist of the UUP Krakow branch, puts it, “they have to be worked on a lot.” This applies to covering heads and too naked shoulders with shawls by some women, or treating the church primarily as a meeting place. Additionally, in Warsaw, local Ukrainians pay attention to a bunch of differences related to local customs and rituals to which the faithful are attached. This applies to both the differences manifested at the intersection of the minority and migrant worlds, as well as local differences from various areas of Ukraine, which are brought by both the faithful and priests working in Poland. For example, a certain style of dressing the faithful has become popular over the years—women cover their shoulders, but not their heads, and the faithful often wear embroidered shirts—not only on the occasion of the biggest holidays. Older believers are offended by the frivolity of young girls in too-short skirts, and some people even use their phones during mass. Therefore, the fieldwork partners pay attention to the differences brought about by migrants from Ukraine as Luba[4], the local activists from Warsaw:

For example, people from Ukraine have a habit of bringing flowers to church and putting them in a jar. I say that I know that you want to bring these flowers, but it cannot look like a bazaar, the church is the church, a place where it is supposed to be nice and modest. (…) so they have [in Ukraine] such [a habit] that you can bring everything to the church. So I am suggesting to them that there are some things that you have to do differently and they do… little by little. (W24_M_A_f50).

Also, a younger activist pointed to differences noticed by her at the church during encounters with migrants:

Everyone is standing, everyone is praying. And (…) I can’t go to church anymore because I would feel bad, that I am praying and someone is talking on the phone (…). In Ukraine it is similar, it concerns people in their forties. Maybe it’s a bit like modernization, I don’t know, or maybe they want to show their phones. I can’t explain it to myself. (W9_M_A_f28).

“Talking on the phone” is considered here a habit of people “in their forties” both in Ukraine and already when they migrate to Poland. It may be offensive for the local faithful of different generations. Even the younger local Ukrainians, as presented above, pay attention to this habit as a source of visible and irritating difference.

Migrants from Ukraine have been coming to Poland since the 1990s. Both Maidans 2004/2005 and 2013/2014 and their consequences brought successive migrants who decided to look for a better life. The ongoing war in eastern Ukraine (since 2014) and the prolonged economic crisis, strengthened in 2020–2021 by the coronavirus pandemic, were perpetuating the migration processes. They were also influenced by the liberalization of EU visa regulations in 2017. The largest group of migrants that arrived in Poland before February 24, 2022, were economic migrants. They come from different regions of Ukraine, with different cultural backgrounds (including religion), different identities, languages, cherished values, political preferences, and memories. They also differ both in their motivations and the nature of arrivals (seasonal, circular, permanent immigration), social class, including social and cultural capitals (highly skilled migrants, young people undertaking studies, people with lower education undertaking 3D jobs), and their orientation towards the Polish society or the migration networks. They also differ in the level of involvement in activities for the benefit of Ukrainian communities in Poland.

These not numerous migrants from Ukraine who obtained Polish citizenship (almost 24.500 in 2000–2019 (GUS, 2020)), which formally equates them with members of the Ukrainian minority, still feel that their migrant background makes them different. An example is the story of Nadiya, an activist from Krakow, whose father had been deported from Poland in 1946. The woman grew up in Ukraine, and in the 1990s migrated to Poland and obtained Polish citizenship. She describes herself as a member of the local Ukrainian community, but she also has migration experience. She emphasized that contacts and connections between the local Ukrainians and migrants are isolated cases. They are not a collective experience. She tried to explain the reason for this situation:

[Both groups] should know each other, they should know, why they are different. There are common affairs like nation-building and language. Historical issues are different. Few of the migrants (…), do know about the history of Operation Vistula. (…) These are historically difficult things. There is little knowledge because these things are so closed. And it is not surprising that a person who has never dealt with it knows nothing about it. How is this person to know this? (K5_I_A_f60).

It is worth noting that knowledge about Operation Vistula is here supposed to be common among local Ukrainians, and not among general society. Migrants often do not experience ancestral trauma, as is the case with local Ukrainians. Even if migrants are aware of the local Ukrainians’ past, they do not identify with that.

Many of our migrant field partners claim that they have no contact with local Ukrainians and often do not understand the term “Ukrainian minority,” used by a part of this community. One of the migrant leaders emphasizes:

I have a friend who is from the minority and they keep asking her when she arrived and saying she has an accent. And she says: ‘well, but where did I come?’. ‘Well, to Poland’, and she says ‘I was born in Poland’, and they say ‘but how is a Ukrainian in Poland?’. They don’t get it at all—neither Poles nor Ukrainians get it. She is most annoyed that for Poles she is not a Pole, and for Ukrainians a Ukrainian. (…) and this is the biggest problem of the entire diaspora, whether a migrant or a minority, that you are not entirely theirs for either of them. (W4_I_A_f35).

