Stara Wies, Subcarpathian Voivodeship
Encyclopedia
Stara Wieś ' is a village
Village
A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet with the population ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand , Though often located in rural areas, the term urban village is also applied to certain urban neighbourhoods, such as the West Village in Manhattan, New...

 in the administrative district of Gmina Brzozów
Gmina Brzozów
Gmina Brzozów is an urban-rural gmina in Brzozów County, Subcarpathian Voivodeship, in south-eastern Poland. Its seat is the town of Brzozów, which lies approximately south of the regional capital Rzeszów....

, within Brzozów County
Brzozów County
Brzozów County is a unit of territorial administration and local government in Subcarpathian Voivodeship, south-eastern Poland. It came into being on January 1, 1999, as a result of the Polish local government reforms passed in 1998. Its administrative seat and only town is Brzozów, which lies ...

, Subcarpathian Voivodeship
Subcarpathian Voivodeship
Podkarpackie Voivodeship , or Subcarpathian Voivodeship, is a voivodeship, or province, in extreme-southeastern Poland. Its administrative capital and largest city is Rzeszów...

, in south-eastern Poland. It lies approximately 3 kilometres (2 mi) north of Brzozów
Brzozów
Brzozów is a town in south-eastern Poland, with 7,677 inhabitants . It is situated in Subcarpathian Voivodeship and is the seat of both Brzozów County and the smaller administrative district of Gmina Brzozów...

 and 35 km (22 mi) south of the regional capital Rzeszów
Rzeszów
Rzeszów is a city in southeastern Poland with a population of 179,455 in 2010. It is located on both sides of the Wisłok River, in the heartland of the Sandomierska Valley...

.

The village has a population of 3,500. The lands on which Stara Wies and its immediate neighbor Brzozow lay today, in ancient times,in the early 14th century, consisted of birch forest (hence the name Brzozow - a variant of
Brzoza, meaning birch tree). On October 2, 1359, King Casimir the Great at Krakow granted to
Stefan Wojosta, a royal knight, the privilege of establishing a village in a forest named
Brzozowe. That name was also adopted as the name for Wojosta's settlement. Later, variant
names appeared in documents: Bresen (1384), Brzozowo (1403), Brzozowa (1437). At some point in
the late 14th century, another settlement was built near the original village for defensive purposes.
Over time this second settlement took on the name of Brzozow while the original settlement became
known as Stara Wies meaning Old Village. The King's grant consisted of 50 franconian lans (about 3000 acres)
distributed as follows -- 3 lans for the village elder, 2 lans for maintenance of the church, two common lans for grazing - and the
remaining 43 lans for settlers with one lan to each of them as set by the Magdeburg colonization
laws. A franconian lan was considered in medieval times the amount of land necessary to operate
a fully self sufficient farm.
A church building was funded as part of the settlement. The first church, named Corpus Christi,
was built between 1359 and 1375. A second church, named Birth of Our Holy Lady, was built in
1698 replacing the three century old wooden structure. It contained three altars. In 1730
construction commenced on the present brick church of the Assumption of the Most Holy Virgin.
Completed in 1760, i
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