The lands of present-day Poland were inhabited from prehistoric times, but their most famous testimony is Biskupin, an Iron Age fortified settlement built around the eighth century before Christ on the shore of a lake in Greater Poland. Discovered in 1933, Biskupin preserved the rows of wooden houses, the palisades and the log roadways of a Lusatian culture community, and it became a symbol of how ancient settlement in these lands is, although its inhabitants were not yet Slavs.
In the centuries around the turn of the era, the region was a crossroads of peoples: Germanic tribes, the amber trade route linking the Baltic with the Roman Mediterranean, and later the passage of the great movements of the migration period. The West Slavs, direct ancestors of the Poles, settled in the basins of the Vistula and the Oder between the sixth and seventh centuries, organised into numerous tribes: the Vistulans around the future Kraków, the Polans and the Goplans in Greater Poland, the Silesians in the south-west, the Pomeranians on the coast, the Masovians in the centre.
Of all of them, it was the tribe of the Polans — 'the people of the open fields' — settled around Gniezno and Poznań, that in the tenth century imposed its dominance over the rest and gave the future state both its name and its core. Their chiefs, the Piast dynasty, whose legendary genealogy begins with the peasant Piast the Wheelwright, united the neighbouring tribes by force and by alliance, and with them the history of Poland as a nation properly begins.
The first Polish ruler documented with certainty was Mieszko I, duke of the Polans, who appears in the chronicles around the year 960 at the head of an already considerable state. The event that fixes the birth of Poland as a Christian nation took place in 966: Mieszko I was baptised, probably at Easter that year, after marrying the Czech princess Dobrava. By accepting Christianity from Bohemia rather than directly from the Germanic Empire, Mieszko anchored Poland in the Latin Christendom of Rome while preserving its independence in the face of pressure from its powerful German neighbours. That baptism (Chrzest Polski) is the founding date of the nation, and the history of the Polish state is conventionally taken to begin in 966.
Mieszko's son, Bolesław I the Brave (Chrobry), took the young state to its first peak. In the year 1000 the emperor Otto III made a pilgrimage to Gniezno to the tomb of St Adalbert — the missionary bishop martyred by the pagan Prussians in 997, whose body Bolesław had ransomed for its weight in gold — and at the so-called Congress of Gniezno he recognised Poland's standing and created an ecclesiastical province of its own with its seat in Gniezno. In 1025, shortly before his death, Bolesław the Brave had himself crowned king, the first of Poland, sealing the kingdom's full sovereignty.
The following centuries alternated between consolidation and crisis. The Piasts moved the centre of gravity from Gniezno to Kraków, resisted pagan reactions and imperial pressure, and gained and lost territories such as Pomerania and Silesia. Christianisation brought writing, abbeys, the first chroniclers — such as Gallus Anonymus at the start of the twelfth century — and Poland's integration into western European civilisation, a choice of direction that would shape the country's destiny forever in relation to the Orthodox world to the east.
In 1138, King Bolesław III Wrymouth divided the kingdom among his sons in his will, hoping to avoid wars of succession. The result was the opposite: for almost two centuries Poland fragmented into rival duchies ruled by different branches of the Piasts, in what is known as the period of feudal fragmentation. Weakened and divided, the Poland of the duchies suffered the devastating Mongol invasion, which in 1241 laid waste to the south of the country and defeated a Polish and crusader army at the battle of Legnica. It was also in this period that, in 1226, Duke Konrad of Masovia made a historic mistake by inviting the Teutonic Knights to fight the pagan Prussians of the north: the German order conquered those lands and founded a military state of its own on the Baltic that would become a formidable enemy.
Reunification came with Władysław I the Elbow-high (Łokietek), who around 1320 brought much of the Polish lands back together and had himself crowned king in the cathedral of Kraków, which from then on would be the coronation place of the monarchs. But it was his son, Casimir III the Great (1333-1370), who raised the kingdom to a new golden age. The only Polish king to whom history gave the title 'the Great', Casimir inherited, as the famous saying goes, 'a Poland of wood and left it of stone': he fortified dozens of towns and castles, codified the laws, founded the University of Kraków in 1364 — the first in Poland and one of the oldest in central Europe — and reorganised the economy and the currency.
Casimir the Great also left a singular mark on the question of tolerance. In a Europe that was expelling and persecuting Jews, he confirmed and extended their privileges and protections, opening Poland to a Jewish immigration that, fleeing the pogroms of western Europe, would make the country the largest home of Judaism in the world for centuries. When Casimir died in 1370 without a male heir, the Piast dynasty that had ruled Poland since its birth came to an end, and the throne passed through the female line into a new era.
In 1386 the young queen Jadwiga — crowned 'king' of Poland under the laws of the kingdom — married Jogaila, grand duke of Lithuania, who was baptised as Władysław II Jagiełło and founded the Jagiellonian dynasty. That personal union of Poland and Lithuania, the last great pagan state in Europe, now converting to Christianity, created an enormous power stretching from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea. Its first great triumph came on 15 July 1410 at the battle of Grunwald (Tannenberg), one of the largest in medieval Europe, in which the Polish-Lithuanian armies crushed the Teutonic Knights and broke the German order's power in the Baltic for good.
The union became definitive in 1569, when the Union of Lublin merged the two states into a single entity: the Rzeczpospolita, the 'Republic of Two Nations' or Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with a single elected king, a single parliament (the Sejm) and a single foreign policy, while each part kept its own laws and armies. At its height, in the early seventeenth century, the Commonwealth was one of the largest and most populous states in Europe, with almost a million square kilometres. It was a cultural golden age, with the Renaissance flourishing in Kraków, the figure of the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus — who in 1543 revolutionised science by placing the Sun at the centre of the universe — and a brilliant intellectual life.
The Commonwealth was an unusual political experiment for its time: a 'democracy of nobles' in which the szlachta (the numerous nobility, up to 10% of the population) elected the king and controlled power through the Sejm. The Warsaw Confederation of 1573 guaranteed by law an exceptional degree of religious tolerance in the Europe of the wars of religion, and the country took in Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Protestants, Jews, Armenians and Muslim Tatars. But that same system carried the seed of its ruin: the liberum veto, which allowed a single deputy to dissolve the Sejm and annul all its decisions, progressively paralysed the state and left it at the mercy of neighbouring powers. Devastating wars in the seventeenth century — above all the Swedish invasion known as 'the Deluge' (1655-1660) — bled the Republic dry, and it entered a long decline.
By the eighteenth century the once powerful Commonwealth had become a paralysed giant. The liberum veto blocked any reform, the elective throne exposed it to foreign intrigue, and its neighbours — the Russia of Catherine the Great, the Prussia of Frederick II and Habsburg Austria — had grown until they surrounded it with modern armies. Russia in particular treated Poland as a protectorate in all but name. When the country tried to reform itself and shake off that tutelage, the powers responded by carving it up in three successive stages.
