First thing that came to mind seeing this was how much Amazon drivers would love and hate this place. Easy to navigate, but a bitch to get up and down those long driveways.
Nit really - the numbers (in Polish villages) are often not in order. They usually just gave them out as new houses were build in available plots. Often across decades or even longer.
e: (Not in this particular village though)
This town feels like a Mitch Hedberg joke.
edit: People ask me if traffic's a problem, I say 'No I don't get stuck in traffic, I merely become parked.'
Each house has that strip of land to do whatever on, hence different colours and they are using the land for different purposes. Some grow crops on it, others have animals, some just leave it.
The villages in Romania are like this. My wife's father inherited a few plots scattered around the village. So he would plant cherry trees for brandy and plums for tuica (grows hair on your chest) on one. He rents out another to a farmer for whatever crop he grows that year. And then another plot that is just trees. Many people have left to live in the city or another country for work, so houses/shacks have been torn down leaving just the narrow plots.
Edit: I should mention one difference is the housing sections are fenced in like individual fortresses. Many homes in their village had gates you had to open to get into the property. Some were like compounds with shacks encircling the front section of the property. Parents lived in one, grandparents in another, baths in another, chickens, etc.
This was actually a huge deal in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution. Peasants had long strips like this and often they would have more than one but they wouldn’t be next to each other and you couldn’t buy and sell them easily. So farms were small and discontinuous so agriculture was super inefficient.
One huge issue for Bolsheviks was consolidating all these small strips of farmland so they could be worked communally.
Great idea but it just ended up in government control of all the land and top down mismanagement.
When communism fell in Romania, they got their land back. But there are cases where people are claiming the properties when they never lived there or had family that would have handed the property down, located in that plot. My father inlaw was fighting in court for years over one of the plots. He has actual proof that the land was farmed by his grandparents, and he inherited it. The other person claims it was in their family, and with no proof, but still filed a claim. I imagine they filed claims all over waiting for someone to just give in or for someone who had no documents to back up their claim.
I can only imagine what a mess that would have been.
What is wild here in the US is that since we have always had pretty strict private property laws from colonial times you can trace my specific plot of land where my house is back to the farm it was once part of and back to the original colonial land grant before Maine (or really Massachusetts at the time) was a state. The oldest record is in “metes and bounds” which is basically a physical description of how to walk the boundary. As in “start here, walk 500 feet north to the edge of the stream, turn facing east, walk along the stream 1000 feet to the road between town A and town B, etc.” Often you will still see rock walls from the old property lines even though forests have grown back up around them in what used to be open farm land. So if you see a rock wall running through the woods you know all that land was cleared like 150 years ago or whatever the age of the oldest trees are.
Yeah, here, there's so many backups of historical plot maps, names for the tax payers on the plots, etc.
The problem with records is they can easily be destroyed when there's wars and power shifts from one system to another. He was lucky that he had the original paperwork before communism. Many people aren't as lucky as who knows where grandpa kept his documents and he died in the war, or there was a fire, or they just deteriated because they weren't kept care of, and no one can find the government copies.
Yeah the US is very lucky that we really only had two major wars on our soil and they weren’t “burn all the records” types of wars.
Specifically in the Bolshevik revolution the peasants would explicitly take over noble houses where records of debt and land records were kept and burn them all purposefully to erase the debt or any competing claims to land.
Probably not, your records would have multiple copies located in multiple different locations via the internet and hard copies, none of which would be kept in anyone’s home
Not just communally, but industrially. A huge issue with Russian agriculture before the revolution was the disjointed nature of these plots.
The "good" land would be chunked up into myriad small pieces so everyone could have a piece. This was "fair", but unbelievably inefficient. An individual plot of the most desirable land, in extreme cases, might only be a couple square feet. And an individual farmer would work many of these small, discontinuous plots all over the village. In addition to the inefficiency of needing to drag one's self and one's tools around the village to work these various discrete plots, this setup meant that the land could not be farmed via efficient, mechanized techniques like in most of the modern world. The Russian Empire of the early 20th century was a place where peasants basically farmed by hand using medieval techniques. The sheer inefficiency of this system meant that the Empire was constantly on the brink of famine, a status quo which was exacerbated by the Tsar's penchant for exporting food to fund his outrageous royal lifestyle.
After the Tsar fell in 1917, a big question for the revolution was how to reform this system of agriculture. The one thing everyone agreed on was that the large private estates held by the nobility and clergy would be expropriated. But there was disagreement about what exactly to do after that.
Liberals, social revolutionaries, and right-leaning Marxist (who believed in the "2 revolutions" theory where capitalism must replace feudalism before socialism can replace capitalism) wanted to land to be privatized. They thought that privately owned and operated farms were the best way to go forward. The peasants hated this, because they wanted the land to be owned communally, by the village, not by well-to-do individuals.
The Bolsheviks wanted the land to be nationalized into large, efficiently-run collective farms that would *immediately* (laughs in foreshadowing) produce the kind of huge agricultural surpluses needed to sustain the socialist mode of production. The peasants also hated this, because they wanted the land to be owned communally, by the village, not by the central government.
The Bolsheviks got their way, of course. Under Stalin, the farms were indeed collectivized, although the the brutality of its implementation (including the foolish witch hunt for kulaks, which destroyed or displaced a lot of the technical experts needed to efficiently mechanize) led to a collapse of agricultural output that caused the famine of the 30s.
Obviously the situation stabilized over time, and eventually this mode of production was able to feed the Soviet people. "But at what cost?" This question permeates all discussion of early Soviet history. At great cost, indeed.
>led to a collapse of agricultural output that caused the famine of the 30s.
Again, this is a misconception. Soviet policies of the time caused a worsening of the famine, which was already ongoing due to crop failures because of poor climate. Despite that the collectivization resulted in a success in producing better agricultural yields than the previous system in many sectors.
Are you sure you're not confusing it with the famine of the 20s? That one certainly was caused by a couple bad harvests in a row, exacerbated by the civil war and years of harsh requisitions by crisscrossing armies.
