Portal:Poland

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Welcome to the Poland Portal — Witaj w Portalu o Polsce

Cityscape of Kraków, Poland's former capital

Poland is a country in Central Europe, bordered by Germany to the west, the Czech Republic to the southwest, Slovakia to the south, Ukraine and Belarus to the east, Lithuania to the northeast, and the Baltic Sea and Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast to the north. It is an ancient nation whose history as a state began near the middle of the 10th century. Its golden age occurred in the 16th century when it united with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to form the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. During the following century, the strengthening of the gentry and internal disorders weakened the nation. In a series of agreements in the late 18th century, Russia, Prussia and Austria partitioned Poland amongst themselves. It regained independence as the Second Polish Republic in the aftermath of World War I only to lose it again when it was occupied by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in World War II. The nation lost over six million citizens in the war, following which it emerged as the communist Polish People's Republic under strong Soviet influence within the Eastern Bloc. A westward border shift followed by forced population transfers after the war turned a once multiethnic country into a mostly homogeneous nation state. Labor turmoil in 1980 led to the formation of the independent trade union called Solidarity (Solidarność) that over time became a political force which by 1990 had swept parliamentary elections and the presidency. A shock therapy program during the early 1990s enabled the country to transform its economy into one of the most robust in Central Europe. With its transformation to a democratic, market-oriented country completed, Poland joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004, but has experienced a constitutional crisis and democratic backsliding since 2015.

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From Polish history – show another

Katyn memorial

The Katyn massacre was a mass execution of Polish citizens by the order of Soviet authorities in 1940. About 8,000 of those killed were reserve officers taken prisoner during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, but the dead also included many civilians who had been arrested for being "intelligence agents and gendarmes, spies and saboteurs, former landowners, factory owners and officials". Since Poland's conscription system required every unexempted university graduate to become a reserve officer, the Soviets were thus able to round up much of the ethnic Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian, Georgian and Belarusian intelligentsia of Polish citizenship. The 1943 discovery of mass graves at Katyn Forest by Nazi German forces precipitated a rupture of diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the Polish government-in-exile in London. The Soviet Union continued to deny responsibility for the massacres until 1990. Although the Russian government acknowledged that the NKVD had in fact committed the massacres, it does not consider them a war crime or an act of genocide, as this would have necessitated the prosecution of surviving perpetrators. (Full article...)

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Stanislaus of Szczepanów

Credit: Stanisław Samostrzelnik

Miniature from a manuscript copy of two books by Jan Długosz, created in the 1530s for Piotr Tomicki, bishop of Kraków. It depicts Bishop Stanislaus of Szczepanów as a patron saint of Poland, venerated by King Sigismund I and Tomicki himself together with church and secular dignitaries. Although in the 16th century the art of manuscript illumination was becoming obsolete due to the invention of printing press, Stanisław Samostrzelnik was still able to find wealthy clients willing to pay for custom-made codices.

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... that publication of one of Adam Mickiewicz's first poems, "Oda do młodości" ("Ode to Youth"; manuscript pictured), was delayed due to censorship?
... that much of the success of the Christianization of Moravia, an empire that extended into what is now southern Poland, is attributed to the work of Saints Cyril and Methodius?
... that the short story Janko Muzykant ("Johnny the Musician") was one of Henryk Sienkiewicz's works mentioned in a speech during his 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature ceremony?
... that archaeological excavations conducted in May 2013 at the Sobibór Museum unearthed an escape tunnel made by Holocaust victims in the Sobibór extermination camp?

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Stanisław Ulam

Stanisław Ulam (1909–1984) was a Polish-American mathematician. Born into a wealthy Polish Jewish family, Ulam earned his D.Sc. in mathematics at the Lwów Polytechnic Institute in 1933. He then worked on the ergodic theory at Harvard University, shuttling between Poland and America, and ultimately settled in the United States after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, becoming an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1943, Ulam joined the Manhattan Project, where he made hydrodynamic calculations to predict the behavior of explosive lenses for an implosion-type nuclear weapon. After the war, he became an associate professor at the University of Southern California, but returned to Los Alamos in 1946 to help Edward Teller develop the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons. Ulam contributed to such fields of mathematics as set theory, topology, transformation theory, group theory, projective algebra, number theory, combinatorics, and graph theory. With Enrico Fermi and John Pasta, he studied the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam problem, which became the inspiration for the vast field of nonlinear science. Ulam is perhaps best known for realising that electronic computers made it practical to apply statistical methods to functions without known solutions, and as computers have developed, the Monte Carlo method he invented has become a standard approach to many physical and mathematical problems. (Full article...)

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Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Masovia in Płock

Płock is a town on the Vistula River in the western part of the Masovian Voivodeship. During the reigns of Vladislaus Herman and Boleslaus the Wrymouth in the 10th–11th centuries, Płock was briefly Poland's capital city, and later served as one of the seats of the dukes of Masovia. The town has two cathedrals: the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Masovia (pictured) where Vladislaus and Boleslaus are buried, and the Temple of Mercy and Charity, the principal seat of the Mariavite Church, a native Polish branch of Christianity. Płock is home to Poland's largest oil refinery, owned by PKN Orlen and served by the Druzhba ("Friendship") pipeline linking Russia with Germany. (Full article...)

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Poland now

Recent events

On 21 May, Jan A.P. Kaczmarek (pictured), a composer best known for writing film scores, died at the age of 71.
On 10 May, an unusually spectacular aurora borealis was observed in large parts of Poland due to an intense solar storm.
On 8 April, local elections were held throughout Poland, with run-off votes in some municipalities held on 21 April.
On 9 January, police entered the Presidential Palace in Warsaw to arrest former Interior Minister Mariusz Kamiński (Law and Justice party) and his former deputy, both of whom had been sentenced to two year's jail for abuse of power. On 23 January, they were both were pardoned by the President Andrzej Duda.