On Gródek's main street, a horse and cart passes three old women sitting at the bus stop, one of them chewing on a hunk of bread, waiting for a bus that won't pass for hours. It's not yet midday, but already four local men are installed in the Killer Bar, sipping bottles of beer at the dimly lit counter. A sign in a shop window across the street advertises second-hand "Clothes from the West" selling at 15 zlotych (€4) a kilo.
"The farther you go to the East," says Witold Sobkow, the former Polish ambassador to Ireland, "the worse the situation is."
In Gródek, we are at Poland's eastern frontier. The majority Orthodox town of some 6,000 people is set among beautiful primeval forests of the sort that fill this corner of the country. Its sole industry is lumber and most of its young have either left or commute to work in Bialystok, some 60km (37 miles) to the west. Apart from the sawmills, locals say there are only two other employers in town: the bakery and the dry-cleaner's.
Zofia Grycuk lives in one of 10 tower blocks first built to house some of the 300 workers from the nearby textile factory that served the army in communist times. The single-storey factory still stands, but it has long since closed: its windows are smashed and the weeds nearly reach the window ledges.
Her son Piotr has been working in Dublin for more than a year. A law graduate, he works the night shift as a security guard in the IFSC and sleeps by day in a hostel where he shares a room with two others, saving his wages in the hope of returning to Poland with something to invest.
Zofia has never been outside Poland and it was reluctantly that she encouraged Piotr to leave when the chance arose.
"Only the kids at school stay here," she says. "All the other young people go to Italy, to Belgium, to Ireland, to the UK. There are no jobs for them here.
"If they pay you here, you get €200 per month, and sometimes they don't pay you at all for the work. Because there's no jobs here, the managers try to exploit people. They pay them very little but they have no choice but to stay."
The ebb and flow of this region's history have made it a cultural confluence like no other in Poland. Poles, Tatars, Russians and Belarussians all have roots here.
At Kruszyniany, a village of 50 people reached after a 30-minute drive along dense forest tracks, most are now Orthodox, but the green wooden mosque identifies it as one of the few Tatar villages on this side of the Belarussian border. The oldest gravestone in the cemetery - one of only three Muslim burial places in Poland - reads 1704.
Only two Muslim families live in the village today, says Dzemil Gembricki, who takes care of the mosque but spends most of the week in Bialystok. The rest have moved elsewhere in Poland or to western Europe. His brother lives in Chesterfield in England and he has friends scattered across Europe.
Further up the road is Krynki, where in 1939 Jews represented more than 80 per cent of the population, but now there are none. Before the war there were three synagogues: today, one is a stable and another has been converted into a cinema. The third is long destroyed.
As cities such as Warsaw and Wroclaw surge forward, parts of eastern and southern Poland are labouring to catch up.
The development disparity between East and West alluded to by Witold Sobkow has always been thus, but recent years have seen it thrown into sharp relief.
As Warsaw heads towards full employment, there are pockets of poverty in the east where almost half the population is without a job. As investors queue to buy property in Krakow, here most farmers still get their diesel from the travelling Belarussian salesmen who come calling each week.
Across the region are towns with historical migrant connections with towns and cities in the United States and Europe.
One of them is Siematycze, where unemployment is artificially low because a quarter of the people have emigrated, most of them to Belgium, where they work in the shadow economy as housekeepers and builders, drivers and waiters.
The Belgian link is lucrative for the town - it is estimated that more than €30 million has been brought back to Siematycze over recent years. However, the social collateral of the exodus is preoccupying the town's authorities.
Often children are raised by single parents or other relatives while their family members are in Belgium, and the statistics tell of chronically high levels of teenage drug abuse and problems between teenagers and the police.
The problem is that for those young people who stay behind, in Siematycze as in Gródek, there is little to occupy them, says Zofia Grycuk. "There used to be plenty of discos, but now they're very rare," she says. "Socially and culturally, the town in dead."