Silesia

Silesia has belonged in turn to Polish dukes, the Bohemian crown, the Habsburgs, Prussia, Germany, and Poland, and few regions show more plainly how Central Europe's borders moved around the people living in them. Its upper reaches along the Oder River held one of the continent's great coal and steel basins, and its capital, Wrocław, the German Breslau, is now among Poland's liveliest cities. After the Second World War almost all of Silesia's German population fled or was expelled, and Poles, many of them displaced from the east, resettled the land. Silesia is no longer a single unit on any map, but a strong regional identity survives, and many Upper Silesians seek official recognition of their Silesian speech as a regional language.

Silesia covers about 40,000 square kilometers of the upper and middle Oder basin, between the Sudetes and Beskids on the south and the plains of Greater Poland on the north. Lower Silesia, downstream around Wrocław, is a land of farms, spa towns, and castles beneath the Karkonosze, the Giant Mountains. Upper Silesia, around Katowice, Opole, and Gliwice, sits on the coal seams that made it an industrial heartland. Today the great majority lies in Poland, across the Lower Silesian, Opole, and Silesian voivodeships and part of Lubusz. Czechia holds Czech Silesia around Opava and Ostrava, now in the Moravian-Silesian Region. Germany keeps a small area west of the Neisse River around Görlitz in Saxony, the remnant of Prussian Lower Silesia.

Silesian duchies ruled by branches of Poland's Piast dynasty passed under the Bohemian crown, a shift the Polish king accepted in the Treaty of Trentschin in 1335. With Bohemia, Silesia came to the Habsburgs in 1526. Frederick II of Prussia seized most of it in 1742, leaving Austria only a southern fringe around Opava and Cieszyn, which after 1918 was divided between Czechoslovakia and Poland. In Upper Silesia, a 1921 plebiscite and a Polish uprising were followed by a partition in 1922 that gave Katowice and much of the industrial district to Poland. The Potsdam Conference in 1945 placed nearly all German Silesia east of the Oder–Neisse line under Polish administration, a border that a united Germany confirmed by treaty in 1990.

• The Holy Roman Empire
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• The Kingdom of Prussia
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• Bohemia
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• Galicia (Central Europe)
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• Czechia
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• Germany
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• Poland
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