Poland
Poland is an eastern European country on the
Baltic Sea known for its medieval architecture and Jewish heritage. Warsaw, the
capital, has shopping and nightlife, plus the Warsaw Uprising Museum, honoring
the city’s World War II-era resistance to German occupation. In the city of
Kraków, 14th-century Wawel Castle rises above the medieval old town, home to
Cloth Hall, a Renaissance trading post in Rynek Glówny (market square).
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The official name of Poland is The Republic
of Poland (Rzeczpospolita Polska).
The flag of Poland consists of
two horizontal stripes of equal width, the upper one white and the lower one
red. The two colors are defined in the Polish constitution
as the national colors.
The Flag of Poland
The Coat of Arms of Poland
The capital of Poland is Warsaw.
The population of Poland is 37.93 million
people (2016).
The currency of Poland is the Polish zloty.
The current president of Poland is Andzei
Duda.
The size of Poland
is 120,562 square miles (312,255 km2)
In 2011, 92.2% of Poles identified themselves
as Roman Catholics and 65% of Polish believers attend church
services on a regular basis. The rest of the population consists mainly
of Eastern Orthodox (504,150
believers, Polish and Belarusian), various Protestant churches (about 145,600, with the largest
being the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Poland with
61,738 members) and Jehovah's Witnesses (129,270). There are about 85,000 Greek Catholics in Poland. Other religions practiced
in Poland, by less than 1% of the population, include Islam and Judaism and to a lesser extent Hinduism and Buddhism.
Roman Catholic Churches
Roman
Catholicism is so popular in Poland that there is a television channel
dedicated to the Pope.
Poland’s
highest point is Mt. Rysy at 8,199 feet (2,499 m); its lowest is near Raczki
Elbląskie at 6.56 feet (2 m) below sea level.
Poland joined
NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.
Poland’s
national anthem is Dąbrowski’s
Mazurka. The anthem, commonly known as “Jeszcze Polska nie zginęla”
(“Poland Has Not Yet Perished”), was written in 1797 by Jozef Wybicki. The
anthem was composed in Italy, where Polish troops were fighting at the side of
Napoleon.
The first
Polish ruler recorded in history was Mieszko, about A.D. 963. In 966, Mieszko
adopted Christianity, making Poland the easternmost country within the orbit of
Latin culture.
The
380,000-acre (150,000-hectare) Białowieża Primeval Forest in Poland is Europe’s
last ancient forest and home to 800 European bison, Europe’s heaviest land animals.
The Mongols’
invasion of Poland from late 1240 to 1241 culminated in the battle of Legnica,
where the Mongols defeated an alliance of forces from fragmented Poland and
members of various Christian military orders led by Henry II the Pious, the Duke
of Silesia.
Polish King
Kazimierz Jagiellończyk, became known as the “Father of Europe.” Of his nine
children, one became a cardinal, four became kings, one was canonized, and the
three daughters were married off to become mothers of the heirs of the greatest
dynasties in Western Europe.
In 1573, the
Poles elected their king, Henry de Valois, but the new king decided to return
to France immediately after his coronation to rule as Henry III.
The last
Polish monarch, Stanisław Poniatowski, died in prison in 1798 in St.
Petersburg, Russia.
On November
11, 1918, Poland declared itself a republic, independent of Russia. Poles have
celebrated their Independence Day as a national holiday on November 11th since
1937. However, public celebration of the holiday was forbidden from 1939–1989,
while Poland was under a Communist government. Since the collapse of that
government, Independence Day has become the most important Polish national
holiday.
In 1922,
Gabriel Narutowicz became Poland’s first democratically elected president.
On September
1, 1939, the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland without any prior declaration of
war, thereby beginning World War II.
Poland was
the only European country which never officially collaborated with the Nazis at
any level, and no Polish units fought alongside the Nazi army. Poland never
officially surrendered to Germany, and the Polish Resistance movement in
German-occupied Poland during World War II was the largest resistance movement
in Europe.
The word
“Poland” is the Anglicized version of Polska, which is ultimately
derived from the word or “field.” Thus, Poland means “land of the Poles”—which
could be a reference to the Polans, Polanies, or Polonians, who were to
eventually unite the territories of Poland and establish the first Polish
national dynasty, the Piast.