The First Partition, in 1772, tore about a third of its territory away from Poland, shared out between Russia, Prussia and Austria. The trauma drove an extraordinary reform effort, crowned by the Constitution of 3 May 1791, considered the first modern constitution in Europe and the second in the world after that of the United States; it abolished the liberum veto and tried to modernise the state. But the reform came too late and alarmed the neighbours: in 1793 Russia and Prussia imposed the Second Partition. A national uprising in 1794, led by General Tadeusz Kościuszko — also a hero of American independence — was crushed by the Russian and Prussian armies.
In 1795 the Third Partition completed the job: Russia, Prussia and Austria divided up what was left, and Poland simply ceased to exist as a state. The last king, Stanisław August Poniatowski, abdicated, and for the next 123 years there was no Poland on the map of Europe. It was a unique case in modern history: a large, ancient nation erased from political geography by agreement among its neighbours. The memory of the Partitions and the determination to recover independence became the axis of Polish identity throughout the following century.
Throughout the nineteenth century, Poles were subjects of three different empires — the Russian, the Prussian (later German) and the Austrian — each with its own language, laws and policy towards the subjugated nation. Napoleon gave the Poles a brief hope by creating the Duchy of Warsaw in 1807, a French satellite state that vanished with his defeat; the Congress of Vienna of 1815 reorganised the division and created a 'Kingdom of Poland' under the Russian tsar, with an autonomy that was whittled away until it disappeared.
The Poles did not resign themselves. Two major armed insurrections broke out against Russian rule: the November Uprising of 1830-1831 and the January Uprising of 1863-1864. Both were harshly crushed, followed by deportations to Siberia, confiscations and an intense policy of Russification: Polish was banned or restricted in schools and administration, and the Catholic Church was persecuted. In the Prussian part, after German unification in 1871, Bismarck pushed a systematic Germanisation (the Kulturkampf, land expropriations, schooling in German) that the Poles resisted stubbornly, as in the famous school strike by the children of Września in 1901. The Austrian zone, Galicia with its capitals in Kraków and Lwów, was by contrast the most tolerant and enjoyed broad cultural autonomy from the 1860s.
Deprived of a state, the Poles made culture their homeland. The nineteenth century was the great age of national Romanticism: the poet Adam Mickiewicz sang of the lost homeland in Pan Tadeusz, and the composer Frédéric Chopin carried across Europe the mazurkas and polonaises that turned music into an act of national resistance. Later the scientist Marie Skłodowska-Curie — twice a Nobel laureate — and the novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz kept high the prestige of a nation without a state. Alongside insurrectionary Romanticism there also grew a current of 'organic work' that bet on strengthening Polish society through the economy, education and language, waiting for a historic opportunity that would come with the First World War.
The First World War set against one another the three empires that had divided Poland up, and their simultaneous defeat opened the door the Poles had been waiting for for more than a century. On 11 November 1918 — the same day as the armistice that ended the war on the western front — Józef Piłsudski, the veteran socialist and military leader who had just been released from a German prison, took command in Warsaw, and Poland recovered its independence after 123 years of non-existence. That date is now the country's national holiday. The Second Polish Republic had to be built almost from nothing: unifying three different administrations, three legal systems, three railway networks with different track gauges, and settling borders nobody had defined.
Defining those borders cost blood. The gravest of the wars surrounding the new state's birth was the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1921. Bolshevik Russia, which aimed to carry the revolution into the heart of Europe, threw the Red Army against Poland, and in the summer of 1920 its troops reached the gates of Warsaw. There, between 13 and 25 August 1920, Piłsudski led a counter-offensive that destroyed the Soviet army at the battle of Warsaw, known as 'the miracle on the Vistula', and saved Polish independence — and, according to many historians, halted the revolution's advance towards western Europe. The Peace of Riga in 1921 fixed the eastern border far to the east.
The Second Republic was a young, poor and multi-ethnic state: a third of its population were not Polish speakers, but Ukrainian, Jewish (more than three million people, the largest Jewish community in Europe), Belarusian or German. Its parliamentary democracy proved unstable, and in 1926 Piłsudski staged a coup and set up a moderate authoritarian regime, the Sanacja, which governed until his death in 1935 and beyond it. Despite the difficulties, the country built a modern port from scratch at Gdynia on the Baltic and developed an intense cultural life. But interwar Poland was trapped between two totalitarian and revanchist neighbours — Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union — that had not accepted its borders, and that in 1939 would seal its fate.
On 23 August 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, a non-aggression treaty whose secret protocol divided up eastern Europe and, in particular, Poland. Nine days later, on 1 September 1939, Hitler's Germany invaded Poland — the warship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire at dawn on the Polish garrison at Westerplatte, in Gdańsk — beginning the Second World War. France and the United Kingdom declared war on Germany, but provided no effective military help. On 17 September, honouring the pact, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east. Attacked by two powers at once and abandoned by its allies, the country was defeated within weeks; its government went into exile, first to France and then to London.
Poland was divided between the two occupiers, and both applied a deliberate policy of destroying the Polish nation. The Germans annexed the western regions directly into the Reich and organised the rest as the 'General Government', a colony under terror. The Polish elites — teachers, priests, officers, intellectuals — were a priority target for extermination in operations such as the Intelligenzaktion and the AB-Aktion. Millions of Poles were subjected to forced labour, mass displacement and executions. On the Soviet side, the NKVD deported hundreds of thousands of Poles to Siberia and Kazakhstan and, in the spring of 1940, secretly murdered some 22,000 Polish officers, police and intellectuals held prisoner, in the Katyn massacre and at other sites; the Soviet Union denied responsibility for half a century and admitted it only in 1990.
Under occupation, the Poles organised the most developed underground state in all of occupied Europe, with a clandestine government, courts, secret schools and a powerful resistance army, the Armia Krajowa (Home Army), answering to the government in exile. No Polish government collaborated with the occupiers: there was no puppet regime in Poland equivalent to those in other occupied countries. The Polish resistance and Polish society paid for that refusal with repression of extreme brutality, in a country the Nazis turned into the main stage for their crimes.
On the eve of the war, around 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland, the largest Jewish community in Europe and one of the oldest and culturally richest in the world. During the German occupation that community was almost entirely annihilated: it is estimated that some three million Polish Jews — close to 90% — were murdered in the Holocaust. It is essential to state the facts precisely: the extermination camps were set up on the territory of occupied Poland, but they were conceived, built and operated by Nazi Germany; they were not 'Polish camps', an expression that historians and the Polish state itself reject as false. Poland was an occupied and subjugated country, not a collaborating state.
The extermination went through several phases. First the Germans confined the Jewish population in walled, overcrowded ghettos — the largest was the Warsaw ghetto, with close to 400,000 people — where hunger and disease caused mass death. Then, from 1942, as part of the so-called 'Final Solution', the Nazis deported the ghetto populations to camps built to kill on an industrial scale: the three camps of Operation Reinhard — Treblinka, Bełżec and Sobibor — where close to 1.7 million people were murdered, almost exclusively in gas chambers; the camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Oświęcim, the largest of them all, where around 1.1 million people died, the vast majority of them Jews from across Europe; and Majdanek, next to Lublin. Non-Jewish Poles, Soviet prisoners, Gypsies (the Roma people) and other groups also perished.
