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.

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From Polish history – show another

Polish soldiers of the 3rd Lithuanian Infantry Regiment in 1792

The Polish–Russian War of 1792 was fought between the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian Empire, which ostensibly came to the aid of the Targowica Confederation, a group of conservative Polish nobles opposed to the Constitution of 3 May 1791. The war took place in two theaters: northern, in Lithuania, and southern, in Ukraine. In both, the Polish forces retreated before the numerically superior Russian forces, though they offered significantly more resistance in the south, thanks to the effective leadership of Polish commanders – Prince Józef Poniatowski and General Tadeusz Kościuszko. During the three-month-long struggle several battles were fought, but neither side scored a decisive victory. The largest success of the Polish forces was the defeat of one of the Russian formations at the Battle of Zieleńce on 18 June. The Order of Virtuti Militari ("For Military Valour"), Poland's highest military award to this day, was established to celebrate this victory. The war ended when King Stanislaus Augustus of Poland, seeking a diplomatic solution, asked for a ceasefire with the Russians and joined the Targowica Confederation, as demanded by Russia. The war resulted in the abrogation of the constitution and in the Second Partition of Poland. (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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Swoboda Lock on the Augustów Canal

The Augustów Canal is a summit-level canal which links the Biebrza River in northeastern Poland with the Neman River in Belarus. At over 100 km long, it comprises 18 locks (example pictured) and 22 sluice gates. Ever since the canal was built in 1823−1839 to provide a navigable waterway from the "Congress" Kingdom of Poland to the Baltic Sea bypassing Prussia, it has been described by experts as a technological marvel. It uses a post-glacial channel depression, forming the chain of Augustów Lakes, and the river valleys of the Biebrza, Netta, Czarna Hańcza, and Neman, which made it possible to perfectly integrate the canal with the surrounding elements of the natural environment. Although the project was never finalized, the completed part of the Augustów Canal remained an inland waterway of local significance used for commercial shipping to and from the Vistula and Neman Rivers until rendered obsolete by the regional railway network. (Full article...)

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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?

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Poland now

Recent events

On 18 February, Marian Turski (pictured), 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 EU

Upcoming

Presidential election on 18 May 2025

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

Women's Day (bouquet of roses and carnations pictured), 8 March

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A star chart with Scutum Sobiescianum and Taurus Poniatovii

Credit: Sidney Hall

Plate 12 from Urania's Mirror, a set of star charts published in Britain in 1824. The two constellations to the left of Serpentarius (Serpent-bearer, now called Ophiuchus) were named by Polish astronomers after the coats of arms of their kings. Scutum Sobiescianum (Sobieski's Shield), created by Johannes Hevelius in honor of King John III Sobieski, who bore the Janina coat of arms, is now known simply as Scutum. The now-obsolete Taurus Poniatovii (Poniatowski's Bull) was named by Marcin Odlanicki Poczobutt for King Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski, who used the Ciołek coat of arms.