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Lusatia (; ; ; ; ; ), otherwise known as Sorbia, is a region in Central Europe, territorially split between Germany and Poland. Lusatia stretches from the Bóbr and Kwisa rivers in the east to the Pulsnitz and Black Elster rivers in the west, and is located within the German states of Saxony and Brandenburg and the Polish of Lower Silesia and Lubusz. Major rivers of Lusatia are the Spree and the Lusatian Neisse, which defines the border between Germany and Poland. The Lusatian Mountains of the Sudetes separate Lusatia from Bohemia (Czech Republic) in the south. Lusatia is traditionally divided into Upper Lusatia, the hilly southern part, and Lower Lusatia, the flat northern part.
The areas east and west along the Spree in the German part of Lusatia are home to the Slavs Sorbs, one of Germany’s four officially recognized indigenous ethnic minorities. The Upper Sorbs inhabit Saxon Upper Lusatia, and the Lower Sorbs Brandenburgian Lower Lusatia. Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian are spoken in the German parts of Upper and Lower Lusatia respectively, and the signage there is mostly bilingual.
Tacitus states that this entire region was part of Germania and that in and before the second century was populated by Germanic tribes.Tacitus, Germania, translated by M. Hutton and edited by E.H. Warmington, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England, 1st edition 1914; this edition 1970, From the seventh century Slavs began migrating into this region. Subsequently it has been ruled variously by Germany, Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary.
The Lusatian Lake District is Europe's largest artificial lake district. The village of Herrnhut (Ochranow) is the seat of the Moravian Church. Muskau Park in Bad Muskau (Mužakow) and Łęknica is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Tropical Islands Resort, a large water park housed in a former airship hangar that is the biggest free-standing hall in the world, is located in the north of Lusatia. The closest international airport to Lusatia is Dresden Airport in Klotzsche (Kłóčow).
The largest Lusatian city is Cottbus (Chóśebuz), with nearly 100,000 inhabitants. Other notable towns are the former members of the Lusatian League: the German/Polish twin towns of Görlitz (Zhorjelc) and Zgorzelec, Bautzen (Budyšin), Zittau (Žitawa), Lubań, Kamenz (Kamjenc), and Löbau (Lubij)), as well as Żary, the German/Polish twin towns of Guben (Gubin) and Gubin, Hoyerswerda (Wojerecy), Senftenberg (Zły Komorow), Eisenhüttenstadt (Pśibrjog), and Spremberg (Grodk).
Upper Lusatia is characterized by fertile soil and undulating hills as well as by historic towns and cities such as Bautzen, Görlitz, Zittau, Löbau, Kamenz, Lubań, Bischofswerda, Herrnhut, Hoyerswerda, and Bad Muskau. Many villages in the very south of Upper Lusatia contain a typical attraction of the region, the so-called Umgebindehäuser, half-timbered-houses representing a combination of Franconian and Slavic style. Among those villages are Niedercunnersdorf, Obercunnersdorf, Wehrsdorf, Jonsdorf, Sohland an der Spree with Taubenheim, Oppach, Varnsdorf or Ebersbach.
Between Upper and Lower Lusatia is a region called the Grenzwall, literally meaning "border dyke", although it is in fact a morainic ridge. In the Middle Ages this area had dense forests, so it represented a major obstacle to civilian and military traffic. Some of the region's villages were damaged or destroyed by the open-pit lignite mining industry during the DDR era. Some, now exhausted, former open-pit mines are now being converted into artificial lakes, with the hope of attracting holiday-makers, and the area is now being referred to as the Lusatian Lake District.
The new lakeland is largely created from remaining holes from former brown coal opencast mines. These are flooded and converted into lakes. Some of the resulting lakes have already reached their final water level, others will not be completely flooded for a few years.
Other lakes are artificially dammed lakes. While the Quitzdorf Dam was created to provide enough process water for the Boxberg Power Station, the Spremberg Dam was primarily planned for flood protection in the lake district, but was also used for process water for power plants. The Bautzen Reservoir was also artificially created in order to be able to continuously supply the Boxberg Power Station with water.
The ponds of the Upper Lusatian Heath and Pond Landscape Biosphere Reserve, which are also located in the Lake District area, were partly created in the Middle Ages, but also during the GDR period for agricultural reasons, as the moor-rich land was restructured and made usable. These very shallow waters are mostly used for fish farming.
The ponds of the Muskau Arch are also located between the large opencast mining holes. They arose from faults in the terminal moraine of glaciers from the Ice Age, and partly through the mining of soil raw materials such as sand, clay and coal even before industrialization. In general, these ponds are not created intentionally by humans, but are filled with water due to a lack of drainage.
