Podlasie fairy tales

Folk tales from the Podlasie and Suwałki regions

Na tej stronie internetowej możecie wysłuchać nagrań z bajkami i legendami, na podstawie których Justyna Bednarek napisała swoje bajki. Przeczytacie je w książce pt. „Cuda nad Rospudą i inne bajki ludowe. Podlasie i Suwalszczyzna” wydanej przez Narodowy Instytut Kultury i Dziedzictwa Wsi. Oprócz bajek, w książce znajdziecie piękne ilustracje Macieja Szymanowicza.

The fairy tales we are writing about were told by storytellers from the Podlasie and Suwałki areas. Among them were Maria Khazbiyevich, Krystyna Cieśluk, Anna Fionik, Zofia Gibowicz, Dorota Halicka, Marcin Halicki, Teresa Harasiuk, Wacława Kapłanow, Halina Kochańska, Józef Murawski, Weronika Wolańska and Anastazja Sidor. The songs were sung by Malgorzata Makowska and Marcin Lycinko.

The rich content of the fairy tales - the original ones and those compiled in literary form by Justyna Bednarek - depict the life, beliefs and customs of the inhabitants of Polish, Belarusian, Lithuanian, Tatar and from the Old Believers religious community. They show what life in the old Podlasie and Suwałki villages looked like and what it was characterized by.

In the book we have included QR codes that link directly to the website with the recordings on which the fairy tale was based. This is all so that you can listen to the amazing tales yourself, both in Polish and in the dialect version, or the language of the ethnic minority in which the tale is told. Thus, you will hear dialects from the region of Goniadz, Leipzig, Wiżajn, areas from the Augustow Forest to the Belovezhskaya Pushcha, and that of the Old Belovezh. In addition, you will hear the sound of Belarusian and Lithuanian languages, which are spoken on a daily basis by Belarusians and Lithuanians living in the Podlaskie region.

Using this website, you will notice that the title of a given subpage with recordings is the same as the title of the fairy tale in the book, while the recording itself has a different title. This is because for the recordings we have kept the original titles, that is, the ones used by the storytellers in their stories. What's more, you'll hear that some of the recordings are slightly different from the content of the tales in the book. Justyna Bednarek, listening to the same materials as you, gave them a literary shape of eight beautiful fairy tales.

You will also notice that some of the tales in the book are longer than the recordings, and have characters and themes that you won't find here. From the trip to Podlasie and Suwalszczyzna we brought back more than twenty recordings, some of which contained stories, family memories, trivia. Although Justyna Bednarek used all of them, here we include only those in the form of traditional fairy tales that your parents and grandparents have told you more than once.

We hope you enjoy the attached recordings!