In spring 2023, the significant book by Iza Chruślińska and Piotr Tyma titled “Tangles. On Ukrainians from Poland. Talks with Piotr Tyma” was published (Chruślińska, 2023). Tyma is a 57-year-old representative of the Ukrainian minority, a former anti-communist oppositionist in PRP, and then a president of UUP for 15 years. His book is generally about the identity preservation of local Ukrainians, uprooted and subjected to forced assimilation by the Polish Communists. During the author’s meeting in Warsaw Ukrainian House, Tyma was asked why they chose the term “Ukrainians from Poland” and not, for example, “Polish Ukrainians” or “Ukrainian Poles,” or “Ukrainians in Poland.” He explained that his intention was to emphasize the very fact of the presence of autochthonous Ukrainians as they have become nearly invisible to the society due to the arrival of outnumbering them migrants and lately—refugees. But it was not an attempt to blame immigrants for anything, since cordial relations between UUP and Tyma personally with Ukrainian House were clearly emphasized.

Heritage, Mutual Images, and Misunderstanding

The contacts of Ukrainians from the local community and migrants from Ukraine lean on transcultural and translocal encounters of various visions of being Ukrainian in Poland: one intersecting with heritage and the second one intersecting with civil rights/legal issues and cultural capitals. Since the growing migration from Ukraine to Poland, local Ukrainians have been confronted with the need to constantly navigate between different loyalties, affiliations, and shades of identity (cultural, ethnic, civic, national). It is betweenness rather than bifurcation (Finn et al., 2021: 272). Different visions of being Ukrainian also result from the specific determinism of the local community and its linearity in identity construction strategies: from resettlement through forced assimilation to actively counteracting it based on ethnocultural values, language, and memory. Meanwhile, migrants do not have such lived diasporic experiences. They do not reach Poland with the memory of being persecuted, assimilated, or discriminated against in their own country. Nevertheless, some of them point to difficult experiences of discrimination as migrants from Ukraine already in Poland. All these issues seem to be informed by being subjected to different forms of exclusion/inclusion (Joppke, 2005) by citizens (local Ukrainians) and not-citizens (migrants), what, in turn, pointed to the impossibility of omitting the context of a national state.

As we mentioned, over the years, local Ukrainians have developed a system of key symbols with the help of which they have been establishing symbolic borders (Cohen, 1985), separating them from Polish society and protecting their identity. As one of the leaders of the local community in Warsaw, Jaroslaw says,

We formed ourselves in the world view of being under the siege. We had to survive and teach the children [Ukrainian language and identity]. We had to survive it all. Therefore, we have this approach that we defend [our identity]. We need to keep it going. Certain values that defined this identity were considered essential. The issue of celebrating according to the Julian calendar, [Greek-Catholic] church, language, and choices of a husband and wife from our own environment. It did build a longer perspective. (W6_M_A_m60).

For anthropologist Wobst, (2010: 101), heritage in the diaspora is regarded as a processual means that helps diasporic subjectivities establish cultural differences. At the same time, it is caught in time and space, uprooted and instrumentalized. He states that.

Heritage in diasporic populations is thus under pressure to become as stereotypical as possible. (…) what is positioned as cultural heritage is often under particularly severe pressure to reify, exemplify and thus amplify difference (…). (Wobst, 2010: 101–103).

His view, however, fits our findings to a limited extent only, falling rather into the “classical” encounter of the diaspora and the majority community of the hosting country. Our example of the consequences of the interrelationship of the Ukrainian autochthonous community in Poland and their co-ethnics from Ukraine reveals that in the case of forcibly displaced persons (but not transnational migrants), the shape of heritage may be similar but it may be also introduced as a source of essential difference by both collective actors of the interrelationship. What is more, the model of diasporic practices developed after leaving the homelands behind may be as important as “unconscious habitus” brought to the new land, and thus may be treated as a diasporic heritage too. Currently, with the domination of migrants in terms of the numbers and organizational network, the local Ukrainian community has introduced the community’s symbolic boundaries “project” and created multiple positionalities—not only towards Poles, as usual, but today also towards migrants.

