In the aftermath of the First World War, partitioned Poland regained its independence. As the young nation attempted to delineate its new borders and defend them from threatening Others, in particular the atheist Soviet Russia, the symbol of the cross came to denote an ethno-nationalist vision of the country’s future. Focusing on three highly controversial monumental crosses erected in the contested Polish–Lithuanian/Belarusian/Ukrainian borderlands, I show how Catholic symbols in the service of the emerging nation-state helped to legitimate Poland’s claim to the multi-ethnic territories of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania and communicated military dominance and moral supremacy over Lithuanians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Jews, who had come to be symbolically excluded from the national fold.

In the first half of this constellation, Alyssa Quint and Michael Steinlauf bring us from the arrival of Jews in Poland through to the nineteenth century, the explosion of Jewish culture after 1905, when Russia relaxed its laws on cultural production, and the Second World War when the Jewish population was decimated in the Holocaust. While some histories ignore postwar Jewish theatre in Poland, this essay demonstrates its continued presence despite waves of emigration in response to multivalent anti-Semitic social and political factors and the re-engagement with Jewish history and identity in the new millennium. Martynas Petrikas then offers a detailed analysis of Polish theatre in Vilnius, a city that he argues was central to the formation of mythogenic narratives for Lithuanians, Poles, Belarusians and Jews. This reveals the city as the site of a dynamic interweaving of performance cultures.