The memory still endures in the names of the German generations… Forest Germans in Franciszek Siarczyński's anthropogeographical description of Galicia

This text analyses the anthropogeographical and ethnographic clues about the Forest Germans [Głusi Niemcy, Głuchoniemcy] in the Carpathian Foothills by the Enlightenment scholar and priest, Franciszek Siarczyński. In his description of Galicia at the dawn of the 19th century, the author explored the phenomenon of descendants of German-speaking settlers brought to the former Polish–Ruthenian frontier by King Kazimierz the Great in the 14th century. Siarczyński created an account that reflected the processes of describing the rural populations, their culture, and their history in the context of the space they inhabited that were characteristic of the late Polish Enlightenment. Among other things, he devoted considerable attention to the etymology of the term ‘Forest Germans’, and conducted field observations in the village of Markowa, near Łańcut, where he recorded old songs and elements of the local language, indicating that the residents spoke a distorted form of German. The materials collected by Siarczyński are likely the most detailed among existing studies on the Forest Germans in Polish literature. Furthermore, they provide an insight into the beginning of history of the scientific discourse that has developed around this phenomenon since the turn of the 18th and 19t centuries.