The fortified camp of the confederates of Bar in Łupków in Western Bieszczady

Abstract

The confederates of Bar built at least nine fortifi ed camps along the ridge of the Carpathian Mountains, close to the border of the Austrian empire. The fortifi cations were used since the spring of 1769. The article discusses the newly discovered site of a camp in Łupków (the district of Sanok), attempting to prove that the camp was built in the late summer of 1768. It is the best preserved and the most eastward fortress of the confederacy of Bar. I localized the remains of the fortifi cation in the autumn of 2014, using the LIDAR photos
available via geoportal.gov.pl. They are situated c. 1800 m south of Przełęcz Łupkowska (the Łupków Pass) at 690–700 metres above sea level. The fi rst archaeological inspection was performed on 11 April 2015, and an initial metal detector search on 29 May 2015. We discovered numerous pieces of WWI military equipment (from autumn 1914–early May 1915) but no artifacts that could be linked with the confederacy camp.
The fortifi cation has the form of an elongated entrenchment along the NWW–SEE axis, measuring c. 280 m in length and up to 70 m in width, facing the north-east. The main curtain wall consists of two straight lines, c. 113 m each, situated at an angle, with a ravelin. At the ends of the curtain wall there were two bastions, connecting it with the side curtains. The central and south-eastern parts of the back of the camp were probably not fortifi ed. In front of the earthwork there was a trench. Section 93 of the so-called Mieg’s map of Galicia, compiled by Austrian cartographers in 1779–1783, represents the position and the shape of the fortress very accurately. Written sources on the Łupków camp are limited to several mentions from 1769. It is interesting to note, however, that one of the confederacy leaders issued a document on 15 Sep 1768 “in our camp near Wyrawa”. Výrava is a village in Slovakia, seven kilometers away as the crow fl ies from Łupków. The two villages are separated only by the main ridge of Western Bieszczady, reaching no more than 700–800 m above sea level in this region. The Polish-Slovak border is also the border between the lands belonging to the communes of Łupków and Výrava. Therefore, it can be hypothesized that the “camp near Wyrawa” in fact refers to the fortifi cation described in this article, located on the Polish side, but only 100 m from the border.