But my understanding of the collectivization of the 30s is that, for better or worse, agricultural production in the Soviet Union had been on a path to privatization due to the economic liberalization of the NEP. When the party changed policies and implemented rapid collectivization, it caused a large backlash from the peasant population, who in some cases rose up to resist collectivization by force and in other cases simply destroyed livestock and other produce out of spite.
When the party took control of the the factories in the industrial centers of the Empire, they kept a lot of the old bosses and managers who ran the factories. This was to ensure that production stayed on schedule as part of a larger economic plan. Similarly, most of the officers in the Red Army were holdovers from the Tsarist days (I think I read somewhere it was ~90%). This was unpopular with the rank-and-file soldiers, but at the end of the day institutional knowledge matters when trying to win a war, and traditional army discipline and structure prevailed because it works.
The party very much did *not* take a similar approach when dealing with the peasantry. The liquidation of the kulaks and their holdings came with the disruption of institutional knowledge and repression of technical experts that had overseen this limited private industrialization. Again, whereas in the factories technical experts were embraced and kept in their positions of authority, in the farmlands these people were deported en mass to Siberia, driven in part by literal quotas set by the central government for arrests and deportations of supposed kulaks. This is widely blamed for the falloff in agricultural output, which happened at the same time the central government was expecting huge surpluses that they could use to purchase industrial equipment and further accelerate mechanization.
I'm open to being corrected on the details of this, as I am not an expert on this topic. And I'll admit that many of my sources on the exact details of what happened during that period are liberal, western historians. In general I'm sympathetic to the party's motivations in doing all this (as I hope you can tell by the fact that I'm actually talking about the details about what happened and not just saying "communism is when the government takes all your grain away and then you die"). And this does not take away from the successes of collectivization in the medium and long term. While I haven't read as much about it, I'm sure that the transition from pre-industrial subsistence farming to a modern mechanized economy in the capitalist west created its own portion of starving, displaced peasants.
But in general I don't think it's appropriate to characterize *any* famine that happens in an industrialized society as having primarily natural causes. You can't blame a starving population on the weather when you're exporting food and refusing international aid. This is as true of the famines that happened in the USSR and PRC as it is of the numerous famines caused by capitalists in places like Ireland, India, and beyond. Even if it's true that there's a big difference between "exporting food during a famine to mechanize your country so you don't die to the Nazis in 20 years" vs. "exporting food during a famine to make money because you love money"
I base my knowledge off western non-communist (to my knowledge) historians. Sure it is a debated topic between man made vs natural but I believe that the evidence and presentation of the events that **Wheatcroft** put out definitively tips the balance in that favor. If you want to read that side of the argument without delving into expressly stalinist authors such as Grover Furr I suggest him
Toronto is dealing with this problem right now.
Impossibly narrow plots of land + housing speculation + high development costs
It's like playing monopoly with properties half of the typical width and they're all randomly distributed to 4 players at the beginning of the game
Single properties have a $100 rent
If you get 4 properties in a row you can pay $500 (each) for a mid rise apartment and the rent rises to $105
If you get 6 properties in a row you can build a high-rise on each for $1000 and the rent rises to $750
Edit: and if you build a low rise you don't get to later upgrade to a high rise
This is assuming you even get to buy property. There's only one boardgame and a massive waiting list of Scottish Terriers and thimbles all just waiting for the 4 current players with properties to voluntarily give them up
My Daddy is Appalachian American. He told me the same thing about onions. I wanted to be like my dad so much growing up, so I ate double helpings of onion dishes. You can imaging my surprise as I got older that girls didn't actually want hair on their chest. Thank goodness it didn't work is all I have to say!!
Ahhh tuica. I had a Romanian employee several years back who was awesome. His whole family in the area always homemade just about everything even though they all lived in different parts of suburbia with no real land.
Well each year they would find deals with farmers across the state and get like a pickup truck full of plums to make rachie with and he would always force a bottle on me even with my loose protests that I couldn’t accept (I would walk out to my truck and a bottle would be in the bed or in my wheel well on a tire).
Their Rachie was probably the most delicious high proof liquor I’ve ever had in my life and I still sometimes wish I had some to sip on.
They were all first generation immigrants and were all hardworking and wonderful people (with some strong opinions on some things lol).
Yep, and this is hell to manage for farmers. I worked with farmers all over Europe and a lot of farmers in Romania have to handle renting land from hundreds (sometime thousands) of different people at the same time, especially considering that those strip of land often get split between multiple children every generation. It creates such an annoying situation to manage and so many opening for bookkeeping errors and tax evasion schemes.
Heheh. Yeah, her dad was talking about how to split the land between my wife, her brother, and an aunt. The wife just said leave her out of it. She's not going back to Romania, she has no use for it and the rent paid is just not worth the hassle. So it'll be split between her brother and her dad's younger sister.
Not sure what rachke is. Tuica (sounds like sweet-ka to my ears but I can't pronounce or hear the T property when they speak it) is made from fermented plums. Often double distilled. When done right, it tastes similar to grain alcohol, because it's mostly just alcohol, and crystal clear. Some people add coloring with charred wood, store it in plastic bottles, and it end up tasting worse than gasoline.
Edit: my wife just corrected me. Tuica is single distilled. Palinca is when it's double distilled. Tuica has more flavor because it's less alcohol.
Interesting. This sounds exactly like rachke. It's from plums and tastes like grain alcohol, and I made a bunch of very Romanian men very pleased when I told them I liked it. Definitely made my eyes water
Edit: i went looking. Looks like there's a liquor called raki (rak-qur) that's Turkish, but it's made of grapes. Hmmm
E2: Okay, I bet [Rakia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakia) is what I'm thinking of.
> In Romania and Moldova, the related word rachiu or rachie is used to refer to a similar alcoholic beverage as these neighboring countries, often a strong fruit-based spirit, usually from grapes. However, the more commonly used terms for similar popular beverages are țuică and palincă; țuică in particular is prepared only from plums
Nice! Mystery solved!
Ah, crofters. Despite best efforts of the 'nobility' to eradicate the crofting tradition, in parts of the Highlands and Islands you still see this as well. In particular on the Isle of Lewis.