What is today perceived by migrants as being backward was for decades the main tool for local Ukrainians to create a symbolic boundary between them and Poles. Luba, a local activist from Warsaw, explains why it is so important for the local community:

(…) in order to keep our identity, roots and so on, we pay attention to so-called folksiness. It somehow helps us to stay separate, to emphasize that we are different. (W24_M_A_f50).

The alleged attachment of the local community to sharavarshchyna[5], i.e., folk culture presented on stages, the lack of a wider interest of the community in “high culture” (valuable artistic achievements from Ukraine), is perceived by migrants as the local community’s anachronism. We heard many times that “well, they’re stuck in the past a bit” (K8_I_A_k27). On the other hand, there is a significant tension in this respect, in the local Ukrainians’ alleged expectations that migrants should perform “living the Ukrainian life in Poland,” which has been developed before their arrival. This tension is perfectly shown by Oksana, a migrant activist from Warsaw who describes these failed expectations of the local Ukrainian community towards migrants:

There is such a term for migrants: zarobitczany[6]. In this context migrants are poor and they only care about money. (…) [we hear]: ‘oh, zarobitczany are coming, they will not read ‘Our Word’, they are only interested in work and drinking beer in the evening. They do not know history, they do not go to church, and they even speak Russian.’ (…) [Local Ukrainians think] that migrants should be interested in Shevchenko’s events. (…) [But] migrants had Shevchenko’s events every year in school. And they are not willing to attend these meetings. Well, no. I do not go to these events voluntarily either, because I prefer something modern. (W10_I_A_f30).

Her words clearly show that the Ukrainian heritage in Poland is not attractive and as such is being rejected even by those who are familiar with the local community and its ethnocultural values. In a similar way, the supposed conservatism of the “old diaspora” is recognized and referred to as a well-known phenomenon in diaspora studies: that the older generation/migration is conservative, at least in the view of the younger generation/earlier migrants. But this alleged “conservativeness” could denote different meanings, ranging from the certain model of cultural consumption (cf. Brown, 2021) to the very understanding of national identity or diaspora’s mission (Kozachenko, 2021; cf. Nikolko, 2019). Therefore, below the alleged “backwardness” or being embedded in the past, there are important phenomena to be identified.

As Ang shows, heritage practices of diasporic groups are often hidden in the private sphere, and not presented publicly, especially when it comes to such areas of the past as exile, alienation, separation, assimilation, or trauma. Such experiences do not suit nationally defined heritage in host lands and cannot be narrativized positively as stories of migrant incorporation and integration (Ang, 2011: 89). Some areas of the hidden heritage of the autochthonous Ukrainian community cannot be simply captured in a nation-state frame, nor as a cultural trauma deliberated only in private spheres. What must be emphasized is that the studied case slips out of recognized frameworks for analyzing heritage practices in diasporic communities, such as national, transnational, territorialized, and located in the past. The expectations of the local Ukrainians for migrants to become part of the developed structures and patterns of the “Ukrainian life” were unrealistic: to fit into the local model of Ukrainian patriotism, and thus to share its values: go to church, take care of tradition and language, and work for the benefit of the community.

A popular migrant activist in Warsaw, Kateryna, pointed to the core of the Ukrainian local lifestyle as not only transmitted in difficult circumstances but also highly protected during the Communist period.

The thing is that we do not even perceive many issues differently, but we know them differently because they learned history in Poland, and we did in Ukraine, someone else in Soviet Ukraine, and so he learned many things that I learned in Poland and about which I had had no idea. But I had an A in history both at school and at university and I thought I liked history, and later it turned out that I didn’t know it at all. It was only in Poland that I had to learn anew. If we do not know the history or we know otherwise, traditions are very different and here some do not understand others, migrants do not understand why the holidays are celebrated the way my grandmother used to do (…) and others do not understand how you can lose traditions, since my grandmother was driving all over Poland through Operation Vistula, she did not speak Ukrainian for several years and so on, and passed these traditions secretly so that no one would notice it. Now, having freedom, how can you not do this at all? (W4_I_A_f35).