There was resistance. In April 1943 the last Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose in arms against the troops who were going to deport them to their deaths: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the largest Jewish rebellion of the war, crushed after weeks of fighting with the total destruction of the ghetto. There were also acts of Polish solidarity — the clandestine organisation Żegota devoted itself to hiding and saving Jews, and Poland is the country with the most 'Righteous Among the Nations' recognised by Israel — but there were also episodes of denunciation, indifference and collaboration by individuals, a legitimate historical debate that is still alive in Polish society. Helping a Jew was punished in occupied Poland with the death penalty for the person who did it and for their whole family, an extreme circumstance that historians emphasise without it serving to avoid an honest examination of every kind of conduct. What is beyond dispute is the scale of the crime: the near-total disappearance of a thousand-year-old Jewish world that had made Poland its home for centuries.
In the summer of 1944, with the Red Army advancing westward and already at the gates of Warsaw, the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) decided to liberate the capital by its own means before the Soviets arrived, to assert Polish sovereignty against future domination by Moscow. On 1 August 1944 the Warsaw Uprising broke out, the largest armed resistance operation in occupied Europe. The insurgents, badly armed, managed to control much of the city, but the help they expected never came: the Red Army halted its advance on the eastern bank of the Vistula and watched without intervening while the Germans crushed the rebellion.
The repression was appalling. During 63 days of fighting, and in the massacres of civilians that went with it — such as the one in the Wola district, where German troops murdered tens of thousands of residents in a matter of days — around 200,000 people died, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. After the surrender of 2 October, Hitler ordered the city razed as punishment: German units systematically dynamited and burned whatever was still standing, so that by the end of the war close to 85% of Warsaw lay in ruins. Poland's capital was one of the most destroyed cities of the entire war.
The Red Army finally entered the devastated Warsaw in January 1945 and pushed the Germans westward. The Yalta Conference, in February 1945, decided the fate of postwar Poland without the Poles taking part: the country's borders shifted hundreds of kilometres westward — Poland lost its eastern territories, annexed by the Soviet Union, and gained lands that had been German up to the river Oder — and the country was left within the Soviet sphere of influence. Millions of people — Poles, Germans, Ukrainians — were expelled and displaced in one of the largest forced movements of population in European history. Poland had been the first country to resist Hitler and one of those that suffered most: it lost around six million citizens, close to a fifth of its population, half of them Jews.
Once the war was over, the Soviet Union imposed a communist regime on Poland. Through fraudulent elections and the elimination of the opposition, the Polish United Workers' Party took total control of the state, which in 1952 was renamed the Polish People's Republic (PRL), a satellite of Moscow within the Warsaw Pact. The first years were ones of hard Stalinism: collectivisation, heavy industry, political police and repression of the Church and of former resistance fighters. But communism never managed to fully subdue Polish society, deeply Catholic and with a strong national identity. In 1956, the workers' protests in Poznań, put down with bloodshed, forced a turn towards a somewhat more tolerant communism under Władysław Gomułka.
The following decades brought recurring crises, almost always triggered by price rises: in 1970 the repression of workers' protests on the Baltic coast (Gdańsk, Gdynia, Szczecin) left dozens dead; in 1976 there were new strikes. Society was organising itself more and more outside the regime, with the support of the Catholic Church. One event changed the mood of the country: in 1978 the cardinal of Kraków, Karol Wojtyła, was elected pope under the name John Paul II, the first Polish pope in history; his triumphant pilgrimage to Poland in 1979, before millions of the faithful, gave the people back an awareness of their own strength and sowed the courage that would erupt a year later.
In August 1980 a wave of strikes paralysed the country, with its epicentre at the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk, where a sacked electrician, Lech Wałęsa, led the protest. Out of the August agreements Solidarity (Solidarność) was born, the first free and independent trade union in the Soviet bloc, which within months came to have close to ten million members and became a mass social movement challenging the communist monopoly on power. Alarmed by Solidarity and pressed by Moscow, General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law on 13 December 1981: the union was banned, its leaders interned and the country militarised. Solidarity survived underground, sustained by the Church and by much of society, until the economic crisis and the new international climate of Soviet perestroika forced the regime to negotiate.
In early 1989, with the economy in ruins and the regime with no way out, the communist government sat down to negotiate with the opposition in the so-called Round Table talks. The agreement opened the door to partially free elections on 4 June 1989 — the same day as the Tiananmen massacre in China — in which Solidarity swept the board, winning every seat it was allowed to contest. It was the beginning of the end of communism, not only in Poland but across the whole Eastern bloc: a few months later the Berlin Wall came down. In August 1989 Poland formed the first non-communist government in eastern Europe, headed by Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and in 1990 Lech Wałęsa was elected president by popular vote.
The transition was not easy. To move from a planned economy to a market one, the government applied a brutal shock therapy in 1990 (the 'Balcerowicz plan') that caused inflation, unemployment and hardship, but laid the foundations of a modern economy that would in time become one of the most dynamic in Europe. Poland completely reoriented its foreign policy towards the West: it joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union on 1 May 2004, an objective that sealed its definitive return to the European family from which the Partitions and the Iron Curtain had separated it.
Today Poland is a democratic republic of almost 38 million people, a member of the EU and NATO, with an economy that has grown steadily for decades and a growing influence in central and eastern Europe, heightened by its role in the response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and in taking in millions of Ukrainian refugees since 2022. Like any young democracy it goes through tensions — debates about the rule of law, historical memory, the Church or its place in the European Union — but contemporary Poland, which rose again from total disappearance and from the devastation of two totalitarian systems, looks at its thousand-year history with deep pride and with the certainty, won at an enormous price, of its own existence as a nation.
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Eastern Poland was for centuries a land of frontier, contact and mixture, very different from the west. In the era of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, these lands were part of the Kresy ('the borders' or 'the borderlands'), the vast eastern strip of the state stretching towards present-day Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania. It was a region of enormous ethnic and religious diversity: Catholic Poles, Orthodox or Uniate Ukrainians and Belarusians, Jews, Armenians and Muslim Tatars lived side by side, in a mosaic of languages and creeds unusual in Europe.
That diversity was at once the region's wealth and its fragility. The nobility and the towns tended to be Polish in culture, while the peasantry in many areas was Ukrainian or Belarusian, and the towns and small towns held a very dense Jewish population. This structure generated social and national tensions that would erupt violently at different moments in history, from the great Cossack rebellions of the seventeenth century to the ethnic conflicts of the twentieth.
The east changed profoundly in the twentieth century. After the Second World War, Poland's border moved hundreds of kilometres westward: the old eastern Kresy, with cities such as Wilno (Vilnius) and Lwów (Lviv), ended up inside the Soviet Union, and millions of people were displaced. Today's eastern Poland is the strip that remained on the Polish side of that new border: a more rural region, less touristy and less prosperous than the west, but of great historical and natural value, where you can still catch the echo of that vanished multi-ethnic world.
