Portal:Poland

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.

Refresh with new selections below (purge)

edit

From Polish history – show another

Monument to Polish soldiers in Crostwitz near Bautzen

The Battle of Bautzen was one of the last battles on the Eastern Front of World War II. It took place on the extreme southern flank of the Spremberg-Torgau Offensive, seeing days of pitched street fighting between forces of the Polish Second Army together with elements of the Soviet 52nd Army and 5th Guards Army on one side and remnants of the German 4th Panzer and 17th Armies on the other. Part of Marshal Ivan Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front push toward Berlin, the battle was fought in the town of Bautzen and its environs along the Bautzen–Niesky line. Major combat took place from 21 to 26 April 1945, but isolated engagements continued until 30 April. The Polish Second Army under General Karol Świerczewski suffered heavy losses, but with the aid of Soviet reinforcements prevented the German forces from breaking through to their rear. According to one historian, the Battle of Bautzen was one of the Polish Army's bloodiest. Both sides claimed victory and modern views as to who won the battle remain contradictory. After the fall of communism, Polish historians became critical of Świerczewski's command, blaming the near destruction of the Polish force on his incompetence and desire to capture Dresden. (Full article...)

More selected articles

edit

Selected biography – show another

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...)

More selected biographies

edit

Selected location – show another

Courtyard of the Lublin Castle

Lublin is the largest city in eastern Poland. Dating back to early Middle Ages, the city played an important role in the nation's history. It was the site of the Lublin Union which established the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569, and of the Lublin Committee which introduced the communist regime in Poland in 1944; seat of a major yeshiva and the Jewish Council of Four Lands in the 16th–18th centuries, but also of the Majdanek extermination camp during the Holocaust. Its colleges include the Marie Curie University, as well as the Catholic University of Lublin where Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II, gave lectures in ethics. Since Lublin's biggest employer, the state-owned truck manufacturer FSC, was acquired by the South Korean Daewoo and then entered bankruptcy in 2001, the city has been struggling to improve its economic performance and standards of living, making it one of the main beneficiaries of EU development funds. (Full article...)

More selected locations

edit

Did you know – show different entries

... that Samuel Willenberg (pictured) is the last living survivor of the prisoner uprising at the Treblinka extermination camp during the Holocaust in Poland?
... that dozens of Red Army soldiers switched sides and joined the Polish Army after several lost engagements during the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939?
... that Testament mój ("My Testament") was the poetical last will of Juliusz Słowacki, one of the Three Bards of Polish poetry?
... that the resistance movement in Auschwitz was formed by the Polish Home Army partisan Witold Pilecki?

More did you know...

edit

Poland now

Recent events

On 27 March, Poland suspended the right to claim asylum by people who cross the border from Belarus (border fence pictured).
On 18 February, Marian Turski, a historian, journalist and Holocaust survivor, died at the age of 98.
On 6 December, Stanisław Tym, a prominent comedian and satirist, died at the age of 87.
On 27 October, the discovery of a previously unknown waltz in A minor attributed to Frédéric Chopin, found at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, was announced.

Ongoing

Constitutional crisis • Belarus–EU border crisis • Ukrainian refugee crisis • Polish Presidency of the Council of the European Union

Upcoming

Presidential election on 18 May 2025

Holidays and observances in April 2025
(statutory public holidays in bold)

April Fool's Day, 1 April
Easter (Easter eggs pictured), 20 April
Easter Monday, 21 April

Archive and more...

edit

Selected image – show another

Majestic seal of King Vladislaus II

Credit: Jan Mehlich

A copy of the stamp of the majestic seal of King Vladislaus II (Władysław II Jagiełło, Jogaila) showing the king seated on a throne, holding an orb and a scepter. He is surrounded by coats of arms, supported by angels, of the territories of his realm: the White Eagle of Poland; the Pursuer of Lithuania; the aurochs' head of the Kalisz Voivodeship; the stripes and stars of the Sandomierz Voivodeship; the demi-lion and demi-eagle of the Kuyavia, Łęczyca and Sieradz voivodeships; the king's head of the Dobrzyń Territory; and the lion rampant of Red Ruthenia.