Miejsce Odrzańskie a tiny 5.37 km² village with a population of just 300 people in southern Poland has finally broken the jinx.
Call it a quirk of fate or otherwise, all pregnant ladies gave birth to 12 baby girls— and not a single boy in the past decade. All the babies born in the village happened to be girls – one after another for not one but 10 years in a row. But strangely this was not the case all over Poland or in the nearby villages – about 25 miles away
As a result, the small one-street village made news due to what the New York Times called “a strange population anomaly” when Anna Miłek gave birth to a baby boy.
While it is a fact that women tend to have a higher life efficiency and live longer than men in Poland, there is no scientific reason to explain what used to happen in Miejsce Odrzańskie.
One possible factor to explain the absence of men in Miejsce Odrzańskie is that males all over Poland prefer to head overseas for work. As a result the population in the village, near the Czech border, fell from 1,200 in 1945 to just around 270 today.
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Out of sheer desperation to somehow break the jinx mothers, used to consult all kinds of quacks and tried almost all kinds of glaringly unscientific advice to conceive boys, ranging from sleeping in a particular posture, only eating specific items in their diets, making love on particular dates or keeping an axe under their bed for “guaranteed success” — a baby boy.
Another factor that made Miejsce Odrzańskie a small village of just 272 people stand out was its low birth rate – no more than one per year.
Finally, Baby Bartek became the first boy to be born in Miejsce Odrzańskie which till late used to be called a ‘girls village’ after a gap of nearly one decade.
Bartek is today not just a boy but a boy from Miejsce Odrzanskie village. He is the only boy in an all-girls village, while his father Grzegorz Miłek is no less than a local celebrity and “hero” of the village.
Till now only girls used to be born in this village for the last 10 years. This led to a decline in the male population in the agricultural village of Miejsce Odrzanskie.
There weren’t enough men around. Faced with a severe population imbalance, young women started to relocate to other places to find partners.
To stop this desperation and exodus in the village, the mayor even offered a reward to the parents who gave birth to a baby boy, even suggesting that a street could be named after them.
Tomasz Golasz, a father of two girls and head of the local fire brigade, has already started looking forward to employing more ‘boys’ in his women-only fire-fighting team. All the tractor drivers in Miejsce Odrzańskie happen to be (wo)men.
