Sõmerpalu (population 2020: 324) is an urban settlement in Võru County, in the south of Estonia. The core is a manor estate from the 16th century, with the existing buildings dating back to the 1860s.


Estonia is a country in north-eastern Europe. It is inhabited by around 1.3 million people and borders Latvia, Russia and the Baltic Sea. The most populous city and capital is Tallinn.
Today's Estonian state only regained its political independence in 1991 as a result of the so-called “Singing Revolution” in the Baltic states and in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Estonian independence was first proclaimed in 1918 and achieved through the “Estonian War of Independence” (1918-1920). As early as 1940, this first Estonian state was replaced by the “Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic”, which was founded under Soviet occupation. With an interruption due to the German occupation during the Second World War (1941-1944) and with slightly different borders, it was a constituent republic of the Soviet Union until 1991. Before 1918, the territory of present-day Estonia was part of the Russian Empire, with its northern part forming the Baltic Governorate of Estonia and its southern part the northern half of the Baltic Governorate of Livonia. In the High and Late Middle Ages and at the beginning of the early modern period, parts of today's country were also under Swedish, Danish and Polish rule, while the Livonian part was also under the sovereignty of the Teutonic Order until 1561.
Estonia has been part of the European Union and NATO since 2004.
Latvia is a Baltic state in the north-east of Europe and is home to about 1.9 million inhabitants. The capital of the country is Riga. The state borders in the west on the Baltic Sea and on the states of Lithuania, Estonia, Russia and Belarus. Latvia has been a member of the EU since 01.05.2004 and only became independent in the 19th century.
The Reichsgau Wartheland, also known as Warthegau, was a Nazi administrative district in occupied Poland that existed from 1939 to 1945. The Reichsgau was in large parts congruent with the historical landscape of Wielkopolska and had 4.5 million inhabitants. The capital was today's Poznań.
The almost six-year occupation period was characterized by the brutal persecution and murder of the Polish and Jewish population on the one hand and the targeted resettlement of German-speaking parts of the population on the other.
Image: „Map of the administrative division of the German Eastern Territories and the General Government of the occupied Polish territories as of March 1940“. Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe – Institute of the Leibniz Association, map collection, inventory no. K 32 II L 43, edited by Copernico (2022). CC0 1.0.


The historical landscape of Volhynia is located in northwestern Ukraine on the border with Poland and Belarus. Already in the late Middle Ages the region fell to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and from 1569 on belonged to the united Polish-Lithuanian noble republic for more than two centuries. After the partitions of Poland-Lithuania at the end of the 18th century, the region came under the Russian Empire and became the name of the Volhynia Governorate, which lasted until the early 20th century. The Russian period also saw the immigration of German-speaking population (the so-called Volhyniendeutsche), which peaked in the second half of the 19th century. After the First World War Volhynia was divided between Poland and the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, from 1939, as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, completely Soviet and already in 1941 occupied by the Wehrmacht. Under German occupation there was systematic persecution and murder of the Jewish population as well as other parts of the population.
After World War II, Volhynia again belonged to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and since 1992 to Ukraine. The landscape gives its name to the present-day Ukrainian oblast with its capital Luzk (ukr. Луцьк), which is not exactly congruent.

