kresyとは 意味・読み方・使い方

The Polish term Kresy (Polish pronunciation: [ˈkrɛsɨ], borderlands) refers to a land adjacent to what Poles consider the historical eastern frontier of their country. That is today's western territories of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. The territory belonged to Poland most recently from 1920, when it captured it from Ukraine, Belorussia (as a result of the Polish-Soviet war), and (directly) from Lithuania, until World War II. During the period of the Second Polish Republic, these territories roughly equated with the lands beyond the ethnographically determined Curzon Line suggested in December 1919 by the British Foreign Office as an eastern border of Poland and first accepted by the Poles but soon transgressed in the course of a continued war. In September 1939, after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Soviet Union occupied these territories and incorporated them into the Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. These Soviet gains were ratified by the Western Allies at the Tehran conference, the Yalta conference and the Potsdam conference. When the Soviet Union broke up, they remained part of those respective republics after they gained independence. The term also refers to the historical eastern frontiers of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Formerly a multiethnic "Ukrainian-Polish-German-Lithuanian borderland," in the course of the twentieth century it was homogenized into a "largely Ukrainian heartland."