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

Street Demonstration by Władysław Skoczylas (1905)

The Łódź Insurrection was an uprising by Polish workers in Łódź against the Russian Empire which took place between 21 and 25 June 1905. The Russian-controlled Congress Poland was one of the major centers of the Russian Revolution of 1905, and the Łódź Insurrection was a key incident in those events. For months prior to the uprising, workers in Łódź had been in a state of unrest, with several major strikes brutally quelled by the Russian police and military. Around 21–22 June, angry workers began building barricades and assaulting police and military patrols. The riots began spontaneously, without backing from any organized group; Polish revolutionary groups were taken by surprise and did not play a major role in the subsequent events. Authorities declared martial law and called in additional troops. No businesses operated in the city on 23 June as the police and military stormed dozens of workers' barricades. Eventually, by 25 June, the uprising was crushed, with estimates of several hundred dead and wounded. The events were reported in international press and recognized by socialist and communist activists worldwide. (Full article...)

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Gniezno Doors

Credit: Krzysztof Mizera

Prayer of Saint Adalbert, one of 18 scenes in bas-relief, telling the story of Adalbert's life and martyrdom, that decorate the Romanesque bronze Gniezno Doors, the main entrance to the Gniezno Cathedral, which houses relics of the saint. Adalbert (Vojtěch) was a bishop of Prague and a missionary to Hungary, Poland, and Prussia where he was slain in AD 997.

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... that during the 1950s, Communist propaganda for the war against the potato beetle alleged that the insect (pictured) was introduced into East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia by the United States as a form of entomological warfare?
... that Polish-Jewish publisher Samuel Orgelbrand financed the printing of his Encyklopedia Powszechna ("Universal Encyclopedia"), the first modern Polish encyclopedia, with proceeds from sales of the Babylonian Talmud?
... that Polish nationalism is more restrictive in terms of ethnicity and religion than the earlier Polish-Lithuanian identity?

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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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Aerial view of Nowa Huta

Nowa Huta is an industrial easternmost district of the city of Kraków. Its history began in 1949, when Poland's communist government started to build the Lenin Steelworks (now Tadeusz Sendzimir Steelworks owned by Mittal Steel Company) together with a town for the workers. Nowa Huta, whose name translates as "New Steelworks", was meant to be an ideal socialist and atheist proletarian town supposed to counterbalance Kraków's conservative bourgeoisie. It is Poland's foremost example of socialist realist urban planning and architecture. The workers eventually turned against the communist regime when they demanded – with the help of Archbishop Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II – the right to build a church in the 1960s; and when they supported the Solidarity movement in the 1980s. (Full article...)

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