Lublin, the main city of eastern Poland, has a prominent place in the country's history because it was here that one of the founding events of modern Europe was sealed: the Union of Lublin. In 1569 the Sejm, meeting in the city, approved the definitive union of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania into a single state, the Commonwealth of Two Nations (Rzeczpospolita). Until then the two countries had shared only the monarch; from Lublin onwards they also had a common parliament, foreign policy and elected king, although each kept its own laws and army.
The Union of Lublin created one of the largest states in Europe and a singular political entity that would last more than two centuries, until the Partitions. Lublin's position, halfway between Kraków and the Lithuanian and Ruthenian lands, made it a natural meeting place and a prosperous trading city on the routes to the east. Its old town, with the castle and the Kraków Gate, still has the character of that era.
Lublin was also a great centre of Jewish culture. For centuries it was home to one of the most important Jewish communities in Poland, and it was famous for its religious academies: it came to be called 'the Jerusalem of the Kingdom of Poland' for the fame of its Talmudic scholars. That history, like that of so many cities in the east, ended with the Holocaust. Today Lublin is a historic university city, with an authentic old town and far less tourism than Kraków or Warsaw, which preserves the memory both of the Union of 1569 and of its vanished Jewish world.
Eastern Poland and the old Kresy were one of the great hearts of world Judaism. From the Middle Ages, and above all after the protections granted by Casimir the Great in the fourteenth century, Jews fleeing persecution in western Europe found a refuge in Poland and prospered in its cities and in the countless towns and villages of the east, the shtetls, where they often made up the majority of the population. There they developed an extraordinarily rich culture in the Yiddish language, with their synagogues, their religious academies (yeshivot), their literature and their traditions.
It was precisely in these south-eastern lands, in eastern Podolia and Galicia, that Hasidism was born in the eighteenth century, one of the most influential Jewish religious movements in history. Its founder, Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Baal Shem Tov ('master of the good name'), preached a fervent and joyful spirituality, based on prayer, music and devotion rather than scholarly study, which took root with enormous force among the Jewish masses of eastern Europe and gave rise to numerous rabbinical dynasties and to communities that survive today around the world.
This world, which had made Poland the largest home of Judaism for centuries, was almost entirely annihilated by the Holocaust. The very dense communities of the east were among the first and most completely destroyed by the Germans and their collaborators after the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, through mass shootings and deportation to the extermination camps. The cities and towns of eastern Poland, which for centuries had had a vibrant Jewish life, were emptied of it. Travelling through the region today also means travelling through the memory of that vanished world, of which synagogues, cemeteries and the memory held in names and stones remain.
Eastern Poland suffered the double occupation of the Second World War with particular harshness. After the invasion of September 1939, this region ended up on the Soviet side under the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, and lived through almost two years of Soviet occupation, with mass deportations of Poles to Siberia and Kazakhstan. In June 1941, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union, the region passed into German hands and was absorbed into the General Government or annexed to the Reich, coming under Nazi terror.
On the outskirts of Lublin, the Germans built the Majdanek concentration and extermination camp, one of the major camps in the Nazi system. Majdanek worked at once as a concentration camp, a forced labour camp and an extermination camp; tens of thousands of people were murdered there and in its subcamps, above all Jews, but also Soviet and Polish prisoners of war. In November 1943, in the operation known as 'Harvest Festival' (Aktion Erntefest), the Germans shot some 42,000 Jews at Majdanek and nearby camps in barely two days, one of the largest shooting massacres of the entire Holocaust.
Majdanek has one historical peculiarity: it was captured almost intact by the Red Army in July 1944, since the rapid Soviet advance prevented the Germans from destroying the evidence. It was thus the first major Nazi camp to be liberated and shown to the world, and its gas chambers, ovens and barracks provided one of the first complete material testimonies of the extermination. Today it is a state museum and memorial. Alongside Majdanek and the sites of the massacres, the eastern region preserves the memory of an occupation that was among the bloodiest in all of Europe.
At Poland's eastern edge, on the border with Belarus, stretches the Białowieża Forest (Puszcza Białowieska), one of the most important natural treasures in Europe. It is the last great remnant of the primeval forest that thousands of years ago covered much of the northern plain of the continent: an ancient woodland, little altered by human beings, with enormous centuries-old trees, dead wood and extraordinary biodiversity. For its value it is a Unesco World Heritage Site and a biosphere reserve, shared between Poland and Belarus.
The reason this forest survived when so many others disappeared is historical: for centuries it was a hunting preserve reserved for the kings of Poland and later the tsars of Russia, who protected it for their exclusive use and banned felling or settlement. That royal protection, self-interested though it was, saved the forest from the exploitation that destroyed the others and allowed it to reach the modern era almost intact, when it became a protected area.
Białowieża is above all the last refuge of the European bison (żubr), the largest land mammal on the continent. These great wild bovids came to the brink of extinction: the last bison living free in Białowieża was shot around 1919, and the species survived only thanks to a handful of animals in captivity. From those, and with a pioneering breeding and reintroduction programme begun in the 1920s in the forest itself, the European bison was returned to the wild; today Białowieża holds the largest population of wild bison in the world, a symbol of successful conservation. The forest is thus both a unique natural monument and an example of how a species that was almost lost could be rescued.
Kraków, on the banks of the Vistula, was Poland's capital for more than five centuries and the setting for its royal history. Already important in the time of the first Piasts, it became the kingdom's main seat when Władysław I the Elbow-high had himself crowned here in 1320, in the cathedral of Wawel Castle. From then on, Wawel hill — with its royal castle and cathedral — was the place where the kings of Poland were crowned and buried, and it remains the country's national pantheon, where monarchs, poets and heroes rest.
Under Casimir the Great, in the fourteenth century, Kraków lived through its first great flowering: the king who 'found a Poland of wood and left it of stone' gave it walls, embellished it and founded its university there in 1364. In the age of the Jagiellonian dynasty and the Renaissance, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the city reached its peak as one of the great capitals of central Europe: Wawel Castle was rebuilt as a Renaissance palace, the enormous market square (Rynek Główny) — one of the largest in medieval Europe — buzzed with trade around the Cloth Hall (Sukiennice), and St Mary's Basilica raised its two unequal towers.
Kraków lost its rank as capital when the court moved to Warsaw around 1596, but it remained the city of coronations and the symbolic heart of the nation. During the Partitions it came under Austrian rule, in the region of Galicia, the most tolerant of the three occupation zones, which let it keep and cultivate its character as Poland's spiritual and cultural capital. Fortunately, unlike Warsaw, Kraków came through the Second World War almost intact, and its historic centre — a Unesco World Heritage Site since 1978 — is today the best-preserved medieval and Renaissance ensemble in Poland.
