Cultural landscape as element of spatial negotiations in a small town: The example of Giżycko, Poland

We are used to situations where landscapes are decomposing, changing and disappearing – it is a common side-effect of globalization, migrations, weakening of cross-generational transmission, climate change, rapid and chaotic urbanization processes, etc. However, what happens when the physical part of a landscape remains but the people are gone? After the Second World War, there were several places in Europe where the change of population was in total due to mass exterminations and forced migrations of all nations or groups. One of these was Mazury, where the former German population was moved in 1945 and replaced by Polish immigrants from many different areas. The new community had to reintegrate the landscape and put new narrations to places and objects they found on site. Some of the pre-war characters of the region remained despite an almost complete population shift, which may lead to a conclusion that landscapes have an element of their own biography.