Papierówki – “Paper Apples”
The migration of an apple variety
Kosewo ist ein Dorf am Jezioro Probarskie (Probergsee) in der polnischen Woiwodschaft Ermland-Masuren, das 1546 als „Kossewen“ gegründet wurde. Von 1938 bis 1945 hieß es Rechenberg (Ostpr.) 2011 hatte Kosewo knapp über 400 Einwohner:innen.
As a boy, Stefan Tymiec (born in 1950) had plenty of opportunities to pick fruit. In the gardens of his friends and on abandoned plots of land that nobody used. Or in
Kajkowo is a village on the Jezioro Sajmino, near the town of Ostróda. It was first mentioned in a document in 1335. In 2011, 1092 people lived in Kajkowo.
For more than a century, the summer apple was in great demand. The variety, which originated in
Riga is the capital of Latvia (population 2023: 605,273) and by far the largest city in the country. It is located in the southwest of the historical landscape of Livonia near the mouth of the Daugava River in the Gulf of Riga. Riga was an important trading and Hanseatic city with a multi-ethnic, but largely German-speaking population for centuries, whose political supremacy changed repeatedly. Until the end of the Middle Ages, it was mainly spiritual rulers (Archbishopric of Riga, Teutonic Order) who claimed the city and surrounding area for themselves, but after a brief period of Polish-Lithuanian rule, the city came under Swedish control in 1621. A century later, Riga became part of the Russian Empire and the capital of the Baltic governorate of Livonia.
In 1918, Riga became the capital of an independent Latvian state. After the German occupation during the Second World War in 1941, the Jewish population of Riga (8% of the total population) was mainly imprisoned in the ghetto, where numerous Jewish people from the territory of the German Reich at the time were also deported. In the same year, the Wehrmacht organized mass shootings of the Jewish population in the area of today's city. After the Second World War, the ethnic structure of Riga changed - the Jewish, German and Polish populations disappeared and were replaced by Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian populations. The Latvian population lost its majority in the city and fell to almost a third by the time the Soviet Union collapsed. They now make up 47% of the total population.
A few papierówki trees still stand in front of the castle in Sztynort. It is said that they were planted in the 1960s, at the request of the then chairman of the collective farm. Today the apples fall from the tree, and no one comes to pick them up.
The village beekeeper also misses the early blossoming trees, which always provided his bees with plenty of food. He, too, is the last of his kind. Before 1989, there were still twelve in Sztynort....
Nowadays, "papierówki" have only sentimental value, for people like Stefan Tymiec.