Silesia and its past

The alliance had already existed in the struggle of the Lechit-Poles with Alexander the Great. These stories are fairy-tale-like, but their sense does not lie in facts verifiable with „lens or eye”.
The legend praises values that have always been, from the mythical „golden” age, accompanying the Lechit as the source of their power. The country of the Silesians appears in this narrative as part of the Polish monarchy, called the „Holy Province of Silesia”, in Latin „Sacra silentii Provintia”. This evokes an association with silence (devotion?) due to the similar sounding silentii from the Latin silentium.
A few centuries later Silesian intellectuals – by then, Germans – considered themselves, in turn, to be the descendants, for example, of the Germanic gods. In their name they found resemblance to the Latin name for Silesia, i.e. Silesia, and also to the Elysium of the hereafter; and so the lands on the Odra gained „elysian”, heavenly, beginnings. From the 18th century, the idea definitely began to be discussed that the first inhabitants of Silesia were the Silings, an off-shoot of the Germanic vandals, who in the 5th century became famous for their sack of Rome (hence, „vandalism”). And so Silesia, or Silesia, became „Silingia”, the homeland of the Silings. This view came to be held in scholarly historical studies in the 19th and 20th centuries.
On the other hand, however, it was stressed that the inhabitants of these lands in the early Middle Ages were unquestionably Slavs and, in particular, there is primary evidence from the 9th century of the Ślęzan tribe. It has even sometimes been suggested as a compromise that when the Silings went south to seek their fortune in the ruins of the Roman Empire, the Ślęzans then occupied the lands they had vacated, taking the name from their country.

However, the name of Silesia actually comes from the Ślęzan, those Silensi in Thietmar, whose country according to him was supposed to derive its name from „a certain great and high mountain.” He had in mind Mt Ślęża.
At most, he was referring here to legendary tradition and thus his message cannot be irrefutable proof that the origin of the name of Silesia is from the mountain. Hence, an alternative scholarly view is that the Ślęzans received their name from the river, Ślęża, along which they were to settle, just as there are the Vistulans on the River Vistula or the Buzhans on the Bug. And so in the 20th century the dispute about the origin of the name Silesia was dominated by the question: from the river or the mountain?
Linguists note that the root „Śl-” in the name of the lands on the Odra indicates something wet, which in the local dialect sounds like drizzly weather: „śląkwa”. It is worth considering the possibility that the name Ślężan referred not only to the river, but generally to some wetland. However they themselves, according to Thietmar, believed, perhaps, that the centre of the lands was Mount Ślęża, which they considered a holy site.

In 1355, it officially became part of Czech, in the German Reich, from the 15th century called the Holy Roman Empire of the German People.
The medieval divisions of the duchy gave rise to regions such as Cieszyn Silesia, mostly today in the Czech Republic, or Opole in the historical Upper Silesia, which – let us not forget – only joined the whole region on the Odra in the 15th century. In 1526 Silesia passed directly under the authority of the Habsburgs who ruled the said empire, and then, as a result of the Silesian Wars from 1740 to 1763, almost entirely under the control of Prussia, and from 1870 it was part of the united Germany. After the Silesian Uprising, from 1919 to 1921, part of the Upper Silesian region was ceded to Poland, and as a result of the post-war movements of the borders in 1945, almost all of the historical Silesia was then to be found in Poland.