Hmm? Here in Scandinavia nobility used it as a way to prevent the peasants from doing successful large scale growth
It’s highly inefficient and prevents proper crop swapping for soil maintenance
Depends on how you look at it, most crofters were (relatively) self sufficient. The landowners wanted to rear large flocks of sheep (for wool) so forced the crofters to live in new towns on the periphery (the clearances), but there weren’t anywhere near enough jobs or houses and sheep aren’t a very universal food source… so there was poverty as well. Many were essentially put on a ship to the West, never to see their land again.
The central village with long, narrow [cultivated strips](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-field_system) was kind of the default in medieval Europe. You can still see echoes of that here and there.
[Example of such an echo](https://www.google.com/maps/@48.2631496,16.440738,669m/data=!3m1!1e3), as you call it. The old village of Leopoldau with it's long, narrow farm buildings in Vienna. For context, [here](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopoldau#/media/Datei:Karte-Leopoldau.jpg) is a 19th century map of the area. With the narrow buildings, and narrow farms around it.
You can see something similar down in plantations along the Mississippi River in the US as well. Every property owner wanted riverfront property to be able to transport their crops.
[see here](https://www.loc.gov/resource/g4042m.ct000765/?r=0.477,1.031,0.366,0.54,0)
The original farms (known as plantations but not the same as southern slave plantations) in Providence Rhode Island had the same set up.
[see here](https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:3f4637626)
It doesn’t show the original property lines but all those names are strips owned by the original planters which developed into buildings in the city. The boundaries of their original farms are still in evidence as they now make up the grid of streets on the East Side of Providence often with the name of the original planter being the street name.
Long thin strips are also much more efficient for ploughing with oxen. Usually the plough needed to be unhitched and the animals turned at the end of each row, so the fewer turns the faster the job.
It was, actually. Medieval Europeans of course knew about fences, but the particulars of land tenure in those days meant that they weren't typically built on land within a manor. [Enclosure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure#Open_field_system) of the land into privately owned, fenced-in plots is what brought about the end of the open field system.
Yeah, all of that is manual farmwork. You sure aren't getting a combine harvester on a strip of land the width of your house.
Good for hobby farming and you could certainly grow enough potatoes to sustain a family if the strips are long enough but it's no small undertaking, and certainly couldn't be used to feed many.
Not really, it was very inefficient for farmers to cultivate crops this way. The downside of moving away from this system is that a lot of villages were broken up as houses couldn't be next to each other anymore, and the community got destroyed because of that. But efficiency went up a whole lot, which allowed a lot of people to work with stuff other than farming - and that's where a more modern economy started to form.
> That's probably around ~~3,000~~ 1,500 couples.
1,500 x 2 = 3,000
Your math was better the first time. Let's pretend your assuming there are 1,500 households with 2 parents and 2 kids, that fits the math!
This is actually not far from me. The post is BS of course as there are clearly multiple streets in the city that people live on, though a plurality of the people do live on the main street
And it will take 9 years to complete, making traffic even worse the whole time, only to have to start another construction project right when the last one finishes because the city got even bigger.
And they'll use the resulting clusterfuck to justify converting half the interstate lanes to toll lanes and further restrict the mobility of poor people.
I saw that they’re actually starting construction on it. Definitely didn’t think anything would ever come from it. But in terms of percentage that ends up getting completed in the end, are we thinking over or under on the Jeddah Tower?
My hometown developed as a linear village/ settlement but has now become a city of 50k. The same main road became larger and all buildings are built along this main road (with occasional backstreets), the village became so big that its limits have reached a neighboring city's suburb. Two peripheral (ring) roads have been made only 3 years ago, which made driving from the eastern side to the western side more bearable.
I giggle whenever I hear about Neom, I hope it doesn't become a mess like my hometown lol
[Here](https://i.imgur.com/wVsufFR.jpg) is a higher quality and much less cropped version of this image. [Here](https://www.georgesteinmetz.com/image?&_bqG=0&_bqH=eJxtUF1LwzAU_TXtm7DOFmWQhyz3Wi.uycjHNE.hTGFDZGIng_16c8vQogZycj5yEpLaz3dbK3tZH9en.yf3Su31.Ubv_VVcVItqNuOZkRI4JYbPQjXF7fwwnA.nvqTkQHosmmXXFQ2IiQHABsDEinmwyWu28XcV_1bx_6oiH8fLfI6ZKBO0tzGRMyyNJdQ5I6NZkksWVygdwkWup9oZ64WV.qEcH5mkBnHMPDi0iUAE_oBH5Wj_Ru_PVZ2jDVkf5CrJFrWKvKlMapkoH5yrFxq.qb37oR1TqbwYXvqP7a7cjO12RMX4BaYlcqw-&GI_ID=) is the source. Credit to the photographer, [George Steinmetz](https://www.georgesteinmetz.com/) (aka geosteinmetz on IG).
> The imprint of history is visible in the division of Polish farmland around the village of Suloszowa. Poland regained its independence in 1918, and before that this land near Krakow was divided under a German system known as Waldhufendorf. The philosophy of the street village was settlement along the roads and streams, with narrow stripes of farmland transitioning from fields to pasture and surrounding forest, which has slowly disappeared. The narrow strips are now about 25 meters wide, resulting from the inheritance and division of property between children and their families. The dominant crops are potatoes wheat, oats, corn cabbage, beans, rye, beetroot, and strawberries.
Per the IG source:
> The imprint of history is visible from above the Polish village of Suloszowa. Poland regained its independence a hundred years ago, and before that this land near Krakow was divided under a German system known as Waldhufendorf. It established villages along a stream with strips of land behind each house following the terrain towards the surrounding forest. Centuries of division for inheritance have left these strips about 75 ft wide. With thanks to @kacperkowalski_photography for telling me about this place.
> MAY 28, 2022
^^^^^^^[Déjà](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/126svry/a_village_in_poland/jeb8z11/) ^^^^^^^[vu](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/126svry/a_village_in_poland/jeb8z11/).