In 1364, King Casimir the Great founded in Kraków the Studium Generale, the first university in Poland and one of the oldest in central Europe, coming shortly after those of Prague and Vienna. After a period of decline it was refounded and expanded at the start of the fifteenth century thanks to a bequest from Queen Jadwiga, which is why it came to be called the Jagiellonian University in honour of the dynasty. Its most emblematic building, the Collegium Maius, a fifteenth-century Gothic courtyard with arcades, is preserved as a museum.
For centuries the Jagiellonian University was Poland's great intellectual centre and a place of European prestige, especially in astronomy and mathematics. Its most famous student was Nicolaus Copernicus, who studied here at the end of the fifteenth century before formulating his heliocentric theory. Throughout its history the university trained much of the Polish elite and kept national culture alive even during the periods of foreign domination.
Its commitment to the nation cost it dearly under Nazi occupation. On 6 November 1939, a few weeks after the invasion, the Germans set a trap for the university's professors: they summoned them to a meeting and arrested almost all of them, deporting more than 180 academics to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in the operation known as Sonderaktion Krakau, part of the Nazi plan to annihilate the Polish intelligentsia. Several died in captivity. The university went on working underground throughout the war. Today the Jagiellonian remains one of the most prestigious academic institutions in Poland; among its illustrious connections is Pope John Paul II, who was a student and a teacher in Kraków.
South of Kraków's historic centre lies Kazimierz, for centuries one of the great centres of Jewish life in Europe. The district began as an independent town founded by Casimir the Great in 1335, and from the end of the fifteenth century, when Jews were moved there from central Kraków, it became the heart of a community that flourished for more than four hundred years. Kazimierz saw the building of remarkable synagogues — such as the Old Synagogue, the oldest in Poland, or the Remuh Synagogue, with its sixteenth-century cemetery — along with houses of study and an intense religious and intellectual life.
Kazimierz was a centre of Polish Judaism of enormous prestige, home to famous rabbis and scholars such as Moses Isserles (the Remuh), and a place where Jewish and Christian culture lived side by side. Before the Second World War, Kraków had some 60,000 to 70,000 Jews, close to a quarter of the city's population, and their world had its spiritual core in Kazimierz.
The Nazi occupation destroyed that community. In 1941 the Germans did not confine the Jews in Kazimierz; instead they created the Kraków ghetto across the river, in the Podgórze district, from where they deported them to the nearby Płaszów camp and to the extermination camps, above all Bełżec and Auschwitz. It was in this context that the German businessman Oskar Schindler saved close to 1,200 Jewish workers from his enamelware factory, a story Steven Spielberg brought to the screen in Schindler's List, filmed in Kraków itself. Emptied of its inhabitants by the Holocaust, Kazimierz spent decades in neglect, until from the 1990s it was reborn as a bohemian district of memory, full of restaurants, bars and museums, where that vanished world is remembered and studied.
About sixty kilometres west of Kraków, next to the town of Oświęcim, Nazi Germany built Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of its camps and the universal symbol of the Holocaust. The facts need to be stated precisely: it was a German camp, planned and operated by the SS on the territory of occupied Poland; the expression 'Polish camp' is historically false. Established in 1940, first as a concentration camp for Polish prisoners, it was expanded from 1941 with the enormous adjoining camp of Birkenau (Auschwitz II), designed for mass murder.
Between 1942 and 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau became the main extermination centre of the 'Final Solution'. Trains of deported Jews arrived from all over Europe — from Hungary, Poland, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy and many other countries — and most were sent straight to the gas chambers on arrival, without even being registered. It is estimated that around 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz, close to a million of them Jews; tens of thousands of non-Jewish Poles, Soviet prisoners of war and Gypsies (Roma) also died there. The camp also functioned as a site of forced labour and of appalling medical experiments.
The camp was liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945 — the date now marked as International Holocaust Remembrance Day — by which time the Germans had already evacuated most of the prisoners on the deadly 'death marches'. Since 1947 the site has been preserved as a state museum and memorial, and in 1979 it was inscribed on the Unesco World Heritage List as a testimony for future generations. Visiting it is a hard but necessary experience: the barracks, the barbed wire, the ruins of the gas chambers and the mountains of victims' belongings are the material proof of the greatest crime of the twentieth century, and a sober, uncompromising reminder of what human beings are capable of.
On the doorstep of Kraków, the Wieliczka salt mine is one of the most extraordinary places in Poland and a testimony to an industry that for centuries was one of the kingdom's main sources of wealth. Salt extraction at Wieliczka goes back at least to the thirteenth century, and the mine was in continuous production for some seven hundred years, until the end of the twentieth century, which makes it one of the oldest mining enterprises in the world.
In the Middle Ages and in the era of the Commonwealth, salt was a strategic and hugely valuable product — essential for preserving food — and the royal mines of Wieliczka and neighbouring Bochnia, managed by the crown, came to provide a very considerable share of the Polish state's revenue. That money financed works such as the university of Kraków itself. For centuries salt was one of the pillars of the economy of southern Poland.
What makes Wieliczka unique is that, over generations, the miners did not just extract salt: they carved an astonishing underground world out of it, with kilometres of galleries, lakes and, above all, entire chapels sculpted in the salt rock, with altars, reliefs and even chandeliers of salt crystals, such as the spectacular chapel of St Kinga. This centuries-old labyrinth, which descends more than three hundred metres, was one of the first sites inscribed on the Unesco World Heritage List, in 1978, and it is today one of the most visited tourist destinations in the country.
At the southern end of Lesser Poland, on the Slovak border, rise the Tatras (Tatry), Poland's only high mountain range and the highest section of the whole Carpathian chain, with peaks above 2,600 metres. This mountain region, with its alpine landscapes, glacial lakes and forests, has a strongly marked culture of its own: that of the góral, the 'highlanders' of the southern uplands, a people of shepherds with their own dialect, music, traditional dress, wooden architecture and distinctive customs, forged in the isolation of the mountain valleys.
The capital of this region is Zakopane, a village that at the end of the nineteenth century turned into the great centre of the Polish mountains. In the era of the Partitions, when the area belonged to Austrian Galicia, Zakopane became a refuge and meeting place for Polish artists, writers and intellectuals who sought in the mountains and in góral culture the authentic roots of the nation. Out of that atmosphere came the 'Zakopane style', an architectural and decorative movement inspired by the highlanders' traditional wooden houses, driven by the artist Stanisław Witkiewicz, who wanted to make it a Polish national style.
Since then, Zakopane has been Poland's 'winter capital' and its great mountain destination: a base for hiking in summer and skiing in winter, with ski jumps and resorts that have made it a host of international competitions. Góral culture is still very much alive — in the music, in the food, such as the smoked cheese oscypek, and in the traditional festivals — and it gives this region a character different from the rest of Poland, more tied to the Carpathians and to a mountain world shared with Slovaks and other peoples of the range.
