page_title: Lusatia
section_title: Lower Lusatia
hierarchical_section_title: Lusatia / Geography / Lower Lusatia
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Karte vom Lausitzer Seenland
context_page_description: Lusatia, also known as Sorbia, is a historical region in Central Europe, split between Germany and Poland. The region is the home of the ethnic group of Sorbs. It stretches from the Bóbr and Kwisa rivers in the east to the Pulsnitz and Black Elster in the west, today located within the German states of Saxony and Brandenburg as well as in the Lower Silesian and Lubusz voivodeships of western Poland.
  Historically, Lusatia belonged to several countries. Being part of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown for three hundred years, alongside them it passed to the Habsburg Monarchy and from it to the Electorate of Saxony. The greater part passed to the Kingdom of Prussia in 1815 and the whole region merged into Germany in 1871. After the occupation of Eastern Germany by the Red Army and the partition in 1945, the eastern part of Lusatia along the Lusatian Neisse river was ceded to Poland under the Potsdam Agreement. The newly-established Polish-German border became known as the Oder–Neisse line.
  In the Polish part today, as the result of the expulsion of its German-speaking population after 1945 and Polish re-settlement, Polish is spoken, and in the German part German.
context_section_description: Most of the area belonging to the German state of Brandenburg today is called Lower Lusatia (Niederlausitz or Dolna Łužyca) and is characterised by forests and meadows. In the course of much of the 19th and the entire 20th century, it was shaped by the lignite industry and extensive open-pit mining. Important towns include Cottbus, Eisenhüttenstadt, Lübben, Lübbenau, Spremberg, Finsterwalde, Senftenberg (Zły Komorow), and Żary, which is now considered the capital of Polish Lusatia.
  Between Upper and Lower Lusatia is a region called the Grenzwall, literally meaning "border dyke", although it is in fact a morainic ridge. In the Middle Ages this area had dense forests, so it represented a major obstacle to civilian and military traffic. Some of the region's villages were damaged or destroyed by the open-pit lignite mining industry during the DDR era. Some, now exhausted, former open-pit mines are now being converted into artificial lakes, with the hope of attracting holiday-makers, and the area is now being referred to as the Lusatian Lake District (Lausitzer Seenland).
caption: Map of the Lusatian Lake District (Lausitzer Seenland, Łužyska jazorina, Łužiska jězorina)
exif: {}