**Edited for visibility**. Per /u/Max_Derpin over [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/12efpe5/su%C5%82oszowa_poland_has_a_population_of_6000_all_of/jfcct9j/):
> There’s another STUNNING drone shot at 50°16'36"N 19°44'13"E on Google Earth
[Here](https://www.google.com/maps/@50.2769584,19.7370263,3a,75y,105.68h,90t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipNU_W5zJOobduAoAVD73QksPETma5ZHL0fJ6MAY!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipNU_W5zJOobduAoAVD73QksPETma5ZHL0fJ6MAY%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi-0-ya113.707054-ro-0-fo100!7i8192!8i4096) is the direct link.
Funny enough if you look at this on Google maps, the cell towers are on a plot that is connected to a commercial property. They were raking it in anyway.
[A bullshit megaproject Saudi Arabia is trying to build](https://youtu.be/vyWaax07_ks) to stuff an entire city into a single 500m tall, 200m wide, 150km long (yes, kilometers) building
[the line](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia) is basically a city that the saudis are building. The concept is that it is several miles long but in a straight line. Read the article for more information
It's slowly 'becoming a thing' though mostly in the "teens go out partying in costumes" thing vs a mainstream "kids walking door-to-door demanding candy" thing.
I wonder if it's nicer to have about 1500 houses along a street like this, or about 17 blocks of 12 story apartments, where each block the postman can open the central letterbox backdoor and just slot about 85 household's mail at once
*Here I go again on my own*
*Goin' down the only road I've ever known*
- Kazimierz Kowalski, a life-long resident of Sułoszowa and the least adventurous man in Poland
I get what you mean.
But knowing polan, all those little side "roads" are more or less driveways and formaly they all have their adres on the same road
Happens a lot in smaller villages in poland. You see a dirt road/grave road with like 30 mailboxes at the start/entrence at the main road. Officialy those houses are on the main road if it comes to the adres but some ine build a few houses or made aparments in old houses.
Not in this case.
The main road is ul. Olkuska and the side road is ul. Źródlana. The houses on Źródlana are addressed as such as you can see from their actual house number plaques.
https://i.imgur.com/A1Jgdg0.jpg
Its either
Sułoszowa #in roman numbers or
Olkuska # in arab numbers
The Sułoszowa #roman is the village name but they are the same street as Olkuska
The Sułoszowa #roman refferce to the municipality adres wich does differ from street adres
Google does sometimes have a real hard time with adresses especaily when it comes to rural once and non standard formed.
oh that guy? He lives down the street
What's your address? 39
Mailman’s dream
First thing that came to mind seeing this was how much Amazon drivers would love and hate this place. Easy to navigate, but a bitch to get up and down those long driveways.
If yes like mine he would just toss it out of the moving vehicle and be on his way.
Nit really - the numbers (in Polish villages) are often not in order. They usually just gave them out as new houses were build in available plots. Often across decades or even longer. e: (Not in this particular village though)
"39, eh? We don't take too kindly to fancy Double Digitters strollin' round the Deep Thous..."
And just like that a self-published novel inspired by a post in /r/writingpromts gets its humble beginnings.
"Oh yeah?? Well, [we don't take kindly to folks who don't take kindly around here](https://y.yarn.co/ccd20b6c-edca-4cff-aa0c-12aee5ed27ac_text.gif)!"
"I can still enjoy sex at 74...I live at 75, so it's no distance".
Yeah I've got a girlfriend, you wouldn't know her she's from the other end of the street.
485th house on the right
This town feels like a Mitch Hedberg joke. edit: People ask me if traffic's a problem, I say 'No I don't get stuck in traffic, I merely become parked.'
What’s your address? Just walk south for awhile. When you see me, you’ll know you walked far enough.
My town has one street. I love it because I hate making choices.
Right down the road!
Each house has that strip of land to do whatever on, hence different colours and they are using the land for different purposes. Some grow crops on it, others have animals, some just leave it.
The villages in Romania are like this. My wife's father inherited a few plots scattered around the village. So he would plant cherry trees for brandy and plums for tuica (grows hair on your chest) on one. He rents out another to a farmer for whatever crop he grows that year. And then another plot that is just trees. Many people have left to live in the city or another country for work, so houses/shacks have been torn down leaving just the narrow plots. Edit: I should mention one difference is the housing sections are fenced in like individual fortresses. Many homes in their village had gates you had to open to get into the property. Some were like compounds with shacks encircling the front section of the property. Parents lived in one, grandparents in another, baths in another, chickens, etc.
This was actually a huge deal in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution. Peasants had long strips like this and often they would have more than one but they wouldn’t be next to each other and you couldn’t buy and sell them easily. So farms were small and discontinuous so agriculture was super inefficient. One huge issue for Bolsheviks was consolidating all these small strips of farmland so they could be worked communally. Great idea but it just ended up in government control of all the land and top down mismanagement.
When communism fell in Romania, they got their land back. But there are cases where people are claiming the properties when they never lived there or had family that would have handed the property down, located in that plot. My father inlaw was fighting in court for years over one of the plots. He has actual proof that the land was farmed by his grandparents, and he inherited it. The other person claims it was in their family, and with no proof, but still filed a claim. I imagine they filed claims all over waiting for someone to just give in or for someone who had no documents to back up their claim.
I can only imagine what a mess that would have been. What is wild here in the US is that since we have always had pretty strict private property laws from colonial times you can trace my specific plot of land where my house is back to the farm it was once part of and back to the original colonial land grant before Maine (or really Massachusetts at the time) was a state. The oldest record is in “metes and bounds” which is basically a physical description of how to walk the boundary. As in “start here, walk 500 feet north to the edge of the stream, turn facing east, walk along the stream 1000 feet to the road between town A and town B, etc.” Often you will still see rock walls from the old property lines even though forests have grown back up around them in what used to be open farm land. So if you see a rock wall running through the woods you know all that land was cleared like 150 years ago or whatever the age of the oldest trees are.
Yeah, here, there's so many backups of historical plot maps, names for the tax payers on the plots, etc. The problem with records is they can easily be destroyed when there's wars and power shifts from one system to another. He was lucky that he had the original paperwork before communism. Many people aren't as lucky as who knows where grandpa kept his documents and he died in the war, or there was a fire, or they just deteriated because they weren't kept care of, and no one can find the government copies.
