Two Ontologies of Space: Territory and Terroir

Olga Tokarczuk

May 7th, 2026

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Thus the difference between Territory and Terroir is also a political difference. In time of war, conquering another territory very often destroys the Terroir, and by doing so introduces instability and chaos. Will honey be produced by burned forests and charred meadows? Will the invaders and new administrators know how to make wine from the captured vineyards? Co-existing with the Terroir takes generations and requires peace.

Perhaps that is why nowadays our yearning for a unique, one-and-only Terroir comes back at times of crisis, whether ecological, cultural or identity-based. When great territories fracture and maps cease to give a sense of meaning, people seek smaller, more concentrated ways to put down roots, not within borders but in places. And perhaps it is today, in the era of excess and haste that we do not need more space, but a deeper place.

Allow me at this point to bring up Lower Silesia, the place where I live and where my grandparents ended up after the Second World War as defiant displaced people. Why “defiant”? Because the choice to emigrate and settle in a different place was made for them by someone else – major politics and its architects at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, when it was agreed that the land of my forefathers would end up in the Soviet Union.

Yes, the history of Central and Eastern Europe convincingly illustrates the struggle between those two terms: Territory and Terroir. Within the framework of a political-and-social experiment unparalleled in the history of Europe, the territory of Poland was shifted several hundred kilometres westwards, and as a result millions of people changed their place of abode and had to abandon their Terroirs. 

The idea of Territory had won again, and although its actual adoption proved difficult and costly in every respect, eventually efficient state structures were established, which somehow coped with the administration. Taking charge of the Terroir on the other hand is still in process to this day.

That is because the fundamental bond between people and their living space was broken. The new arrivals did not understand the climate or the character of the soil, they could not cope with a different agriculture. The landscape was alien, and nature here was nothing like the kind they had left behind them. This experience was most traumatic for inhabitants of the countryside, where our bond with nature and our dependency on it are closest. The first generation of newcomers – exiled and lost – only made weak, superficial contact with their new environment. The second did their best to take matters into their own hands, but the communist regime did not make it easy. The new territories were insecure, there was talk of a third world war, and people were reluctant to invest in alien terrain. It was only the third and fourth generations who gradually, with growing conviction, felt they were at home, and having as it were yielded to the local aura, with tenacity and love began seeking to establish their own relationship with the Terroir that had fallen to their lot.

I once compared maps of our region from before the war and after it. I was struck by how many of the local names had disappeared from them – the names of the smaller features, such as mountain passes, crossroads, small streams, forest tracks, hills and valleys. Only the official names of the most important places were still there, translated from German into Polish. The architects of this new political order tried to act as if Territory were something stable, stronger than nature and independent of it. As if it were possible to transfer crops, towns and infrastructure without consequences.

Territory enables ruling from a distance, from a headquarters, from a faraway capital city. You can administer it without being on the spot. Terroir demands a presence, because it can’t run itself. Every year the balance of forces changes. Every intervention comes back in a changed form. In the world of Terroir the whole of nature plays just as active a role as humankind.

Territory – in its social sense – is always conducive to homogenization. This can be seen in the case of Lower Silesia after the war. Incorporated into the state, the new Territory has to standardize as quickly as possible and attach itself to the motherland in every sense, becoming an inseparable part of it, despite the fact that the real connections are weak. It regards local differences as a problem to be solved or as folklore. Territory that is subject to central authority, which is far away and has other problems, starts to operate automatically, ignoring its own history and all those differences. A Terroir acts the opposite way – it reinforces the difference as a functional value. Here, diversity is not a threat to order, but a condition for stability. In this sense Terroir is an anti-centralist, though not anarchic category, because it seeks to preserve its own, local order.

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I very much hope this comparison of these two ontologies of space will prompt us to reflect on the differences between living on the land and living amid relationships. Territory does indeed put the political and social complication of the world in order, but it is Terroir that teaches us humility towards something that, although not human, contributes to the creation of human life; it organizes us as just a small part of the whole, deposing us, as it were, from the uncomfortable, bogus position of the kings of creation. Territory is not familiar with this humility and does not teach it to us – instead it uses the delusion of control. In this sense, territory will always be in the category of power, because it enables ruling by separating: the inside from the outside, the citizen from the foreigner, ours from theirs, and the centre from the periphery. Its basic tool is the border, and its fundamental promise is security. It allows for the exercise of control over the population, resources and movement. It is a condition of existence for the modern state and is its epistemological foundation – a policy becomes possible because the world has previously been “flattened” into a surface divided into areas.

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© Olga Tokarczuk
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones