The Bialowieza forest at the border of Poland and Belarus has served as the last sanctuary of the European Bison since the 18th century. In the 1920’s the ‘King of the Forest’ nearly died out. Only in the 1950s, following their reintroduction into nature did the Bisons’ population begin to grow once more. The forest gained international importance first as a hunting ground for Polish kings and Russian Tsars, then, as a Polish and Belarusian national park, and finally as an UNESCO world heritage site. This book traces the history of the Bialowieza national park from the Early Modern period to the present. It focuses on the human relationship to nature, seen as both a resource for exploitation and an intrinsic good requiring preservation, and considers the everyday life of the human population under the park’s different rulers over the course of the 20th century.weiterlesen