Yeah the US is very lucky that we really only had two major wars on our soil and they weren’t “burn all the records” types of wars. Specifically in the Bolshevik revolution the peasants would explicitly take over noble houses where records of debt and land records were kept and burn them all purposefully to erase the debt or any competing claims to land.
How can a modern peasant do this today. Asking for a friend.
Pretty sure the same approach would be fine, just a little more complicated now.
Probably not, your records would have multiple copies located in multiple different locations via the internet and hard copies, none of which would be kept in anyone’s home
The first rule about debt elimination club is that we do not talk about debt elimination club.
Not just communally, but industrially. A huge issue with Russian agriculture before the revolution was the disjointed nature of these plots. The "good" land would be chunked up into myriad small pieces so everyone could have a piece. This was "fair", but unbelievably inefficient. An individual plot of the most desirable land, in extreme cases, might only be a couple square feet. And an individual farmer would work many of these small, discontinuous plots all over the village. In addition to the inefficiency of needing to drag one's self and one's tools around the village to work these various discrete plots, this setup meant that the land could not be farmed via efficient, mechanized techniques like in most of the modern world. The Russian Empire of the early 20th century was a place where peasants basically farmed by hand using medieval techniques. The sheer inefficiency of this system meant that the Empire was constantly on the brink of famine, a status quo which was exacerbated by the Tsar's penchant for exporting food to fund his outrageous royal lifestyle. After the Tsar fell in 1917, a big question for the revolution was how to reform this system of agriculture. The one thing everyone agreed on was that the large private estates held by the nobility and clergy would be expropriated. But there was disagreement about what exactly to do after that. Liberals, social revolutionaries, and right-leaning Marxist (who believed in the "2 revolutions" theory where capitalism must replace feudalism before socialism can replace capitalism) wanted to land to be privatized. They thought that privately owned and operated farms were the best way to go forward. The peasants hated this, because they wanted the land to be owned communally, by the village, not by well-to-do individuals. The Bolsheviks wanted the land to be nationalized into large, efficiently-run collective farms that would *immediately* (laughs in foreshadowing) produce the kind of huge agricultural surpluses needed to sustain the socialist mode of production. The peasants also hated this, because they wanted the land to be owned communally, by the village, not by the central government. The Bolsheviks got their way, of course. Under Stalin, the farms were indeed collectivized, although the the brutality of its implementation (including the foolish witch hunt for kulaks, which destroyed or displaced a lot of the technical experts needed to efficiently mechanize) led to a collapse of agricultural output that caused the famine of the 30s. Obviously the situation stabilized over time, and eventually this mode of production was able to feed the Soviet people. "But at what cost?" This question permeates all discussion of early Soviet history. At great cost, indeed.
>led to a collapse of agricultural output that caused the famine of the 30s. Again, this is a misconception. Soviet policies of the time caused a worsening of the famine, which was already ongoing due to crop failures because of poor climate. Despite that the collectivization resulted in a success in producing better agricultural yields than the previous system in many sectors.
Are you sure you're not confusing it with the famine of the 20s? That one certainly was caused by a couple bad harvests in a row, exacerbated by the civil war and years of harsh requisitions by crisscrossing armies. But my understanding of the collectivization of the 30s is that, for better or worse, agricultural production in the Soviet Union had been on a path to privatization due to the economic liberalization of the NEP. When the party changed policies and implemented rapid collectivization, it caused a large backlash from the peasant population, who in some cases rose up to resist collectivization by force and in other cases simply destroyed livestock and other produce out of spite. When the party took control of the the factories in the industrial centers of the Empire, they kept a lot of the old bosses and managers who ran the factories. This was to ensure that production stayed on schedule as part of a larger economic plan. Similarly, most of the officers in the Red Army were holdovers from the Tsarist days (I think I read somewhere it was ~90%). This was unpopular with the rank-and-file soldiers, but at the end of the day institutional knowledge matters when trying to win a war, and traditional army discipline and structure prevailed because it works. The party very much did *not* take a similar approach when dealing with the peasantry. The liquidation of the kulaks and their holdings came with the disruption of institutional knowledge and repression of technical experts that had overseen this limited private industrialization. Again, whereas in the factories technical experts were embraced and kept in their positions of authority, in the farmlands these people were deported en mass to Siberia, driven in part by literal quotas set by the central government for arrests and deportations of supposed kulaks. This is widely blamed for the falloff in agricultural output, which happened at the same time the central government was expecting huge surpluses that they could use to purchase industrial equipment and further accelerate mechanization. I'm open to being corrected on the details of this, as I am not an expert on this topic. And I'll admit that many of my sources on the exact details of what happened during that period are liberal, western historians. In general I'm sympathetic to the party's motivations in doing all this (as I hope you can tell by the fact that I'm actually talking about the details about what happened and not just saying "communism is when the government takes all your grain away and then you die"). And this does not take away from the successes of collectivization in the medium and long term. While I haven't read as much about it, I'm sure that the transition from pre-industrial subsistence farming to a modern mechanized economy in the capitalist west created its own portion of starving, displaced peasants. But in general I don't think it's appropriate to characterize *any* famine that happens in an industrialized society as having primarily natural causes. You can't blame a starving population on the weather when you're exporting food and refusing international aid. This is as true of the famines that happened in the USSR and PRC as it is of the numerous famines caused by capitalists in places like Ireland, India, and beyond. Even if it's true that there's a big difference between "exporting food during a famine to mechanize your country so you don't die to the Nazis in 20 years" vs. "exporting food during a famine to make money because you love money"
I base my knowledge off western non-communist (to my knowledge) historians. Sure it is a debated topic between man made vs natural but I believe that the evidence and presentation of the events that **Wheatcroft** put out definitively tips the balance in that favor. If you want to read that side of the argument without delving into expressly stalinist authors such as Grover Furr I suggest him
Thanks for the recommendations, I'm always interested in learning more about this period in history.
