Polesia or
Polesie is one of the largest European
swampy areas, located in the south-western part of the
Eastern-European Lowland, mainly within the territories of
Belarus and
Ukraine but also partly within
Poland and
Russia. The swamp areas of Polesia are known as the
Pripyat Marshes (after the
Pripyat River) or
Pinsk Marshes (after the major local city of
Pinsk).
The name Polesia is from a Slavic root and loosely translates as "woodland". Polesie [p?'l???] is the Polish spelling; other names include Belarusian Pales’sye (????????) [pa'l?es?s?e], Ukrainian Polissya (???????), Russian Poles’ye (???????); Latin Polesia.
An inhabitant of Polesia is called Poleszuk in Polish; Palashuk in Belarusian, Polishchuk in the local Ukrainian dialect, and Poleshchuk in Russian.
Polesia is a marshy region lining the Pripyat River in Southern Belarus (Brest, Pinsk, Kalinkavichy, Homel), Northern Ukraine (in the Volyn, Rivne, Zhytomyr, Kiev, and Chernihiv Oblasts), and partly in Poland (Lublin) and Russia (Bryansk). It is a flatland within the watersheds of the Western Bug and Prypyat rivers. The two rivers are connected by the Dnieper-Bug Canal, built during the reign of Stanislaw August Poniatowski, the last king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
