The Kresy myth (Polish: mit Kresów) is a view of the former eastern borderlands of Poland (Kresy) as a multicultural land dominated by Polish culture. According to Andrii Portnov, the Kresy is seen as "'the lost paradise' of Poland’s 'civilisational mission'" at the same time as the location of "bloody and romantic clashes with the Cossacks and Tatars". The Kresy was part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Second Polish Republic but since 1945 is outside of Poland, in present-day Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Latvia. The Kresy, in the Polish imagination, extend beyond the areas which became part of interwar Poland. After the territorial losses of World War II, the nostalgia focused on the Vilnius region and East Galicia. Exponents of the discourse tend to focus on Poles livin