In her opinion, the fact that migrants from independent Ukraine do not live the “Ukrainian lifestyle” as the local Ukrainians worked it out brings misunderstanding. It is worth commenting that ignorance of history, to which Kateryna admits, should be rather considered as knowledge of different national history (cf. Kasianov & Tolochko, 2016: 16), and that awareness of the past of local Ukrainians does not derive from the standard Polish school curriculum, but rather from family and organizational transmission (including public schools with the Ukrainian language of instruction) or conscious acquisition of historical knowledge. Therefore, the analysis of the heritage of the local Ukrainian community goes beyond the linear history of the diasporic communities, national-state point of reference, and diasporic putative in-betweenness (homeland—host land) as sources for heritage practices in favor of translocality, vernacularity, and broadening the studied subject of heritagization towards diasporic lifestyles, and cultural practices of positioning and self-defining. In classical Giddens’, (1991: 83) approach, lifestyle is “a more or less integrated set of practices which an individual embraces, not only because such practices fulfil utilitarian needs, but because they give material form to a particular narrative of self-identity.” By diasporic positioning, we understand the practices of symbolic construction and discursive emphasizing of “being different.” This distinction may be based on indicating areas in which similarities or differences are highlighted. In other words, it is about when Ukrainians from Poland are part of the diaspora-in-the-making and when they are just Ukrainians from Poland, in which situations these differences and similarities become an important emblem in mutual relations, and when they lose their strength. We argue that diasporic lifestyles, practices of positioning and self-defining, and lived experiences constitute heritage at least for part of our fieldwork participants. As such, it is protected and maintained. When contested or undermined, it mobilizes diasporic subjectivities and activates resistance.

Migrants do not meet the expectations of following up the lifestyle of local Ukrainians also for other reasons. Most of them have other goals related to migration, important for them at least in the first years of their stay: anchoring in Poland (Grzymała-Kazłowska & Brzozowska, 2017), securing their existence, and learning the Polish language. Thus, we can observe a fundamental mutual lack of approval of the migrants’ goals and the goals of the local community: to become a successful migrant vs. to survive as Ukrainians.

Nevertheless, the local activists undertake efforts to bring migrants into the local context which means actually explaining strategies of living and surviving as Ukrainians dominated by the Polish society:

You have to be patient and explain a lot, various perspectives and sensitive topics because there are certain things that people from Ukraine do not understand, and for Ukrainians from Poland they are crucial, and vice versa. For example, people from Poland do not like to be said that they are Polish and it is important to them. Even if they speak Ukrainian poorly, even if the relationship is so symbolic, it is not an insult—it is simply a bad definition of their identity and this is related to the fact that being from a minority is an attempt at such determination to maintain this culture, like entering these Ukrainian classes. So, in a situation where someone cares for it, and someone calls him Polish because he has an accent, it is frustrating. And explaining it to people from Ukraine is a common practice at the moment. (W11_M_A_f33).

The local Ukrainians point out the excess of their expectations, too, which they associated with the arrival of migrants from Ukraine. Some counted on the inflow of “fresh blood” and an energy boost to the community. Others, on the other hand, have long recognized the need to involve migrants in the structures of organizations in order to survive at all. Meanwhile, migrants either flinch from joining the available models or establish new structures. It is also difficult for our interlocutors-migrants to accept a strong lens, as they feel, of the “right model” of Ukrainian patriotism, which some migrants do not fit—those who do not vote in elections in Ukraine in accordance with the political views of the local community’s leaders (e.g., Poroshenko, supported by local Ukrainians[7] vs. Zelenskyy), speak Russian, and do not demonstrate attachment to the local tradition. They reject a folkloristic frame of the events and are not religious. Sometimes their professional activities or opinions about the local community posted on Facebook become the target of attacks by local Ukrainians:

(…) as a journalist, I very often report some events for the Ukrainian media and I have come across comments from the local Ukrainians several times (…) that I have lived in Poland for too short time to have any opinion on this subject. ‘You have to train yourself, educate yourself.’ (W13_I_A_w38).

Such experiences certainly do not help to establish dialogue and get to know each other and are a source of othering and bonding practices. What is more, due to circulation in social media, they become widely known and generate aloofness; they can also trigger prejudices through the prism through which migrants are perceived. This strategy is also used by migrants themselves, when they assess the level of knowledge of the literary Ukrainian language among the local Ukrainians and point to its shortcomings, using the “grandmother’s language,” a dying dialect of the Polish-Ukrainian borderland.