The region of Greater Poland (Wielkopolska), around the cities of Poznań and Gniezno, is literally the cradle of the Polish state. Here, in the lands of the Polan tribe, the first nucleus of Poland emerged in the tenth century under the Piast dynasty. Gniezno was the country's first capital and ecclesiastical seat: the first archbishopric was established here in the year 1000, after the pilgrimage of the emperor Otto III to the tomb of St Adalbert, and the first Polish kings were crowned here. Poznań, for its part, has on the cathedral island of Ostrów Tumski the oldest cathedral in Poland, where the first sovereigns, Mieszko I and Bolesław the Brave, are buried.
The region's very name, 'Greater Poland' (the larger or older Poland), as against the 'Lesser Poland' of the south, reflects its status as the kingdom's original land. Although the political centre soon moved to Kraków and then to Warsaw, Greater Poland remained one of the country's fundamental historic regions, prosperous and agricultural, with a strong awareness of its founding role.
That national awareness was tested during the nineteenth century, when the region came under Prussian rule after the Partitions. Subjected to an intense policy of Germanisation — Bismarck's Kulturkampf, land expropriations, compulsory schooling in German — the Polish society of Greater Poland responded with stubborn, organised resistance based on 'organic work': cooperatives, banks, cultural and educational associations that strengthened the Polish community against German pressure. This region thus offered a model of peaceful, economic national resistance different from the insurrectionism of the Russian sector.
When the First World War ended and Poland recovered its independence in November 1918, the fate of Greater Poland was not settled: the region was still part of the German state, and it was not clear that it would join the reborn Poland. The Poles of the region decided to settle the question by force of arms. On 27 December 1918, coinciding with a visit to Poznań by the famous pianist and politician Ignacy Paderewski, the Greater Poland Uprising broke out.
Unlike so many earlier Polish insurrections, this one was a military success. The Polish insurgents, well organised and with combat experience from the world war, took control of almost the whole region within weeks, defeating the German forces. The uprising was one of the few victorious rebellions in Polish history, and it ensured that Greater Poland — the country's historic cradle — was incorporated into the reborn Polish state.
The outcome was confirmed by the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, which officially assigned Greater Poland and much of Pomerania to Poland, giving it access to the sea through the so-called 'Polish corridor'. The victory of 1918-1919 has a place of honour in the region's memory, proud of having won its own liberation. Poznań became one of the great cities of the Second Republic, with its International Fair as a symbol of its economic drive.
Silesia (Śląsk), in the south-west, is perhaps the region with the most changeable borders in all of Poland. It was part of the Polish state from its foundation in the tenth century, but during the period of feudal fragmentation it was ruled by its own branch of the Silesian Piasts and, little by little, drifted into the orbit of the kingdom of Bohemia. In the fourteenth century it passed definitively to the Bohemian Crown, and with it, in the sixteenth century, to the Habsburgs of Austria, moving away from the Polish state for centuries although keeping a substantial Polish-speaking population in its eastern areas.
In the eighteenth century Silesia changed hands again: King Frederick II of Prussia seized it from Austria in the Silesian Wars (1740-1763), and the region was absorbed into Prussia and then the German Empire. Under German rule it went through intense industrialisation, especially in its south-eastern part, Upper Silesia, rich in coal, which became one of the largest mining and industrial basins in Europe. The region was an ethnic and linguistic mosaic, with German and Polish populations and a Silesian speech of its own.
After the First World War, the dispute over industrial Upper Silesia was fierce. Between 1919 and 1921 three Silesian Uprisings broke out among the Polish population against German rule, and in 1921 a plebiscite was held to decide the region's fate. The result was a division: the eastern part of Upper Silesia, with Katowice and much of the mining basin, became part of Poland, while the rest stayed in Germany. That border split the region until 1945, when, after the Second World War, all of Silesia passed to Poland and its German population was expelled.
No city illustrates the border shifts of the Polish west better than Wrocław, the capital of Lower Silesia. Founded in the time of the first Piasts and the seat of a bishopric since the year 1000, it was a Polish city for its first centuries; then, following the fate of Silesia, it passed to Bohemia, to Austria and finally to Prussia, and for more than six hundred years it was a large German city under the name Breslau, one of the most important in the kingdom of Prussia and in the German Empire.
The end of the Second World War brought the most radical transformation in its history. In the final months of the war the Nazis declared Breslau a 'fortress' (Festung Breslau) and ordered it defended to the last; the city suffered a devastating Red Army siege between February and May 1945 that left it largely in ruins, and it did not surrender until a few days before the end of the war in Europe.
After the war, decisions by the powers moved Poland's border westward, and Breslau passed to Poland under its Polish name, Wrocław. An almost complete exchange of population followed: the German population that remained was expelled, and the city was repopulated with Poles, many of them displaced from the city of Lwów (now Lviv, in Ukraine) and from other eastern territories Poland had lost to the Soviet Union. People spoke of the 'transfer' of the culture of Lwów to Wrocław. The rebuilt city is today one of the most dynamic and enjoyable in Poland, famous for its great market square, its cathedral island, its many bridges over the Oder and the hundreds of small bronze gnome statues scattered through its streets.
Katowice is the heart of Upper Silesia, the great industrial and mining region of southern Poland. The city grew spectacularly in the nineteenth century with the coal and heavy industry boom, and it became the centre of a dense conurbation of mining towns. Its working-class, industrial character shaped its history: it was one of the settings of the Silesian Uprisings after the First World War and, once part of Poland, it became one of the pillars of the country's economy. That working-class heritage survives in districts such as Nikiszowiec, a distinctive red-brick miners' housing estate from the early twentieth century, now protected as a monument.
Under communism, Upper Silesia was the coal and steel basin of the People's Republic, with an enormous concentration of miners and heavy industry. After the fall of communism the region went through a difficult restructuring as many mines closed, and Katowice has reinvented itself as a cultural and services hub, with a modern cultural zone built over the old mining installations, home to museums, concert halls and conference venues.
The industrial Polish west was also the setting for one of the first great revolts against the communist regime, although in Greater Poland: in June 1956, the workers of Poznań rose against poor living conditions and work quotas. The protest, which began as a strike at the large Cegielski factories, turned into a mass demonstration that the regime put down with tanks and troops, killing dozens — the most remembered of them a thirteen-year-old boy, Romek Strzałkowski. The Poznań protests of 1956 were one of the first outbreaks of workers' rebellion in the Soviet bloc and forced a political shift in Poland. Their memory is preserved today in a large monument in the centre of the city.
The history of Pomerania and northern Poland is shaped by the order of the Teutonic Knights, a German military-religious order that emerged from the Crusades. In 1226, Duke Konrad of Masovia invited them to his borders to fight the pagan Prussians of the Baltic; the order conquered those lands with extreme harshness, exterminated or subjugated the old Prussians and, instead of handing the territory back, founded its own monastic state, a military power that for two centuries dominated the Baltic coast and blocked Poland's access to the sea.
