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

Contour map of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth at its greatest extent in 1619 superimposed on present-day national borders

The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was a confederation of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania under a common monarch, which lasted from 1569 until 1795. It was an extension of the Polish-Lithuanian Union, a dynastic union that had existed between the two nations since 1386. The Commonwealth was one of the largest and most populous states in Europe and for over two centuries successfully withstood conflicts with the Russians, the Ottomans and Sweden. It was notable for its political system, which was a precursor to modern democracy and federation; for its remarkable religious toleration; and for the second-oldest written national constitution in the world. Its economy was dominated by agriculture. While the Commonwealth's first century was a golden age for both Poland and Lithuania, the second century was marked by military defeats, a return to serfdom for the peasants, and growing anarchy in political life. (Full article...)

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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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Bydgoszcz granaries

Bydgoszcz is a city in northern Poland, straddling the confluence of the Vistula River and its left-bank tributary, the Brda. It is the eighth-largest city in Poland and the co-capital, with Toruń, of the Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship. Bydgoszcz is an architecturally rich city, with gothic, neo-gothic, neo-baroque, neoclassicist, modernist and Art Nouveau styles present, for which it has earned the nickname "Little Berlin". The notable granaries on Mill Island and along the riverside belong to one of the most recognized timber-framed landmarks in Poland. (Full article...)

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Did you know – show different entries

...that one-fourth of the world's white storks make their home in Poland, where they are believed to bring good fortune?
...that the first extra-solar planetary system was discovered by a Polish astronomer Aleksander Wolszczan?
... that Poland's National Council of the Judiciary has been criticized for including only 6 women among its 25 members?
... that the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki co-wrote the German libretto of Ubu Rex, his only opera buffa, based on the French play Ubu Roi?

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Poland now

Recent events

Poland won 10 medals, including one gold, at the 2024 Summer Olympics, ranking 42nd in the medal table.
- On 11 August, Daria Pikulik won a silver medal in track cycling.
- On 10 August, Poland men's team won a silver medal in volleyball, while Julia Szeremeta won a silver medal in boxing.
- On 7 August, Aleksandra Mirosław (pictured) and Aleksandra Kałucka won, respectively, gold and bronze medals in speed climbing.
On 1 August, Russian–Spanish journalist Pablo González Yagüe, arrested in Poland on espionage charges and held in pre-trial detention for 886 days, was released as part of a multinational prisoner exchange.
On 9 July, Jerzy Stuhr, a prominent theatre and film actor and director, died at the age of 77.

Ongoing
Constitutional crisis • Belarus–EU border crisis • Ukrainian refugee crisis

Holidays and observances in August 2024
(statutory public holidays in bold)

Assumption Day and Polish Armed Forces Day (military aircraft pictured), 15 April
Solidarity and Freedom Day, 31 August

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Daniel Mróz

Credit: Daniel Mróz

A 1957 illustration by Daniel Mróz for Sławomir Mrożek's short story collection entitled Słoń ("Elephant"). Mróz, with his surrealist or grotesque line art drawings, is best known as an illustrator for science fiction books by Stanisław Lem and works by Mrożek, who is famous for his satirical stories and absurdist dramas.