Rychtal

Rychtal (Reichthal) is a town in Kępno County, Greater Poland Voivodeship, in west-central Poland. It is the seat of the gmina (administrative district) called Gmina Rychtal.

Geography
Part of the Lower Silesia historical region, it is situated close to the administrative border with Opole Voivodeship, located approximately 18 km south-west of Kępno, on the road to Namysłów, and 153 km south-east of the regional capital Poznań.

History
The area became part of the emerging Polish state in the 10th century, and after the fragmentation of Poland into smaller duchies, it formed part of the Duchy of Silesia. The Polish settlement at the site called Będłowice or Bandlowice is documented in 1222, when the estates were held by the Teutonic Order. From 1233 onwards, the Silesian duke Henry the Bearded opened the remote area to German and Walloon colonists in the course of the mediaeval Ostsiedlung migration. Their settlement Reichthal ("Rich Valley") was first mentioned as a town in 1294, then a possession of the Bishops of Wrocław. It replaced the older Polish locality, nevertheless, due to the proximity of the episcopal lands to Greater Poland, the Rychtal area remained bilingual with both Polish and German speaking populations and predominantly Catholic. In the 18th century, the town was annexed by Prussia. After the secularization of the Bishopric's estates under Prussian rule in 1810, Rychtal belonged to the Namslau (Namysłów) district of the Silesia Province. In 1842, the town had a population of 1,310, predominantly Polish by ethnicity and Catholic by confession. During the Polish January Uprising in 1863 weapons were smuggled through the town to the Russian Partition of Poland. From 1871 it formed part of the German Empire. After the German defeat in World War I, the area (Reichthaler Ländchen) was allocated to the Greater Polish Poznań Voivodeship of the Second Polish Republic by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.

Rychtal lost town privileges in 1934. In the course of the German invasion of Poland, which started World War II in September 1939, it was occupied by Nazi Germany as part of the Reichsgau Wartheland, attended with persecutions of the Polish inhabitants. In 1939, the Germans carried out the first expulsions of Poles, and several died during their deportation in freight trains to Mińsk Mazowiecki in the more-eastern part of German-occupied Poland. The area was overrun by the Red Army in the course of the Vistula–Oder Offensive in January 1945 and restored to the Republic of Poland.

Cuisine
The officially protected traditional food of Rychtal, as designated by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development of Poland, is kaszanka rychtalska, a local type of kaszanka.