The symbol of that power is Malbork Castle (Marienburg in German), which the order made its capital and the seat of the grand master from 1309. Built in red brick on the banks of the river Nogat, Malbork is the largest brick fortress in the world and one of the most impressive Gothic complexes in Europe: an enormous ensemble of castles, palaces, churches and concentric walls that housed hundreds of knights and served at once as fortress, monastery and seat of government.
Teutonic power was broken in the fifteenth century. The great defeat at Grunwald in 1410, at the hands of the Polish-Lithuanian armies, marked the beginning of the end, and in the Thirteen Years' War (1454-1466) the towns of Prussia, fed up with the order, allied themselves with Poland. The Second Peace of Thorn of 1466 gave Poland back control of Pomerania and the Vistula delta, and Malbork passed into Polish hands; the rest of the Teutonic state was left as a vassal of the king of Poland. Malbork was badly damaged in the Second World War and later restored; today it is a Unesco World Heritage Site and one of the most visited monuments in the country.
Gdańsk (Danzig in German), at the mouth of the Vistula, has been Poland's great port for a thousand years and one of the richest and most distinctive cities on the Baltic. Mentioned as early as around the year 997, it grew as a trading port and in the Middle Ages joined the Hanseatic League, becoming the main port for exporting Polish grain to western Europe. Its merchant wealth took shape in splendid architecture of narrow, ornate façades, with streets such as Ulica Długa (Long Street) and the Golden Gate.
Throughout its history, Gdańsk was a city with a special status and a strong character of its own. After the Peace of Thorn of 1466 it passed to the Polish Crown, but it kept broad privileges of self-government and great autonomy within the Commonwealth, along with a mostly German-speaking population. It was a prosperous, cosmopolitan and multi-confessional city, one of the largest trading centres in northern Europe, whose loyalty to the kings of Poland sat alongside its strong identity as a free city. Ships were built in its yards and its commercial exchange rivalled the great ones of the continent.
Gdańsk's frontier condition, disputed between the Polish and German worlds, would shape its tragic twentieth century. After the Partitions it had passed to Prussia, but following the First World War the Treaty of Versailles separated it from Germany and turned it into the Free City of Danzig, a semi-autonomous state under the protection of the League of Nations, in order to give the reborn Poland access to the sea. That anomalous situation, with a mostly German city in the 'corridor' separating Germany from East Prussia, would become Hitler's pretext for unleashing the war.
It was precisely in Gdańsk that the Second World War began. In the port of the Free City of Danzig, Poland kept a small military garrison on a peninsula called Westerplatte, guarding a materiel depot. At dawn on 1 September 1939, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, which had arrived days earlier on a 'courtesy' visit, opened fire on Westerplatte. Those were the first shots of the most devastating war in history.
The Polish garrison at Westerplatte, little more than two hundred men, held out for seven days against naval, air and ground bombardment by far superior German forces, in a defence that Poland turned into a symbol of its resistance. On that same 1 September, in the city, German troops and local paramilitaries also attacked the building of the Polish Post Office in Danzig, whose defenders held out for hours before surrendering; many of them were executed afterwards.
With the invasion, the Free City of Danzig was immediately annexed to the German Reich, and its Jewish and Polish population was persecuted. When the war ended, in 1945, the city was taken by the Red Army and left largely destroyed; by decision of the powers it passed definitively to Poland and recovered its Polish name, Gdańsk. Its German population was expelled, and the city was repopulated with Poles, many of them displaced from the eastern territories Poland had lost. The historic centre, flattened in the war, was carefully rebuilt over the following decades.
Four decades after the war began in Gdańsk, the city changed the history of Europe again, this time from its shipyards. The Baltic coast — Gdańsk, Gdynia, Szczecin — was a recurring focus of workers' protest throughout the communist period. In December 1970 a price rise set off strikes and demonstrations that the regime put down with gunfire, killing dozens of shipyard workers. That massacre left a deep wound and a memory of resistance.
In August 1980 another price rise sparked a strike at the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk. The workers, led by an electrician named Lech Wałęsa — sacked years earlier for his activism — occupied the yard and drew up a list of demands that went well beyond the economic: they called for the right to form trade unions that were free and independent of the party. The strike spread across the country, and on 31 August 1980 the government had to give way and sign the Gdańsk Agreement, which recognised that right.
Out of that came Solidarity (Solidarność), the first free trade union in the Soviet bloc, which within months gathered close to ten million members and became a social movement that put the communist regime in check. Although it was banned during the martial law of 1981, Solidarity survived underground and, at the end of the decade, negotiated the peaceful transition to democracy. Gdańsk is thus both the place where the Second World War began and the place where communism began to fall. Today, next to the shipyards, the European Solidarity Centre commemorates that workers' achievement, and beside it stands the monument to the workers killed in 1970.
Between Gdańsk and Gdynia, with which it forms the conurbation known as the 'Tricity' (Trójmiasto), lies Sopot, the most elegant seaside resort on the Polish coast. Unlike its industrial port neighbours, Sopot grew from the nineteenth century as a summer holiday town and a place for sea bathing. It was a Napoleonic doctor, Jean Georges Haffner, who at the start of the nineteenth century pushed for the creation of a bathing establishment that gave rise to the town as a spa and seaside resort.
In the period when the region belonged to Germany, Sopot (then Zoppot) became a luxurious and fashionable Baltic resort, with hotels, a casino and an intense social life, frequented by high society. From that golden age comes its best-known symbol: the molo, the wooden pier reaching out into the sea, considered the longest in Europe, at more than five hundred metres. Around it stand villas and period buildings from the early twentieth century that give it a stately air.
After passing to Poland in 1945, Sopot kept its vocation as a town of leisure and culture. It is famous for its international song festival, one of the most important in central and eastern Europe during the communist era, and it remains a very popular summer destination today, with its sandy beaches, its lively Bohaterów Monte Cassino street (nicknamed 'Monciak') and a relaxed atmosphere that contrasts with the dense history of neighbouring Gdańsk. Sopot is the easy-going, seaside face of the Polish Baltic coast.
The region of Mazovia (Mazowsze), the great plain of central Poland on the banks of the Vistula, followed its own path for centuries, somewhat apart from the rest of the kingdom. Although it was part of the state of the first Piasts, during the long period of feudal fragmentation (twelfth to fourteenth centuries) it took shape as an independent duchy ruled by its own branch of the dynasty, with its capital first at Płock and later at the growing city of Warsaw. The dukes of Mazovia kept their autonomy even when the rest of Poland was reunified under Casimir the Great.
Mazovia was a land of frontier and of contact: to the north it bordered the state of the Teutonic Knights and pagan Prussia, and its dukes lived in permanent tension with the German order. It was precisely a duke of Mazovia, Konrad, who in 1226 made the famous mistake of inviting the Teutonic Knights to his borders to fight the Prussians, with consequences that would shape the history of northern Poland. The region kept cultural features of its own, a distinctive local speech and a poor and unusually numerous nobility.
