Polonezköy (The Polish Village)

The Forest That Kept a Country Alive

Poland had been erased from the map.

The November Uprising of 1830 failed. The Russian army retook Warsaw, the uprising collapsed, and thousands of Poles went into exile. Some reached Paris. Others made their way to the one major power that had never formally recognised the partitions: the Ottoman Empire. From that second group, a few dozen people settled a patch of forested land northeast of Istanbul in 1842.

Twelve people lived there at first.

What It Looks Like

Polonezköy sits in the Beykoz district on Istanbul's Asian side, roughly 30 kilometres from the historic city centre, deep inside a forest typical of the western Black Sea region. The dominant trees are chestnut, beech, hornbeam, linden, pine, and oak. The understorey holds strawberry tree, ivy, blackberry, and laurel. Red deer, fox, squirrel, hedgehog, and dozens of bird species live in these woods.

The road into the village is narrow and canopied. At some point the city noise stops. 

White-walled farmhouses with tile roofs and fenced gardens line the lanes. A small square. 

A church facing the square. Some of the houses were built by the original Polish settlers and are still standing, their gardens running toward the tree line.

In 1994 the surrounding forest was declared a nature park. It covers approximately 3,004 hectares, making it Istanbul's largest nature park by area.

Where It Is

Beykoz occupies the northern stretch of Istanbul's Asian shore. Polonezköy lies in the forested interior of the district, about 20 kilometres from the Black Sea coast and 15 from the Bosphorus.

The village had no paved road until 1961. Electricity arrived in 1973. That isolation protected both the forest and the community inside it. The city could not reach the village before the village had learned to sustain itself.

Adam's Field

Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski led the Polish national government during the November Uprising. After the defeat he settled in Paris, running the independence movement from exile. His plan required two centers: Paris and Ottoman territory. Most European powers had accepted the partitions of Poland. The Ottomans had not.

Czartoryski sent his representative Michał Czajkowski to Istanbul. Czajkowski eventually converted to Islam and took the name Mehmed Sadık Pasha. Whether that conversion was strategic, genuine, or both is a question the records leave open. What is certain is that he secured a forested estate of around 5,000 dönüm from the Lazarist priests running the Saint Benoit French school in the city, and the first twelve Polish settlers moved in.

The village was named Adampol. Sources disagree on the exact meaning. In Polish, pole means field, which gives "Adam's field." Ottoman documents recorded it as Adamköy, "Adam's village," treating the name as a Polonized form of the Turkish. Both readings point back to the same person: Prince Adam, who funded the settlement but never lived there.

The early years were brutal. The first records list twelve residents. Contemporary accounts suggest that by 1857 only three remained. What revived the village was war. 

After the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856, Polish soldiers who had served in Ottoman units under Czajkowski's command settled in Adampol upon demobilisation. By 1856 the population had reached around 120. Later waves brought Poles escaping Siberian exile and captivity in the Caucasus. At its peak the village held around 220 people.

Sultan Abdülmecid granted tax exemptions to the settlers. Those exemptions helped the settlement survive its most fragile years.

The village chronicles gather unlikely names. Franz Liszt came in 1847, during the concert tours that took him across the Ottoman Empire. Gustave Flaubert visited in 1850, during his time in the Ottoman capital. Atatürk visited in 1937. Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, arrived in 1941 while serving as papal nuncio in Istanbul and gave religious confirmation to the village children.

The Church on the Square

The Czestochowa Virgin Mary Church was completed in 1914. Its name is a direct reference to the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, Poland's most venerated religious icon. 

Carrying that name into an Ottoman forest was a quiet act of preservation. The community continues to gather there for regular services.

The Zofia Ryży Memorial House, known locally as "Zosia Teyze'nin Anı Evi," holds photographs, documents, and objects from the village's history. It is small and specific, and what it contains exists nowhere else.

Each summer, usually in June, the village holds its Kiraz Festivali. Folk dance groups travel from Poland in traditional dress. The cherry trees in these hills produce a variety the region is known for. The festival remains closely tied to the local community, though it has also received support from the Beykoz municipality in recent years.

The village kitchen draws from the forest as much as from Central European tradition. Wild mushrooms and chestnut honey have an established place in local cooking, products of the same woodland that surrounds the settlement. For much of Polonezköy's history, pig farming supplied Istanbul's non-Muslim communities with pork. That trade required exactly the kind of legal and geographic autonomy Adampol had managed to secure.