On September
12, 1989, the first freely elected, non-communist government in a Warsaw Pact
state took office, led by Poland’s Nobel Peace Prize-winner Lech Wałęsa, who
was instrumental in organizing the Solidarity movement of the 1980's.
Lech Wałęsa
Adam
Mickiewicz is the author of the Polish national epic poem, Pan Tadeusz (Master
Thaddeus) in 1834, which ironically begins with the verse “Lithuania, my
fatherland!”
The
2,121-feet- (646-m-) high Warsaw Radio Mast in Konstantynów, Poland, was the
world’s tallest structure until it was intentionally collapsed on August 8,
1991.
During World
War II, the Polish town of Oświeçim was the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
Concentration Camps, where at least 1.1. million Nazi prisoners were killed by
gassing with the pesticide Zyklon-B and many more died in other ways. Ninety
percent of the prisoners killed were Jewish. The first exterminations of
prisoners took place in September,1941.
The Entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau
Gniezno was
the very first capital of Poland. The Gniezno Cathedral has been the seat of
the Polish archbishops since A.D. 1000. The first Polish martyr, St. Adalbert,
is entombed in Gniezno Cathedral.
Gniezno Cathedral
On July 20,
1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg made his courageous, though unsuccessful,
attempt to assassinate Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair, near Kętrzyn, in northeastern
Poland. The Wolf’s Lair was Hitler’s main headquarters along the German Eastern
Front.
Russian
composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose paternal Polish grandfather fought in the
1863 insurrection against Russia and was exiled to Siberia, is the most famous
of the descendant of those Poles exiled or killed during that rebellion.
It is
estimated that 100 million pączki, a Polish doughnut, are consumed
every year on the the Thursday before Ash Wednesday alone.
pączki,
On November
3, 1939, the first death sentence of World War II was passed by the Nazis on
two Polish women who had torn down Nazi placards.
Poland’s
Henryk Sienkiewicz, author of Quo Vadis and winner of the
Nobel Prize for Literature, is buried in Warsaw’s St. John’s Cathedral, which
also happens to bear the dedication “Decapitation of the head of St. John.”
Napoleon
Bonaparte met the Polish elite and his future mistress, Countess Maria Waleska,
in the ballroom of Warsaw’s Zamek Królewski (Royal Castle)
in 1806.
Nicolaus
Copernicus (Mikołaj Kopernik) was born in 1473 in Toruń (Thorn), Poland. He was
educated at Kraków’s Jagiellonian University and after that joined the Catholic
priesthood. On his return home from studying in the famous Renaissance
universities in Padua and Bologna, he became administrator of the northern
bishopric of Warmia in 1497, also working as a doctor, lawyer, architect, and
soldier. He lived for 15 years in Frombork, where he constructed an observatory
and undertook his research, which he later wrote down in De revolutionibus
orbium coelestium; its revolutionary contention was that the sun, not Earth,
was the center of the planetary system. The work was published by church
authorities in Nuremberg in 1543, the year Copernicus died. It was later banned
by the papacy, but re-allowed into scholasticism in 1582 with Pope Gregory.
Nicolaus Copernicus (assumed image)
Ludwig
Zamenhof, from Białystok, Poland, created the artificial language of Esperanto.
His first primer, Dr. Esperanto’s International Language, was published in
1887. The first world Esperanto conference was held in France in 1905, the same
year Zamenhof published Fundamento de Esperanto, his main
work, which became the basic Esperanto textbook and is still use today.
Universala Esperanto-Asocio has an estimated worldwide membership of 500,000
speakers. There is still a thriving Esperanto-speaking community in Białystok.
Marie Curie
(Manya Sklodowska) was born in Warsaw (Warszawa), Poland, on November 7, 1867.
She moved to Paris in early 1880 and married Frenchman Pierre Curie in 1895.
With her husband, she discovered the elements polonium (Po), named after her
native Poland, in the summer of 1898 and, soon thereafter, radium (Ra). She is
credited for coining the term “radioactivity” and won her first Nobel Prize in
Physics with her husband and another colleague, Henri Becquerel, in 1903.
Following Pierre’s death in 1906, Marie was appointed to her husband’s
professorship and was the first woman to teach at Paris’ Sorbonne University.
She won a second Nobel Prize in 1911 for her research in the isolation of pure
radium.
Marie Curie
Thomas
Keneally’s book Schindler’s Ark is
based on the life of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who used his
business operations to shelter thousands of Polish Jews during World War II.