Mazovia's full integration into the Crown of Poland was completed in 1526, when the last duke of the Mazovian line died without heirs and the duchy was incorporated directly into the kingdom. Shortly afterwards, Mazovia's central position within the enormous Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth — halfway between Kraków and the Lithuanian lands — would turn its main city, Warsaw, into the natural place to host the shared institutions of the two nations, and with that into the future capital.
Warsaw was not Poland's historic capital: for centuries that role belonged to Kraków, where the kings were crowned and buried. Warsaw's rise was due to the political geography of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. After the Union of Lublin of 1569, which merged Poland and Lithuania, a meeting place was needed for the shared Sejm of the two nations, and Warsaw, in the centre of the immense state, was far more practical than Kraków in the far south. From 1573 the royal elections were held nearby.
The decisive step was taken by King Sigismund III Vasa, who from 1596 effectively moved the court from Kraków to Warsaw, a change that became permanent over the following decades. The city then grew as a royal residence and seat of power: the Royal Castle was enlarged and embellished, and Sigismund's Column, raised in 1644 in his honour, became the symbol of the city. Warsaw became the political heart of the Republic, although by tradition the kings continued to be crowned and buried in Kraków.
As capital, Warsaw also lived through the country's great catastrophes: it was sacked by the Swedes during 'the Deluge' of the seventeenth century, it was the setting for the proclamation of the Constitution of 3 May 1791 and, after the Partitions, it fell under Prussian and then Russian rule. During the nineteenth century it was the capital of the 'Kingdom of Poland' under the tsar, a focus of the great national insurrections and of an intense cultural life that resisted Russification. When Poland regained its independence in 1918, Warsaw became once again, by full right, the capital of a sovereign state.
Before the war, Warsaw was home to the largest Jewish community in Europe: close to 350,000 people, almost a third of the city's population. In 1940 the German occupiers shut that population into a walled ghetto in central Warsaw, into which they packed some 400,000 people in appalling conditions. Hunger and epidemics killed tens of thousands; and in the summer of 1942, in the so-called 'Great Deportation', the Germans sent close to 300,000 inhabitants of the ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp, where they were murdered.
In April 1943, when the Germans entered the ghetto to deport the few thousand who remained, the last Jews rose in arms. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, led by young fighters of the Jewish Combat Organisation such as Mordechai Anielewicz, was the first major urban insurrection in occupied Europe and the largest Jewish rebellion of the entire war. With a handful of small arms and Molotov cocktails, the insurgents held out for almost a month against a German army that, to defeat them, burned and dynamited the ghetto house by house until it was completely levelled.
The uprising ended in May 1943 with the total destruction of the ghetto and the death or deportation of its last inhabitants. It was not a fight for victory, which was impossible, but for dignity: to die fighting rather than in the gas chambers. Today, on the ground where the ghetto stood, are the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes and the great POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which remembers both the extermination and the thousand years of Jewish life in Poland that preceded it. The distinction matters: this 1943 uprising, carried out by the Jews of the ghetto, is different from the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, the work of the Polish resistance.
On 1 August 1944 the Polish resistance — the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) — launched in Warsaw the largest armed operation in occupied Europe: the Warsaw Uprising. The aim was to free the capital from the Germans before the Red Army arrived, so that it would be Poland, and not the Soviet Union, that took possession of its own capital. The insurgents, badly armed, controlled large areas of the city for weeks and waited for help that never came: the Red Army stopped on the eastern bank of the Vistula and did not intervene.
The German reprisal was extremely brutal. In the Wola district, in the first days of the uprising, German troops massacred tens of thousands of defenceless civilians. After 63 days of house-to-house fighting, the insurrection surrendered on 2 October 1944. In all, around 200,000 people died, the vast majority of them civilians, and the surviving population was expelled from the city en masse. Hitler then ordered what was meant as an exemplary punishment: to raze Warsaw completely.
Over the following months, specialised German units systematically dynamited and burned the empty city, building by building, with particular fury against its monuments, palaces, churches, libraries and archives. When the Red Army finally entered in January 1945, Warsaw was a sea of rubble: close to 85% of the city had been destroyed, and its historic centre almost entirely. Few capitals in the world have been so deliberately and completely annihilated. The destruction of Warsaw became the symbol of Poland's martyrdom in the Second World War.
When the war ended, Warsaw was so badly destroyed that there was debate about whether it was worth rebuilding at all or whether the capital should be moved to another city. The Poles decided to raise it again, and they did so in an almost unprecedented way: they rebuilt the historic centre — the Old Town (Stare Miasto), the market square, the walls, the churches, the Royal Castle — not as a modern city, but meticulously recreating its prewar appearance, street by street and façade by façade.
The reconstruction, carried out mainly between 1945 and the 1960s, drew on old plans, photographs and, remarkably, on the city views the Venetian painter Bernardo Bellotto (known as Canaletto) had made of Warsaw in the eighteenth century, so detailed that they served as a guide for restoring the buildings that had been lost. The Royal Castle, which the Germans had blown up, was not rebuilt until the 1970s, financed in part by public donations. The result was a faithful recreation of historic Warsaw raised on its own ruins.
Because of its exceptional character, the Old Town of Warsaw was inscribed on the Unesco World Heritage List in 1980, not as an authentic medieval ensemble but precisely as a unique testimony to an almost total reconstruction, whose value Unesco highlighted as a symbol of a people's will to preserve and recover its heritage. Alongside that recreated old town, postwar Warsaw grew as a large socialist city — with the imposing Palace of Culture and Science, a gift from Stalin, dominating the centre — and, since 1989, as a modern capital of skyscrapers and intense life. Today's Warsaw is, literally, a city reborn from its ashes.
Downstream along the Vistula, on the boundary between Mazovia and the northern lands, Toruń is one of Poland's medieval jewels and a city with a very different history from Warsaw's. It was founded in 1233 by the Teutonic Knights as a stronghold on their advance towards Prussia, and it soon prospered as a trading city: it joined the Hanseatic League, the great merchant network of northern Europe, and its wealth took shape in splendid Gothic brick architecture — the town hall, the churches, the merchants' houses and the walls — which survives almost intact and earned it inscription on the Unesco World Heritage List.
Toruń played an important part in the long conflict between Poland and the Teutonic order. Two famous treaties known as the 'Peace of Thorn' were signed here: the first in 1411, after the battle of Grunwald, and above all the second in 1466, which ended the Thirteen Years' War and gave Poland back control of Pomerania and the Vistula delta, placing the rest of the Teutonic state under Polish sovereignty. The city was thus a key setting for the retreat of German power in the Baltic.
But Toruń is famous above all for one of its sons: Nicolaus Copernicus (Mikołaj Kopernik), born here in 1473 into a merchant family. The astronomer who in his 1543 work placed the Sun — and not the Earth — at the centre of the universe, beginning the modern scientific revolution, is the city's most illustrious resident, and his birthplace is preserved as a museum. Toruń is also famous for another tradition going back to the Middle Ages: its gingerbread (pierniki), spiced and shaped into artistic forms, made in the city for centuries and still its most typical sweet.