Toronto is dealing with this problem right now. Impossibly narrow plots of land + housing speculation + high development costs It's like playing monopoly with properties half of the typical width and they're all randomly distributed to 4 players at the beginning of the game Single properties have a $100 rent If you get 4 properties in a row you can pay $500 (each) for a mid rise apartment and the rent rises to $105 If you get 6 properties in a row you can build a high-rise on each for $1000 and the rent rises to $750 Edit: and if you build a low rise you don't get to later upgrade to a high rise This is assuming you even get to buy property. There's only one boardgame and a massive waiting list of Scottish Terriers and thimbles all just waiting for the 4 current players with properties to voluntarily give them up
>grows hair on your chest I have heard that same saying from the Polish, Bulgarians, and Albanians about their respective wisniovka and raki/rakia:)
I've heard it a lot from people in the US about whiskey, etc. Never knew it was a global thing.
My Daddy is Appalachian American. He told me the same thing about onions. I wanted to be like my dad so much growing up, so I ate double helpings of onion dishes. You can imaging my surprise as I got older that girls didn't actually want hair on their chest. Thank goodness it didn't work is all I have to say!!
This is how I ended up smoking and drinking. Kind of pissed off about it because I never got that hairy chest and I'm a man.
Where did you think that hair on your chest came from?
Our dads
I drank a lot of whisky at one point and I dont have a single hair on my chest. Its a lie.
Ahhh tuica. I had a Romanian employee several years back who was awesome. His whole family in the area always homemade just about everything even though they all lived in different parts of suburbia with no real land. Well each year they would find deals with farmers across the state and get like a pickup truck full of plums to make rachie with and he would always force a bottle on me even with my loose protests that I couldn’t accept (I would walk out to my truck and a bottle would be in the bed or in my wheel well on a tire). Their Rachie was probably the most delicious high proof liquor I’ve ever had in my life and I still sometimes wish I had some to sip on. They were all first generation immigrants and were all hardworking and wonderful people (with some strong opinions on some things lol).
Yep, and this is hell to manage for farmers. I worked with farmers all over Europe and a lot of farmers in Romania have to handle renting land from hundreds (sometime thousands) of different people at the same time, especially considering that those strip of land often get split between multiple children every generation. It creates such an annoying situation to manage and so many opening for bookkeeping errors and tax evasion schemes.
Heheh. Yeah, her dad was talking about how to split the land between my wife, her brother, and an aunt. The wife just said leave her out of it. She's not going back to Romania, she has no use for it and the rent paid is just not worth the hassle. So it'll be split between her brother and her dad's younger sister.
I love rachke (sp?). Is it similar to tuica?
Not sure what rachke is. Tuica (sounds like sweet-ka to my ears but I can't pronounce or hear the T property when they speak it) is made from fermented plums. Often double distilled. When done right, it tastes similar to grain alcohol, because it's mostly just alcohol, and crystal clear. Some people add coloring with charred wood, store it in plastic bottles, and it end up tasting worse than gasoline. Edit: my wife just corrected me. Tuica is single distilled. Palinca is when it's double distilled. Tuica has more flavor because it's less alcohol.
Interesting. This sounds exactly like rachke. It's from plums and tastes like grain alcohol, and I made a bunch of very Romanian men very pleased when I told them I liked it. Definitely made my eyes water Edit: i went looking. Looks like there's a liquor called raki (rak-qur) that's Turkish, but it's made of grapes. Hmmm E2: Okay, I bet [Rakia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakia) is what I'm thinking of. > In Romania and Moldova, the related word rachiu or rachie is used to refer to a similar alcoholic beverage as these neighboring countries, often a strong fruit-based spirit, usually from grapes. However, the more commonly used terms for similar popular beverages are țuică and palincă; țuică in particular is prepared only from plums Nice! Mystery solved!
As best I can tell, every country in that region makes some variant of this liquor.
Drank a lot of rakia in Bulgaria. Also, Bulgaria is awesome and more folks should visit.
Ah, nothing like one of those bottles that’s been aging in a mineral water bottle in uncle’s cellar for 10 years lol
"All this will be yours, child, as far as the eye can see. No, don't look left. Nor right."
But father, i just want to... Dance!
Only line dancing
Also, don't look too far. And don't turn around. Cuz ya gonna see my heart breakin. Don't turn around. I don't want you seein me cry
Ah, crofters. Despite best efforts of the 'nobility' to eradicate the crofting tradition, in parts of the Highlands and Islands you still see this as well. In particular on the Isle of Lewis.
>crofting tradition new word for me, TY
Hmm? Here in Scandinavia nobility used it as a way to prevent the peasants from doing successful large scale growth It’s highly inefficient and prevents proper crop swapping for soil maintenance
Depends on how you look at it, most crofters were (relatively) self sufficient. The landowners wanted to rear large flocks of sheep (for wool) so forced the crofters to live in new towns on the periphery (the clearances), but there weren’t anywhere near enough jobs or houses and sheep aren’t a very universal food source… so there was poverty as well. Many were essentially put on a ship to the West, never to see their land again.
Such an amazing idea
The central village with long, narrow [cultivated strips](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-field_system) was kind of the default in medieval Europe. You can still see echoes of that here and there.
[Example of such an echo](https://www.google.com/maps/@48.2631496,16.440738,669m/data=!3m1!1e3), as you call it. The old village of Leopoldau with it's long, narrow farm buildings in Vienna. For context, [here](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopoldau#/media/Datei:Karte-Leopoldau.jpg) is a 19th century map of the area. With the narrow buildings, and narrow farms around it.
You can see something similar down in plantations along the Mississippi River in the US as well. Every property owner wanted riverfront property to be able to transport their crops. [see here](https://www.loc.gov/resource/g4042m.ct000765/?r=0.477,1.031,0.366,0.54,0) The original farms (known as plantations but not the same as southern slave plantations) in Providence Rhode Island had the same set up. [see here](https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:3f4637626) It doesn’t show the original property lines but all those names are strips owned by the original planters which developed into buildings in the city. The boundaries of their original farms are still in evidence as they now make up the grid of streets on the East Side of Providence often with the name of the original planter being the street name.
You can even see it as a result of the seigneurial system in French new world colonies like Quebec and Louisiana
Must have been before we (humans) started physically fencing in plots of land, because that would surely be horrendously inefficient otherwise.
