Listy polskiej szlachty do t ureckiego paszy
Thanks to more than 300 letters from Polish nobility to the Turkish pasha Ilias Kolchak, we learn about the social, cultural and moral life of the borderland between the former Polish nobility and the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century. The correspondence bears witness not only to the intense relations between the nobility of the Commonwealth at the time and Kolchak Pasha, governor of Chocim, but also to the complaints lodged with him by nobles, serfs and even peasants.

The Commonwealth under the Ottoman Empire
The typical image of the Turkish-Polish borderland in the modern era brings to mind the association, persistent in Polish historiography, of the Republic of the nobility constituting a wall protecting Europe from barbaric Turkish-Tartar expansion. This theory often appeared in historical sources and was used instrumentally.

Turks in old Poland
In the 18th century, however, this anti-Turkish vision had little to do with reality, and the Polish Noble Republic struggled with internal problems and Russian infiltration rather than the then faint Turkish threat. Indeed, Turks appeared on the borderlands of the Commonwealth in countless situations: as merchants or small vendors, military men serving in border garrisons or simply tourists.

In the spring of 1737. Florian Szyling, commandant of the border fortresses residing in Kamieniec Podolski, informed the Turkish pasha, Ilyas Kolchak, of an unprecedented situation: Mustafa, a Turkish seller of lemons and oranges, had been detained by him after he had first "drunk a lot," and then indecently harassed a Polish noblewoman. Shilling initially imprisoned Mustafa, but after intercession from the local postmaster and priest, he decided to free the vendor to maintain a neighbourly friendship.

Mustafa, who had gotten inappropriately drunk in Kamieniec Podolski, was well known there. According to a surviving letter, it was not so much the border Turkish pasha who stood up for his release, but local officials and even a priest! This shows that the anti-Turkish discourse present in Old Polish culture had little to do with the image of life in the Polish-Turkish borderland.

The Treaty of Karlovice - the end of the Polish-Turkish wars
After the conclusion of the Treaty of Karlovice in 1699 and the return of Podolia with Kamieniec to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, there were no more conflicts with Ottoman Turkey. The 18th century also saw the stabilisation of the Ottoman-Polish border, on which a joint commission erected border signs. Some of these remained at least until the 19th century and clearly informed travellers where the Republic ended and Turkey began. A lasting peace also brought with it the need for an institution to regulate border disputes.

After the Treaty of Carlowitz (1699), the Ottoman Empire and the Commonwealth sent commissioners to determine the course of the border between the two countries. The commission was also tasked with building border symbols. One of the posts was traced and sent by a reader of the 'Przyjaciel Ludu' to the editor and published. There were at least several such posts in the Jahorlik area. In 1823, Wawrzyniec Marczyński, an expert on Podolia, reported that "in the fields of Jahorlik there is a three-sided stone pillar marking the border between Poland and Turkey, erected after the Karlovitsa treaty with an inscription of the act of this treaty and the year 1699; but the inscription is difficult to read, except for a few Latin words." Other accounts mention that the post had a Latin inscription finis Poloniae (the end of Poland), as well as Ottoman inscriptions.

Poles at Chocim
In 1713. Turks created a new province on the border of the Republic under the direct administration of Istanbul with the capital at Chocim. As a result, Podolia officials of the Republic now had the local Ottoman governor as their immediate neighbour!

In Ottoman-Polish borderland correspondence, there were clear moves during this period towards the establishment of borderland court institutions. The desire to establish them was not only due to the existence of shaykhs of robbers who could easily cross the border to avoid justice, but also due to the stability of borderland life and the lack of open conflicts. For example, in the early 1820s there was a Moldavian-Polish horse-stealing shaykh specialising in stealing horses from the Tatar steppes on the borderlands of the Republic. This group even included officers of the Crown army giving shelter to Moldavian boyars stealing Tatar horses.

A border court was needed to prosecute such criminal groups. It was successfully established in the early 1830s. The Polish-Turkish border court operated as a component of the legal system of the Republic of the Nobility and handed down sentences in cooperation with mediators sent from Turkey. This court became a kind of supreme court for the borderland.

Turkish Pasha - Ottoman Governor of Chocim
As evidenced by period documentation, the border court was appealed to when all other means of mediation proved ineffective. The court issued verdicts that were implemented both in the Republic and in the Ottoman Empire. The latter was possible thanks to the Ottoman governors residing in Chocim. Most notable among them in the 18th century was Iliah Kolchak Pasha, governor of Chocim between 1730 and 1739. He was probably from Bosnia, but he had an excellent command of Polish, in which he could also write, which facilitated his contacts with the elite of the Republic.

Letters to Ilyas Kolchak feed
. Kolchak regularly corresponded with a sizable group of Polish nobility, but his Polish-speaking respondents also included priests, women and Cossacks. Although he spoke Polish, his letters were written in the skilled hand of his Polish secretary, Piotr Pavlovski. Much of the correspondence concerns the issue of political cooperation between Turkey and Russia's opponents in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The letters also contain innumerable detailed descriptions of the everyday life of the borderland, as much fraught with petty conflicts as distinguished by an intense cultural and material exchange. For example, borderland judges enjoyed a privileged position on the frontier, who maintained constant correspondence with Kolchak in connection with their functions. Often, like Jan Świrski, a Podolia border judge, they would send two letters to Chocim at the same time, one to Kolchak and the other to his Polish secretary. The first contained official content, the next a detailed shopping list.

In one letter, Svirsky asked 'dear Pavlov' to send soap, tobacco, top-quality coffee and other products from Turkey. In another letter to Secretary Pawlowski, Michal Potocki expressed his frustration at the unsuccessful course of negotiations with a Turkish horse-trading merchant, stating that, due to the stubbornness of the contractor, he would never buy anything from him again. Letters to Kołczak also abound in frequent requests from the Polish nobility to sell or lend tents from the fodder collection, for example on the occasion of the election after the death of August II. It is also noteworthy how, in one letter, a frontier military officer of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth antedates his wife's visit with other ladies to both Chocim and Fodder!

The Turkish pasha and the nobility of the Commonwealth - letter archive
In 1739, during the Russo-Turkish War, Ilyas Kolchak, governor of Chocim, was taken prisoner and deported to Russia. There would have been nothing unusual about this fact, were it not for the fact that the Russians also took his archive. Eventually Kolchak regained his freedom, but the archive remained permanently in Russia. Today, it is available - as one of the few surviving Ottoman provincial governors' archives - at the Archives of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and at the Chernihiv Regional Historical Museum named after V. Tarnavsky in Ukraine. In 2020, the Polish correspondence of the Ottoman governor preserved in these archives was published by the POLONIKA Institute in cooperation with the Chernihiv Museum.

This edition contains a one-of-a-kind collection of original letters received from the Republic of Poland to the chancellery of Ilyas Kolchak passe and clearly proves that research on the Polish-Turkish borderland is worth developing. Thanks to the wealth of preserved source material, the reader can learn about the social, cultural and customary life of the borderland between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century. Let us hope, therefore, that this edition will not only contribute to the popularisation of research into the common Polish-Turkish past, but will also change the stereotypical - hitherto exclusively conflict-filled - picture of the Commonwealth's relations with its Muslim neighbours.