Conclusions

This anthropological inquiry on the role and ways of using heritage in forming a diaspora may constitute a response to the current weakness of migration studies concerning heritage and its role in establishing diasporic discourses. In order to examine its role and ways of using, we suggested treating it as one of diaspora-forming processes, i.e., an approach which localizes diaspora in the sphere of social imaginings and cultural practices that are shared, believed to be common and mobilizing people around a putative diaspora. In our concept, diaspora-forming processes consist of social imaginings and cultural practices that transform into diasporic discourses and claims (such as cultural idioms, popular cliches, and stereotypes). They cannot be then reduced to diasporic discourses only and they do not establish a diasporic “unity.” In such a perspective heritage would be an example of how such processes work mobilizing only partially some communities and being at the same time contested by others. The aforementioned interrelationship of, on the one hand, bottom-up beliefs and images of diaspora, and, on the other, discourses and claims helps to recognize the processuality of diaspora.

The proposed broadening of the meaning of heritage in diasporic processes towards lifestyle, diasporic lived experiences, and positioning viewed in translocal and vernacular perspective, stimulated by encounters with migrants, enables to go beyond static and territorialized definitions and diasporic putative in-betweenness (homeland—host land). It offers an attempt to consider processual strategies of heritagization in favor of translocality, vernacularity, and hybridity that shape past and present rather than fixed “objects” (tangible and intangible) and their valuating.

What needs to be continued in research on “diasporas-in-making” is a special focus on establishing diasporic discourses and their foundations. In order to deepen a perspective, it is not enough to claim that a diaspora is fueled by discourses (with a special role of political discourses) and that they are important in developing a diasporic identity. Researchers should ask, therefore, what and how social imaginings and cultural practices impact such discourses. Hence, there is a need to identify the beliefs and images, although they are often not verbalized and discursivised.

Drawing on the research material, it is shown that the heritage of the local Ukrainian community is not a point of reference for migrants and it cannot be considered a unifying power for different Ukrainian communities in Poland. What is more, it is challenged by the dominance of migrants from Ukraine. Nevertheless, the role of this heritage in diasporic encounters is significant as it elicits migrants’ responses to heritage-centered claims in local diasporic discourses. What is more, as shown in the analysis, it may trigger processes of othering and bonding which problematize alleged “unity” of co-ethnics. On the other hand, when confronted with “new” migrants, it provides the community with tools that help them position themselves within the Ukrainian diasporic discourses, and collectively empower instead of being marginalized as belonging to the past.

Using the perspective of heritage as one of diaspora-forming processes, we analyzed its evolution in the past and actual models and strategies of using its different components during encounters with migrants or without them. We also presented migrants’ imaginings of the local Ukrainians’ heritage which often lead to a mutual misunderstanding based on the simplified assumption that co-ethnics, although of different backgrounds, still have much in common.

Although migrant leaders and activists speak with respect about the survival of the Ukrainian community in Poland and the achievements of particular activists and leaders, note that, in principle, migrants from Ukraine en bloc perceive the local “Ukrainianness” as a bastion of anachronisms (e.g., through the lens of a “grandmother’s language”). At this point, a stereotypical perception of the profile of the local community’s activity appears as focused “only or mainly on history,” and thus backward, unfamiliar with the problems of migrants. Our research indicates that the mutual perceptions and expectations of the leaders and activists of the Ukrainian autochthonous community and migrants from Ukraine differ significantly and lead to a series of misunderstandings and disappointments.

The heritage of the members of the Ukrainian community after 1947 was shaped by the new, Communist conditions, in a situation of dispersion, modernization, and assimilation. Although today in the emic perspective it seems to be a “ready,” “found,” “owned,” and “preserved” heritage, its dynamic, processual aspect should not disappear from the horizon. Sticking to the Ukrainian heritage in Poland does not have to mean, however, being more conservative than others or living embedded in the past. While for decades the patterns of action and production of subjective positionalities had a single point of reference—the Polish society—it is now necessary to produce multiplied subjective positionalities towards Polish society and migrants. This is a new process that the Ukrainian community is entering into: a construction of dual minority positionalities.

Since the outbreak of full-scale Russian aggression on Ukraine, we have been observing the unprecedented scale of arrivals of war migrants in Poland. Although we cannot predict yet the potential influence of the recent newcomers on the diaspora-forming processes nor the scale and dynamics of their returns to Ukraine (cf. Bukowski Duszczyk, 2022), in our opinion hitherto findings from our research will long last actual.

The politization of the issue of Ukrainian presence in Poland, already observable in Polish public discourse due to the increasing number of newcomers from Ukraine, refers to both the economic and symbolic spheres, and the latter often entails the migrant-minority nexus. Hence, the profound inquiries on Ukrainian communities, reaching their own voice and unravelling the simplifying nature of relying on putative “Ukrainian identity,” especially when it comes to symbolic claims, are getting increasing importance.