They are building a new road. Modernizing road 19 may be needed, but why a highway right up to the border with an unfriendly state? Trees are already being cut, and soon there will be excavation, drainage, and concrete.

Słoja is my favorite river in the forest. It is wild, like all forest rivers, but in a few places it has beautiful high banks with wide views over the valley.

This reserve is beautiful, and so are its trees. As the name suggests, it is mainly old oaks — nearly 180-year-old giants — accompanied by slightly younger hornbeams and elms forming a green canopy high above.

The forest is drying out. A snowy winter is now an exception, and without a solid snow cover the water balance is always unfavorable.

A marshy reserve near Czarna Białostocka — a tangle of trunks, roots, branches, and windthrows woven with moss.

They keep cutting. The Knyszyn Forest should be a national park, yet it is still managed as a commercial forest with all the consequences.

This is the name of the ditch that once separated the lands of the village of Studzianki from the Forest. Today the border runs elsewhere, and the Tsar's Ditch marks the edge of the Knyszyn Forest Landscape Park here.

The Czumażowskie Hills are like micro-Bieszczady — you can see it clearly, as if you were looking at a scaled-down model of real mountains.

Marshes are the wild Knyszyn Forest — an ongoing cycle of creation and decay, where nature bursts into a majestic chaos that amazes me every time.

I like trees. Each one deserves its own portrait — but even the longest life would not be enough.

Traces of logging are visible almost everywhere — sometimes moderate thinning cuts, but far more often a bare-earth clear-cut of entire quarters.

Rivers, streams, floodplains, marshes, springs. In the Knyszyn Forest, water is always nearby — even a hillside can surprise you with a slow-seeping trickle.

This patch of forest doesn’t really have that name — in fact, it has no name at all.

There is a place in the Knyszyn Forest — barely five and a half hectares, a scrap of woodland. But what a place.

The oldest nature reserve in the Knyszyn Forest — a tangle of trunks and branches, well watered by springs seeping from the ground.

Czeremcha is a tree; tryba means a road or path. Czeremchowa Tryba is a station on a narrow-gauge railway.

There used to be a forest settlement here, but since the 1980s there has been nothing. Only a clearing and a magnificent oak remain.

That’s what people here call this tiny patch of forest, cut off by fields from the main body of the Knyszyn Forest.

The Bartoszycha valley is wet and people rarely go there — so every summer a jungle rules.