The village on the summit, while all the others lie in the valley. Nobody quite knows why.
In the spring of 1835 Highlanders from overcrowded Kaliczanka, near Cernăuți, set out to look for a place. They found an empty slope on the border of the Solca and Ilișești estates. On 17 July the representatives of sixteen families, led by Marian Zendek, lodged a petition with the Cernăuți district office for the southern slope of Mount Pleșa.
The petition was granted. The forester from Ilișești measured out 482 acres at between 650 and 730 metres, on both sides of the old mountain track. Houses began to go up in March 1836. So arose the second Polish Highlander village of southern Bukovina, and for a long time the only wholly Polish one.
This is the oddity everyone who comes here talks about. The villages around lie in valleys, by water and by the road. Pleșa lies on the summit, at 734 metres. Historians have no clear explanation; two legends circulate, but neither can be proved.
The people here have their own answer, simpler and better: the higher up, the closer to God.
Linguists came to study the speech, expecting archaisms after two centuries of isolation. The result surprised them: the Polish of Pleșa hardly differs from today's. The people themselves insist anyway that they speak „the Pleșa way”, not Polish.
And a Polish teacher settled here for good only in 1906, later than in any other Polish village of Bukovina. The language, then, held on by itself, without a school, for seventy years.
On the summit stands the church of Saint Anne, consecrated in 1904. During the Second World War the villagers wandered through northern Bukovina; they returned in 1945 and found it wholly destroyed. On this hill German troops had held out against the Soviet army standing at Solca.
After the repatriates left for Poland, about fifty Polish families remained. They rebuilt the church and stayed.
The church belonged in turn to the parish of Gura Humorului, from 1921 to Solonețu Nou, and from 2003 to Poiana Micului. A parish of its own was erected only in 2014. The first priest was Father Andrzej Staszkowian, himself a descendant of Bukovina Highlanders from neighbouring Solonețu Nou; he died in 2022. The parish books today list 153 faithful.
One hundred and seventeen people, all of Polish descent and all Catholic. Polish is taught in the kindergarten and in grades one to four. The „Pleszanka” ensemble is active. There is no museum and no information point: there is a village, a church on the summit and the view over the Obcine.
For someone looking for traces of family, that can be worth more than any exhibition: in Pleșa you can still ask about a surname and get an answer.
1869: twenty-five houses. The peak in 1940, then the repatriations to Poland and the slow drift to the towns.
He led the sixteen families from Kaliczanka and lodged the petition with the Cernăuți district office for the southern slope of Mount Pleșa. Without that piece of paper there would be no village.
A descendant of Bukovina Highlanders from Solonețu Nou, first priest of the independent parish of Pleșa from 2014. On his initiative the chapel of Saint John Paul II was raised in the old cemetery, blessed in 2016.
She runs the „Pleszanka” ensemble. She is also the person to ask about a bed, if anyone wants to stay in the village longer than an afternoon.
The plans from Ceaușescu's time to move the village off the hill into blocks in the valley are described in Polish travel accounts; we have found no official source for them, so we give it as something told, not as fact.
Sources: the Union of Poles in Romania (dompolski.ro), the Polish Wikipedia after works on the Czadca Highlanders, the censuses of 1930, 2011 and 2021, and the account of the village's 180th anniversary, 2016.
Czytaj dalej
Your base
Câmpulung Moldovenesc is an hour from the Polish villages and an hour from the painted monasteries. The whole house, seven beds, parking in the yard.
Via Transilvanica