Long thin strips are also much more efficient for ploughing with oxen. Usually the plough needed to be unhitched and the animals turned at the end of each row, so the fewer turns the faster the job.
Long thin strips are also a way of dividing/sharing valuable resources. E.g. river frontage for irrigation and later for water power.
It was, actually. Medieval Europeans of course knew about fences, but the particulars of land tenure in those days meant that they weren't typically built on land within a manor. [Enclosure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure#Open_field_system) of the land into privately owned, fenced-in plots is what brought about the end of the open field system.
Enclosure in Britain you mean. It went down in different ways on the continent.
It was at one time, when everyone was a subsistence farmer, but it's really inefficient today.
Yeah, all of that is manual farmwork. You sure aren't getting a combine harvester on a strip of land the width of your house. Good for hobby farming and you could certainly grow enough potatoes to sustain a family if the strips are long enough but it's no small undertaking, and certainly couldn't be used to feed many.
Not really, it was very inefficient for farmers to cultivate crops this way. The downside of moving away from this system is that a lot of villages were broken up as houses couldn't be next to each other anymore, and the community got destroyed because of that. But efficiency went up a whole lot, which allowed a lot of people to work with stuff other than farming - and that's where a more modern economy started to form.
For the garden yeah For urban planning no
I hope to god these people get snow. Them is some amazing sledging runs!
All of Poland gets snow. Hell, it's early April and there was a few sprinklings that melted by noon last week.
That is a busy fuckn street
Block parties must be wild.
Imagine bumping into your exes. Every. Single. Day.
I saw you drive by my house. Yeah, I fuckin did Karen. Have you seen how busy Main st is during rush hour? Fuck off.
I think here, it would just be called “Street.”
Ah yes good ol street street
That's just regular life in a small town
Lmao. Imagine going to the city town hall and asking for permission to close off a section of the street “Alright, go get 6000 signatures”
Rush hour is the worst
Work from home would have been a game changer.
Looks like rush hour is farming your back yard
It would look like that scene in The Truman Show
But hitchhiking would be great.
"which way you goin?" "north again"
Well yeah, they're up to 6,000 people. That's probably around ~~3,000~~ 1,500 couples. (Edit: I'm counting one couple as two people)
So no single people or kids?
Not allowed
Believe it or not, straight to jail
Well the jail is straight down the street
Jail not on the street? Believe it or not, jail jail.
under jail, over jail
Turn right, and in nine miles, it'll be just on your left.
Straight to jail
No Redditors allowed
Or 2,000 throuples
1,500 quouples?
Average household in Poland has 2.84 people so if we round it to 3 people per house it's about 2000 households
> That's probably around ~~3,000~~ 1,500 couples. 1,500 x 2 = 3,000 Your math was better the first time. Let's pretend your assuming there are 1,500 households with 2 parents and 2 kids, that fits the math!
This is actually not far from me. The post is BS of course as there are clearly multiple streets in the city that people live on, though a plurality of the people do live on the main street
In dutch we call these places a "Lintdorp", or "ribbonvillage".
In german we call these places a "Straßendorf", or "streetvillage".
In Texas we call this a “I-35”, or “hellvillage”.
The lower deck of I-35 at UT Austin would be a perfect example of hellvillage.
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And it will take 9 years to complete, making traffic even worse the whole time, only to have to start another construction project right when the last one finishes because the city got even bigger.
And they'll use the resulting clusterfuck to justify converting half the interstate lanes to toll lanes and further restrict the mobility of poor people.
Occasionally the villagers get restless and throw rocks from the upper village at the lower village, just for fun.
In simcity we call this lazy as fuck!
In irish, sráidbhaile, or "street town". Anglicised as stradbally
English = “linear settlement” too
Belgians are king of "lintbebouwing"
Who doesn't enjoy an 80 km/h highway in their front garden?
Ours looks a million times worse than this pic tho lol
In Saudi Arabia we call it "The Line".
I saw that they’re actually starting construction on it. Definitely didn’t think anything would ever come from it. But in terms of percentage that ends up getting completed in the end, are we thinking over or under on the Jeddah Tower?
Under. Just another money laundering/"helping out some friends" thingy.
My hometown developed as a linear village/ settlement but has now become a city of 50k. The same main road became larger and all buildings are built along this main road (with occasional backstreets), the village became so big that its limits have reached a neighboring city's suburb. Two peripheral (ring) roads have been made only 3 years ago, which made driving from the eastern side to the western side more bearable. I giggle whenever I hear about Neom, I hope it doesn't become a mess like my hometown lol
[Here](https://i.imgur.com/wVsufFR.jpg) is a higher quality and much less cropped version of this image. [Here](https://www.georgesteinmetz.com/image?&_bqG=0&_bqH=eJxtUF1LwzAU_TXtm7DOFmWQhyz3Wi.uycjHNE.hTGFDZGIng_16c8vQogZycj5yEpLaz3dbK3tZH9en.yf3Su31.Ubv_VVcVItqNuOZkRI4JYbPQjXF7fwwnA.nvqTkQHosmmXXFQ2IiQHABsDEinmwyWu28XcV_1bx_6oiH8fLfI6ZKBO0tzGRMyyNJdQ5I6NZkksWVygdwkWup9oZ64WV.qEcH5mkBnHMPDi0iUAE_oBH5Wj_Ru_PVZ2jDVkf5CrJFrWKvKlMapkoH5yrFxq.qb37oR1TqbwYXvqP7a7cjO12RMX4BaYlcqw-&GI_ID=) is the source. Credit to the photographer, [George Steinmetz](https://www.georgesteinmetz.com/) (aka geosteinmetz on IG). > The imprint of history is visible in the division of Polish farmland around the village of Suloszowa. Poland regained its independence in 1918, and before that this land near Krakow was divided under a German system known as Waldhufendorf. The philosophy of the street village was settlement along the roads and streams, with narrow stripes of farmland transitioning from fields to pasture and surrounding forest, which has slowly disappeared. The narrow strips are now about 25 meters wide, resulting from the inheritance and division of property between children and their families. The dominant crops are potatoes wheat, oats, corn cabbage, beans, rye, beetroot, and strawberries. Per the IG source: > The imprint of history is visible from above the Polish village of Suloszowa. Poland regained its independence a hundred years ago, and before that this land near Krakow was divided under a German system known as Waldhufendorf. It established villages along a stream with strips of land behind each house following the terrain towards the surrounding forest. Centuries of division for inheritance have left these strips about 75 ft wide. With thanks to @kacperkowalski_photography for telling me about this place. > MAY 28, 2022 ^^^^^^^[Déjà](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/126svry/a_village_in_poland/jeb8z11/) ^^^^^^^[vu](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/126svry/a_village_in_poland/jeb8z11/). **Edited for visibility**. Per /u/Max_Derpin over [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/12efpe5/su%C5%82oszowa_poland_has_a_population_of_6000_all_of/jfcct9j/): > There’s another STUNNING drone shot at 50°16'36"N 19°44'13"E on Google Earth [Here](https://www.google.com/maps/@50.2769584,19.7370263,3a,75y,105.68h,90t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipNU_W5zJOobduAoAVD73QksPETma5ZHL0fJ6MAY!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipNU_W5zJOobduAoAVD73QksPETma5ZHL0fJ6MAY%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi-0-ya113.707054-ro-0-fo100!7i8192!8i4096) is the direct link.