A glacier on the inland ice that was up to 500 m thick compressed the sand and brown coal layers in front of and below it over a length of more than 40 km to form a small-scale fold arch with a compression terminal moraine up to 180 m high and 700 m wide. The structure is currently preserved as a flat, undulating hill range and is almost unique in the world. The meltwater lake that subsequently emerged within the horseshoe was filled with clays. Ice advances in the following cold periods eroded the higher parts of the terminal moraine. Due to oxidation and the associated loss of volume in the areas near the surface of the brown coal seams, furrows of 3 m to 5 m, a maximum of 20 m deep, 10 m to 30 m wide and up to several kilometers long were formed. Known as "Gieser" (from the Sorbian "jězor" for "lake"), they form long stretches of drainless ditches that are either filled with standing water or often peat-covered.
After already centuries of extraction of clay and sand, brown coal was mined in the area of the Muskau Arch in the 19th and 20th centuries, partly in pillar mining and partly in opencast mining. Due to the location of the mined seams, noticeably elongated lakes formed in the remaining holes north and east of Weißwasser after the end of mining.
In the 10th century, the region came under the influence of the Kingdom of Germany, starting with the 928 eastern campaigns of King Henry the Fowler. Until 963 the Lusatian tribes were subdued by the Saxon margrave Gero and upon his death two years later, the March of Lusatia was established on the territory of today's Lower Lusatia and remained with the Holy Roman Empire, while the adjacent Northern March again got lost in the Slavic uprising of 983. The later Upper Lusatian region of the Milceni lands up to the border at the Kwisa river at first was part of the Margraviate of Meissen under Margrave Eckard I.
At the same time the Polan duke of the later Kingdom of Poland raised claims to the Lusatian lands and upon the death of Emperor Otto III in 1002, Margrave Gero II lost Lusatia to the Polish Duke Boleslaw I the Brave, who took the region in his conquests, acknowledged by Henry II first in the same year in Merseburg and later in the 1018 Peace of Bautzen, Lusatia became part of his territory; however, Germans and Poles continued to struggle over the administration of the region. It was regained in a 1031 campaign by Emperor Conrad II in favour of the Saxon German rulers of the Meissen House of Wettin and the Ascanian margraves of Brandenburg, who purchased the March of (Lower) Lusatia in 1303.
In 1367 the Brandenburg elector Otto V of Wittelsbach finally sold Lower Lusatia to King Karel of Bohemia, thereby becoming a Bohemian crown land.
In 1346 six Upper Lusatian cities formed the Lusatian League to resist the constant attacks conducted by robber barons. The association supported King Sigismund in the Hussite Wars leading to armed attacks and devastation. The cities were represented in the (Upper) Lusatian Landtag assembly, where they met with the fierce opposition of the noble state country. In 1469 the region passed to Hungary, and in 1490 it returned to the Bohemian Crown, then under the rule of Polish Prince Vladislaus II.
Following the Lutheran Reformation, the greater part of Lusatia became Protestantism except for the area between Bautzen, Kamenz and Hoyerswerda. The Lusatias remained under Bohemian rule – from 1526 onwards under the rule of the House of Habsburg – until the Thirty Years' War.
Herrnhut, between Löbau and Zittau, founded in 1722 by religious refugees from Moravia on the estate of Count Nicolaus Zinzendorf became the starting point of the organized Protestant missionary movement in 1732 and missionaries went out from the Moravian Church in Herrnhut to all corners of the world to share the Gospel.
The newly established Kingdom of Saxony, however, sided with Napoleon; therefore, at the 1815 Congress of Vienna, Lusatia was divided, with Lower Lusatia and the northeastern part of Upper Lusatia around Hoyerswerda, Rothenburg, Görlitz, and Lauban awarded to Prussia. Only the southwestern part of Upper Lusatia, which included Löbau, Kamenz, Bautzen, and Zittau, remained part of Saxony.
One of the main escape routes for insurgents of the unsuccessful Polish November Uprising from partitioned Poland to the Great Emigration led through Lübben and Luckau.
The 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed an era of cultural revival for Sorbs. The modern languages of Upper and Lower Lusatian (or Sorbian) emerged, national literature flourished, and many national organizations such as Maćica Serbska and Domowina were founded. There were also notable Polish communities in Lusatia, such as Klettwitz (, ), inhabited in the 1930s by some 550 Poles.
During World War I, Germany operated two prisoner-of-war camps and a detention center for Russian, French, British, Belgian, Serbian, Romanian, Italian, Portuguese and Australian POWs in Cottbus (Chóśebuz). After the war, until 1923, the former POW camp was used as a concentration camp for some 1,200 to 1,500 Polish activists, civilians and insurgents (including women with children) of the Silesian Uprisings of 1919–1921, who were often subjected to harassment, beatings and tortures.Stanek, pp. 84–85, 91–94, 100
In the interbellum, the German government carried out a massive campaign of changing of place names in Lusatia in order to erase traces of Slavic origin, and while most of the historic names were restored after World War II, some were retained.