After Polish independence in 1918, many residents returned to Poland. Those who stayed took Turkish citizenship in 1938. In 1968 the Czartoryski heirs relinquished their property rights, and the land could be bought and sold for the first time. Wealthier Istanbulites began building houses among the trees. The village's character shifted from a farming settlement to a weekend destination.

A small Polish-speaking community remains. Exact numbers vary by source. What matters is that the community still survives.

The Words Inside the Name

The name the village carries today, Polonezköy, is itself a lesson in how Turkish absorbs foreign words. Polonez entered Ottoman Turkish through the French polonaise, a word referring to something Polish or in the Polish style. Köy is the Turkish word for village.

Look at any map of Anatolia and you will see köy everywhere. It is one of the most common elements in Turkish place names. The structure of Polonezköy is a sıfat tamlaması, an adjective-noun phrase: the modifier sits before the noun, nothing is added to either word. Polonez köy. The Polish village. When the compound becomes a proper noun, the two words fuse into one: Polonezköy. Compare this with names like Salda Gölü (Lake Salda), where the second noun takes the possessive suffix -ü, "Salda its-lake," because it is a belirtisiz isim tamlaması, an indefinite noun compound. Two nouns standing together require that marker. An adjective and a noun do not. The distinction tells you something about how each name was built.

The district Polonezköy belongs to offers its own etymological puzzle. Beykoz does not contain köy at all, despite the phonetic resemblance. Two rival explanations have circulated for centuries. One traces the second syllable to the Farsi word kos, meaning village, giving "the bey's village," a reference to the Kocaeli beylerbeys who resided in the district. The other traces it to koz, the Anatolian Turkish word for walnut, because ceviz ağaçları, walnut trees, grow thickly in the area, particularly around the Akbaba neighbourhood. Beykoz would then mean something closer to "the bey's walnut grove." 

Both readings remain unconfirmed. Before the Ottoman conquest, the place was called Amikos, after a Thracian king. The name changed when the district entered Ottoman territory in 1402; the older name did not survive. Two villages sit inside this etymological landscape: Beykoz with its Persian or its walnuts, and Polonezköy with its French. The layers do not resolve into a single clean story. They rarely do in Istanbul.

The older name of the village, Adampol, follows a Slavic naming pattern. Sources read it two ways. In Polish, pole means field, giving "Adam's field." Ottoman documents recorded the same place as Adamköy, "Adam's village," which suggests the Ottomans treated Adampol as a Polonized form of their own word. Both point to the same person: Prince Adam Czartoryski. The suffix -pol in Adampol is not the same root as the Greek polis that appears in Black Sea port names like Sevastopol or Simferopol. Those carry a Greek word meaning city. Adampol carries a Polish word meaning open land. The resemblance is coincidental.

The word the village teaches most naturally is gurbet. It means being away from home, living in a foreign land. A person living in gurbet is a gurbetçi. Turkish is full of this word. 

The folk song tradition called gurbet türküleri, songs of longing sung by people far from their own soil, is one of the most enduring genres in Turkish music. The Polonezköy settlers were gurbetçi by every definition. They left under duress, they built a life elsewhere, and they kept the old songs.

Göç means migration. Göçmen is the person who migrates. Mülteci is a refugee, someone who seeks iltica, asylum. The Adampol founders were mülteci when they fled and göçmen when they settled. Their grandchildren became vatandaş, citizens, in 1938. Vatan is homeland. The suffix -daş means someone who shares something: a vatandaş shares the homeland, a yoldaş shares the road. There is a proverb that sits behind all of this: 

Vatan sevgisi imandandır, love of homeland is a matter of faith. Whose homeland, though, is the question the proverb does not answer. For the people of Polonezköy, the answer was two places at once for a very long time.

Keeping the Forest

The 1994 nature park designation protects the forest from development but does not resolve all the pressures on it. Weekend tourism has intensified since the road was paved and since the village became known across Istanbul. The question now is how much access the forest can carry.

Preserving the community presents its own challenge. The Polish-speaking population is small and aging. The church and the memorial house, together with the annual festival, are maintained by people who understand what would be lost if they stopped. That responsibility rests almost entirely with the remaining community.

Twelve people arrived in 1842, into a forest on the far edge of an empire, carrying a country that no longer existed on any official map. The forest is still there. So is the village. 

Whether it still carries the country is a question you can answer for yourself if you walk through the cemetery behind the church and read the names on the stones. Some are Polish. Some are Turkish. Most are both.

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