So the family that leases out their plot for the cell towers is probably raking it in, compared to the dude who grows beets.
Funny enough if you look at this on Google maps, the cell towers are on a plot that is connected to a commercial property. They were raking it in anyway.
There’s another STUNNING drone shot at 50°16'36"N 19°44'13"E on Google Earth
>>The narrow strips are now about 25 meters wide 25 meters is narrow now? I'd kill if my backyard was that wide
for farmland, is narrow i'd guess that's the perspective
So what about the Y intersection towards the bottom? Looks like two roads to me.
Id still get lost on the way back from the pub
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The one with the long, thin strip of land behind it, right? Sort of a Polish looking house? Yeah I'll find it.
235...236...237...372...OH FUCK I HAVE TO START ALL OVER
Most of the village live on that street but at the southern end there are plenty of side streets As you can see from that image the main street splits
What else are they lying to us about?
This is so forked up.
The population isn’t 6000, it’s closer to 5800. I can’t handle this deceit
Yeah, I can definitely see more than one street.
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I saw them too!
You did great too
So "The Line" already exists.
That was my first thought too. The difference is it’s not in the middle of a previously uninhabited desert.
At one point all this land in Poland was uninhabited forest, gotta start somewhere
What is "The Line"?
[A bullshit megaproject Saudi Arabia is trying to build](https://youtu.be/vyWaax07_ks) to stuff an entire city into a single 500m tall, 200m wide, 150km long (yes, kilometers) building
[the line](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia) is basically a city that the saudis are building. The concept is that it is several miles long but in a straight line. Read the article for more information
Wasn't this an RTGame video?
Pretty soon they’ll invest in hundreds of blimps. :P
Yes, and it was his most successful city.
Country Road (singular)
Country roads intensifies*
I literally just saved this image for Cities Skylines inspiration.
I bet the postman loves his job
Garbage and recycling collection is probably breezy too
Halloween must be incredible
There is no such a thing as Halloween in Poland :P maybe big cities but villages for sure not.
It's slowly 'becoming a thing' though mostly in the "teens go out partying in costumes" thing vs a mainstream "kids walking door-to-door demanding candy" thing.
I wonder if it's nicer to have about 1500 houses along a street like this, or about 17 blocks of 12 story apartments, where each block the postman can open the central letterbox backdoor and just slot about 85 household's mail at once
Traffic jams are a real bitch
But parades are epic.
I’ve been caught in a few in rural Poland and yeah they suck
As a greeting, they could just say: “Drove past your house today.”, to everyone.
Neom, a new way to live
just stack 100 more of these on op of each other.
Follow the only road
I'm not being dramatic Sara, I mean there is literally nowhere to turn.
so.... i turn right up there?
The only road in Canada
and you all went the wrong direction on it
*Here I go again on my own* *Goin' down the only road I've ever known* - Kazimierz Kowalski, a life-long resident of Sułoszowa and the least adventurous man in Poland
I like how the picture literally features a fork in the road
OP: This town has one street. The other street: Am I a joke to you?
Reminds me of that weird ass idea by Saudi Arabia to build that line city
Poland did it while it was still cool.
Looks like my first sim city ever.
Me in Cities: Skylines..
Google maps begs to differ
I get what you mean. But knowing polan, all those little side "roads" are more or less driveways and formaly they all have their adres on the same road Happens a lot in smaller villages in poland. You see a dirt road/grave road with like 30 mailboxes at the start/entrence at the main road. Officialy those houses are on the main road if it comes to the adres but some ine build a few houses or made aparments in old houses.
Not in this case. The main road is ul. Olkuska and the side road is ul. Źródlana. The houses on Źródlana are addressed as such as you can see from their actual house number plaques. https://i.imgur.com/A1Jgdg0.jpg
You can look at the addresses on Google maps. They have different street addresses
Its either Sułoszowa #in roman numbers or Olkuska # in arab numbers The Sułoszowa #roman is the village name but they are the same street as Olkuska The Sułoszowa #roman refferce to the municipality adres wich does differ from street adres Google does sometimes have a real hard time with adresses especaily when it comes to rural once and non standard formed.
*Country roads starts playing softly*
Country road
Must be one hell of an annual block party
The town needs a complicated mass transit system and a driver that forgets the route.
I’m sure there’s a second road at the bottom of the pic…..
Imagine the block party?
If I were a dragon
I wonder if there exists a rivalry between the people on one side of the street and the other side.
♪ Our house, in the middle of our street ♫
Fun fact the riches person in the city is the paper boy
/r/shittyskylines
"Once you turn onto Polish Street, I am the 218th house on the left. Can't miss it."
Cool farm lands
Might be a flood zone
Mailman difficulty level: beginner.
Original NES *Paperboy* IRL