The book won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize in 1982 and was also made into
an Academy Award-winning film, Schindler’s List, by Steven Spielberg.
American
author Leon Uris wrote the bestselling novel Mila 18, based on the tale of the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising of 1843. Mila 18 was
the Warsaw address of the Jewish Resistance militia’s headquarters.
Ignacy Jan
Paderewski was a celebrated pianist and composer who became Poland’s first
prime minister post World War II, as the country regained its independence from
Nazi Germany.
Mikołaj Rej
is the so-called Father of Polish Literature, being the first author to write
exclusively in the Polish language.
In October,
1978, the Bishop of Kraków, Poland, Cardinal Karol Józef Wojtyla, became Pope
John Paul II, the 264th head of the Roman Catholic Church on October 16, 1978
at 5:15 p.m. A mountain climbing man of letters, playwright, philosopher,
intellectual, and poet, Pope John Paul II is affirmed by many as one of the
chief architects of the Second Vatican Council and its document Gaudium es Spes, or Joy and Hope. He was canonized
by the Roman Catholic Church on April 27, 2014.
Pope (and Saint) John Paul II
Poles have
won a total of 17 Nobel Prizes (more than Japan, China, India, or Australia),
including four Peace Prizes and five in Literature.
Polish-born
Michael Marks arrived in Britain in the 1880s, fleeing persecution of the Jews
in Russian-controlled Poland. In 1884, he set up a stall in Leeds’ Kirkgate
open market, selling household goods for the fixed price of a penny. He would
later go on to become cofounder, with Tom Spencer, of Marks & Spencer
Department Stores, which officially opened in 1894.
Born in
Kraków, Poland, Helena Rubinstein can take credit for the world’s first
waterproof mascara, and later for the precursor of the mascara wands used
universally today, when she bought and developed a business called
“Mascara-Matic.” The business was also the first to develop a professional
range of suntan products.
Helena Rubinstein (photo)
One of the
world’s oldest salt mines, the Wieliczka Salt Mine, located in the southern
Polish town of Wieliczka, was built in the 13th century and produced table salt
until 2007. The mine’s attractions include dozens of statues, three chapels,
and an entire cathedral carved out of rock salt by the miners. Approximately
1.2 million visitors walk through the salt mine annually. The mine reaches a
depth of 1,073 feet (327 m) and is over 178 miles (287 km) long. It is often
referred to as the “Underground Salt Cathedral of Poland.”
The English
writer Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Nałęcz Korzeniowski in
Poland. He is most famous for the novels Lord Jim and Heart
of Darkness.
The highest
mountain in Australia, Mount Kosciuszko, was named after Polish General Tadeusz
Kościuszko, who fought against the Russian Empire as well as in the American
Revolutionary War.
Kazimierz
(Casimir Pulaski) is a Polish-born nobleman and soldier who was recruited by
Benjamin Franklin and the Marquis de Lafayette to fight with the colonists in
the American Revolutionary War. He is sometimes called the “Father of the
American cavalry.” He was killed on October 9, 1779, during the Battle of
Savannah in Georgia.
In 1912,
Casimir Funk, a Polish-born American biochemist, collected all published
literature on the issue of vitamin deficiency. He was the first to isolated
niacin, later called Vitamin B3. He also coined the term vital
amine to describe the class of chemicals he and other researchers were
studying, and the word was later simplified to vitamin by 1920.
Stanisław
Leszczyński, King of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1704–1709 and
1733–1736, was the father-in-law of Louis XV of France. Leszczyński became the
last Duke of Lorraine after losing the throne of Poland. He gave his name to a
World Heritage City square in Nancy, then the capital of the Duchy of Lorraine.
Polish
astronomer Johannes Hevelius published the earliest exact maps of the moon.
In 1802, a
Polish unit of soldiers accompanied a French force sent to quell the slave
uprising in the French colony of Haiti. Descendants of the Polish soldiers
still live in Haiti where they are known as negres blancs. In 1983,
Pope John Paul II visited Haiti and acknowledged its place in Polish history.
Mirosław
Hermaszewski was the first Polish national in space, flying aboard the Soyuz 30
spacecraft in 1978 and spending almost eight days on board the Salyut 6 space
station as part of the Intercosmos space program.
