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Poland’s state water authority has announced plans to strengthen the bank of the Bug river, which marks the border with Belarus, amid concerns that erosion could change the course of the river and thereby cause a 15th-century monastery located there to find itself outside Polish territory.
Broadcaster TVN reports that Polish Waters has announced a 495,000 zloty (€118,000) tender for a project to temporarily secure a breach of the bank of the Bug with the aim of protecting St Onuphrius Monastery in Jabłeczna.
According to legend, the monastery was founded in the 15th century after an icon of St Onuphrius floated down the river. It belongs to the Polish Orthodox Church, Poland’s second-largest religious denomination behind the dominant Roman Catholic church.
Ponad 495 tysięcy złotych zamierzają wydać Wody Polskie na zabezpieczenie wyrwy, która powstała w linii brzegowej Bugu.https://t.co/3yw2OK9rIp
— tvn24 (@tvn24) March 17, 2025
“In the case of the monastery in Jabłeczna, the breach [in the river bank] occurred about a kilometre away from the buildings, so there is no direct threat that water will wash away the foundations,” Tomasz Makowski from the local branch of Polish Waters told TVN.
However, the agency is concerned that water from the river could flow through the breach into nearby oxbow lakes, cutting off the monastery from the Polish mainland.
“Hypothetically, in this situation, the course of the Bug river, which is a border river, may change and [the monastery] may be cut off from the territory of Poland,” said Makowski.
While Polish Waters says that the breach of the bank is the result of “natural erosion”, a prominent environmental scientist claims that it could in fact have resulted from the cutting down of trees along the river carried out as part of efforts by the government to improve security and prevent migrant crossings.
Last December, hundreds of trees and other plants were removed in order to establish an electronic border monitoring system, including the installation of camera posts.
Since 2021, tens of thousands of migrants – mainly from the Middle East, Asia and Africa – have tried to irregularly cross into Poland from Belarus, including in some cases by traversing the Bug river.
A young Sudanese man who drowned in a river on Poland’s border while trying to cross from Belarus has been buried in a funeral organised by the local Muslim community.
He is one of at least 20 to have died at the border since last year https://t.co/TDWdwp8DHa
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) December 6, 2022
Andrzej Czech, an environmental biologist and member of the State Council for Nature Conservation, suggested on social media that the cutting down of trees could be behind the breach in the Bug.
He pointed to an opinion issued last month by the council, which found that “the way the border infrastructure was designed and constructed raises serious doubts as to its durability in the face of natural processes, mainly hydrological ones, which can be expected on this section of the Bug”.
However, Makowski told TVN that the tender for securing the breach on the river was prepared before the logging along the Bug took place in December. “The ongoing erosion is a natural phenomenon and has nothing to do with installing a border protection system,” he said.
Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.
Main image credit: Grzegorz W. Tężycki/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 4.0)
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
