Paper short abstract:

In the paper I focus on narratives and social practices of the inhabitants of Bielsk Podlaski, a small town near the new EU border, who do not accept the vision of their region as a periphery of Europe.

Paper long abstract:

The enlargement of European Union with it's rhetoric of cultural dialogue enhancement seemed to be a spur to development for multicultural communities in new member states. Nevertheless, many dwellers of cultural borderlands in eastern Poland perceive the activities of EU as contradictory to their own concept of "unified Europe" and regard the new eastern borders of EU as more divisive than integrating.

In this paper I would like to focus on narratives and social practices of the inhabitants of Bielsk Podlaski, a small town on Catholic-Orthodox borderland, who do not accept the vision of their region as a periphery of Europe, rather the very centre of it, a place where two great European cultural traditions, Latin and Byzantine, meet. EU is considered here as an alien and intrusive institution, imposing unnecessary borders, orietalising and excluding the nearest neighbours and cutting them off from the second half of "their" Europe.