This era came to an end during the Nazism regime in Germany, when all Sorbian organizations were abolished and forbidden, newspapers and magazines closed, and any use of the Sorbian languages was prohibited.
During the war, the Germans established and operated several prisoner-of-war camps, including Oflag III-C, Oflag IV-D, Oflag 8, Stalag III-B, Stalag IV-A and Stalag VIII-A, with multiple forced labour subcamps in the region. Prisoners included Polish POWs and civilians, and French, Belgian, British, Australian, New Zealander, Canadian, South African, Dutch, Italian, Soviet, Serbian, Slovak and American POWs. (2025). 9780253060891, Indiana University Press, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. ISBN 9780253060891 There were also several Nazi prisons with multiple forced labour subcamps, including in Görlitz, Luckau, Zittau, and a prison solely for women in Cottbus, and multiple subcamps of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, the prisoners of which were mostly Jews, Poles and Russians, but also Frenchmen, Italians, Yugoslavs, Czechs, Belgians, etc.
During the war, the Poles postulated that after the defeat of Germany, the Sorbs should be allowed free national development either within the borders of Poland or Czechoslovakia, or as an independent Sorbian state in alliance with Poland.
The Eastern Front reached Lusatia in early 1945, with Soviet and Polish troops defeating the Germans and capturing the region. In Horka, on April 26, 1945, the Germans carried out a massacre of a field hospital column of the 9th Polish Armored Division, killing some 300 POWs, mostly wounded soldiers and medical personnel (see German atrocities committed against Polish prisoners of war).
In 1945, the northeastern part of Upper Lusatia west of the Neisse rejoined Saxony and in 1952, when the state was divided into three administrative areas ( Bezirke), the Upper Lusatian region became part of the Dresden administrative region. After the East German Revolution of 1989, the state of Saxony was reestablished in 1990. Lower Lusatia remained with Brandenburg, from 1952 until 1990 in the Bezirk of Cottbus.
In 1950, the Sorbs obtained language and cultural autonomy within the then–East German state of Saxony. Lusatian schools and magazines were launched and the Domowina association was revived, although under increasing political control of the ruling Communist Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). At the same time, the large German-speaking majority of the Upper Lusatian population kept up a considerable degree of local, 'Upper Lusatian' patriotism of its own. An attempt to establish a Lusatian Land within the Federal Republic of Germany failed after German reunification in 1990. The constitutions of Saxony and Brandenburg guarantee cultural rights, but not autonomy, to the Sorbs.
There is a daily newspaper in the Sorbian language ( Serbske Nowiny); a Sorbian radio station (Serbski Rozhłós) uses local frequencies of two otherwise German-speaking radio stations for several hours a day. There are very limited programmes on television (once a month) in Sorbian on two regional television stations (RBB and MDR TV).
In 2020, despite the loss of the Sorbian language in most of Lusatia, there are some Sorbian traditions and habits that still live on to this day. In February, many people (mostly people from villages, regardless of German or Sorbian ancestry) will still engage in the Sorbian tradition of Zampern (a festive procession) . Some Sorbian dishes like boiled potatoes with linseed oil and curd (German: Quark mit Leineöl) are still prevalent and, today, are eaten in other parts of Germany (like Berlin or western Saxony) too. Spreewälder Gurken (pickled cucumbers potted by using a special mixture of herbs and spices) are often associated with the Sorbs even though the cucumbers themselves were introduced by Dutch migrants, who started to pickle them for higher durability. Soon Sorbs adopted the pickling and might have changed the recipes slightly over time.
The traditional Sorbian costumes are still to be worn in the Spreewald region even though mainly in the tourism industry. Recently, some women started to revive traditional clothes by using them as wedding dresses, even though this practise differs from original traditions.
The percentage of Sorbs in Lusatia has decreased since the 1900 census due to intermarriage, Germanization, cultural assimilation related to industrialization and urbanization, Nazi suppression and discrimination, ethnocide and the settlement of expelled Germans after World War II, mainly from Lower Silesia and northern Bohemia.
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There are two major Sorbian museums in Cottbus ( Serbski muzej Chóśebuz) and Bautzen ( Serbski muzej Budyšin).
In Poland, notable museums include the Muzeum Łużyckie ("Lusatian Museum") in Zgorzelec and the Muzeum Pogranicza Śląsko-Łużyckiego ("Museum of Silesian-Lusatian Borderland") in Żary.
Zgorzelec is home to one of Poland's largest war cemeteries.
The CargoLifter airship hangar that now houses the Tropical Islands Resort is the largest freebearing hall in the world.
The Saurierpark Kleinwelka is Germany's largest dinosaur park.
Herrnhut is also a UNESCO world heritage site since 2024.
The Spree Forest as well as the Upper Lusatian Heath and Pond Landscape are UNESCO biosphere reserves.
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