Frédéric
François Chopin (Fryderyk Franciszek Szopen), is Poland’s most famous composer.
Chopin was born in Żelazowa Wola, Poland, in 1810. In the summer of 1830, he
left Poland, never to return. He died in Paris in 1849 in his home at Place
Vendôme 12 and is buried in Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
Frédéric François Chopin
The
International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition is one of the oldest music
competitions in the world. It was founded by Polish Professor Jerzy Zurawiew,
and the first competition took place in January 1927 in the Warsaw Philharmonic
in 1927. From then on, the competition was organized to take place every five
years except for 1942, when the competition was interrupted by World War II.
The first
Olympic medal in winter sports won by a Polish national was a bronze won by
skier Franciszek Gąsienica Groń in 1956.
The
beginnings of Polish football, or soccer, can be traced back to a
seven-minute-long game played on July 15, 1894. The first real Polish football
club was called Sława Lwów, later Czarni Lwów, formed in 1903. The first
international match Poland played was against Hungary in 1921 in Budapest,
which Poland lost 0-1.
Poland
contributed 144 fighter pilots to the Allied effort during World War II, most
notably in the RAF 302 and 303 squadrons. It is claimed they are responsible
for shooting down 204 German planes and probably another 35, which was 12%–14%
of German losses during the Battle of Britain in 1940.
Poland’s
Stanisław Lem is known as one of the world’s greatest science fiction writers.
His novel Solaris was
made into a movie in 2002.
Poles
consider the Battle of Monte Cassino, a Benedictine monastery in Italy, their
most important military action during World War II. After repeated Allied
failures to take the monastery, Second Polish Corps commanded by General
Władysław Anders succeeded, although with heavy losses. The battle was
increasingly commemorated after 1989, with streets in Poland being named after
it.
Polish-born
Pola Negri, born Apolonia Chałupec, became a great Hollywood starlet,
especially of the silent film era. Her most memorable roles were in historical
epics such as Ann Boleyn and Madame DuBarry.
Krąków’s
Jagiellonian University was established by King Casimir III the Great in 1364
and is the oldest university in Poland and second oldest in Central Europe.
The American
Academy of Motion Pictures recognized the outstanding merit of Andrzej Wajda,
Poland’s most famous contemporary film director, awarding him a special Oscar
for lifetime achievement in March 2000.
Polish-born
Mariusz Pudzianowski is a five-time winner of the “World’s Strongest Man”
title.
President
Woodrow Wilson set out Fourteen Points in January 1918 as the basis for a peace
settlement at the end of World War I. The Thirteenth Point laid down the
requirement for an independent Poland, with secure access to the sea.
Barbara
Piasecka Johnson, of Johnson & Johnson Company fame, was born in
Staniewicze, Poland. In 1971, she married John Steward Johnson, who left her
the bulk of his fortune when he died in 1983. In 2007, she was listed on the
Forbes 400 World’s Richest People List with an estimated net worth of $2.7
billion US, making her the 149th richest person in the world. She died in
Sobótka, Poland, in 2013, and was buried in Wrocław.
Poles drink,
on average, 92 liters of beer a year, which places Poland third in consumption
in Europe behind Germany and the Czech Republic.
The first
surviving cookbook of Polish recipes dates from 1682 with dishes influenced by
strong Lithuanian, Tartar-Turkish, and German influences.
The Polish
alphabet consists of 32 letters.
Pierogi, or Polish
dumplings, are one of the most recognizable Polish dishes outside of Poland.
Ronald Reagan
named his 1982 speech “Let Poland Be Poland” after the song, “Żeby Polska była
Polską,” a protest song written in 1976 by Jan Pietrzak.
Poland has a
history of producing high-quality vodka for more than 500 years.
The first Polish
vodkas appeared in the 11th century when they were called gorzalks and
used as medicines.
Located in
Wrocław, the “Piwnica Swidnicka” is the oldest restaurant in Europe, open since
1275.
Pizza,
or zapiekanka, in Poland does not contain tomato sauce. It is a
popular street food served on a baguette with melted cheese, mushrooms, and
ketchup.
Inspired by
and named for the original Woodstock rock festival, Pryzstanek Woodstock, an
annual free rock music festival in Poland, is the largest open-air festival in
Europe.
In Poland,
bananas are peeled from the blossom end not the stem end.
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Pictures of
Poland
