Category Archives: Eastern Europe

by | 29 September 2026 · 5:53 am

Some Polish Nobles on the Grand Tour

This week’s edition of Culture.pl has an interesting historical article by Jakub Zarzycki, titled The Grand Tour, or the ‘Great Journey’ Through Europe, first published in 2023 and translated from Polish by Michał Pelczar. Here are some more excerpts.

Grand Tour of a Polish Nobleman

Such a trip was in Polish sometimes referred to as a peregrination (peregrynacja) or a voyage (wojaż), and its participants were called peregrines or voyagers (peregrynanci and wojażerowie, respectively). German terms were also used, such as Kavalierstour (for ‘bachelor tour’) or Kavaliersreise.

It is worth noting geographic and social differences between nations. The English, being mostly Protestants, came to the continent, which involved a physical crossing of the English Channel and a stay in countries with a different – that is, Roman Catholic – religion (such as France and particularly Italy). Meanwhile, for Poles, among whom Catholics predominated, it was a trip to lands not so religiously different from theirs.

Such a trip was to happen only once, because later the young nobleman entered adult life. Initially, the peregrines were therefore between the ages of 16 and 20; later, from the 18th century, older people went. It happened that brothers of similar age traveled together. Jan (later king) and Marek Sobieski, departing in 1646, were 17 and 18, respectively. Janusz Antoni and Michał Serwacy Wiśniowiecki, starting their journey in 1695, were 17 and 15 years old. Later, they held high offices, as Janusz became the castellan of Kraków, while Michał became the voivode of Vilnius and the great hetman of Lithuania.

The journey (sometimes combined with study) could last from one to four years, sometimes longer. Both the young Sobieskis and the Wiśniowieckis left Poland for a total of two years. The grand tour of the brothers Jan Stanisław and Aleksander Jan Jabłonowski, sons of Stanisław Jan, the grand crown hetman and the commander of the Polish hussars during the Battle of Vienna, lasted longer – they stayed abroad for over five years – from September 1682 to January 1688.

As a side note, it can be remarked that their father also spent part of his youth abroad – the period of his studies in Prague and the Grand Tour, spent primarily in France, were in the years 1648 to 1650.

The time spent in each city was not divided equally. It was assumed that one could spend up to a year in Paris (combining this stay with studies), and only a few weeks would be left for Madrid. This is what the Jabłonowskis, for example, did. The Sobieskis also spent most of their trip in the French capital, while the Wiśniowieckis lived there for almost a year.

The trips were, of course, carefully planned, and the most important element of preparation was the choice of a guardian. Young people did not leave alone but under the supervision of a preceptor, also called a mentor, governor or tutor. As Antonii Mączak, the precursor of research on travel in modern times, wrote in the book Everyday Life in Traveling Around Europe in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Życie Codzienne w Podróżach po Europie w XVI i XVII Wieku) that this guardian had to be

a thoroughly competent person who knows the countries he visits, speaks languages and treats the care provided during a foreign trip as a profession. Such a tutor was valuable, as he ensured the young man used his experience and made it possible to trust that he would avoid unnecessary risks. Such specialists were passed on by fathers through letters of recommendation. They would often become authors of widely read and useful guides.

One such professional preceptor was Lassels, the author of the term Grand Tour, who traveled in this manner five times in total. The young Jabłonowskis had two tutors – Jan Michał Kossowicz and Szymon Ignacy Gutowski. The Wiśniowieckis were looked after by Jan Kamocki, and the Sobieskis by Sebastian Gawarecki. During such trips, preceptors could complete their own studies and, of course, visit previously unknown places with the young peregrines.

The task of the preceptor was primarily to make sure that the whole trip proceeded in accordance with the parents’ instructions, i.e. that the young men learned, made appropriate contacts, and also engaged in sightseeing. It was the preceptor who had the money allocated for the trip and regularly informed the parents in letters about what was happening to their sons. Mentors would also write diaries if the peregrines were too young. Gawarecki wrote one for the Sobieskis, and Kossowicz for the Jabłonowskis.

In addition to the guardians, servants were also taken along, which was so obvious that they were not even mentioned in the travel accounts unless they became the protagonists of some particular story.

Itineraries, Diaries & Manuals

Our knowledge about Polish voyagers and their experiences comes from the few remaining travelers’ records  of a specific type. Most of them were not published (their authors did not intend to do so), and they circulated among the relatives and friends of the diarist only in the form of manuscripts, helping in the preparation of subsequent trips.

The first type of such a document was the itinerary. As Adam Kucharski noted:

[it was] simply a list of visited cities, arranged in the chronological order of their visit. Thence originated  the specific type of itineraries, such as the Old Polish ones, that constituted a kind of guide for travelers. They provided an outline of the road separating the destination points, specifying the distance between the start and the finish of the peregrination. The distance was given in various units of length (usually miles as measured in a given country). Possible obstacles on the way, such as rivers or mountains, were also specified.

The second type was a diary, i.e. an account of the expedition; their authors were referred to as diarists. It was a travel journal in chronological order, with the author’s opinions and impressions about the places he visited. It contained comments on history, geography, politics but also descriptions of the sights and observations on the customs prevailing in each given country. It also included practical information. Diaries are the most valuable documents for us today, because on their basis not only can we reconstruct the routes of the journeys but we can also get to know the impressions and opinions of the peregrines. Particularly interesting are those fragments in which the authors describe not so much something typical but rather something that deviated from the norm they were accustomed to.

Yet another document was parental instructions – guidelines in which fathers (more often) and mothers (less often) wrote down their instructions: what and how peregrines were to study, how to behave, what to avoid. These were often based on the earlier experiences of fathers-voyagers. Moral admonitions and practical advice also appeared in the texts themselves. Such an instruction was written, for example, by Jakub Sobieski for his sons, Jan and Marek.

Places Visited

France – including Paris and Versailles – was undoubtedly a special place for the participants of the Grand Tour, often being its main destination. As we read in Stanisław Wierzbowski, who took his ‘bachelor tour’ in the 1680s:

I do not describe Paris, because there are so many volumes written about it. I only add that the city is full of all delicacies. Want to be a saint? You can, because you will find so many opportunities and people whose example of holiness you can follow. There are so many temples of the Lord, pious monasteries, school libraries. The Sorbonne itself gives you a doctorate. Want to be bad? There also you will more likely find the type of company to corrupt your soul and body. Do you want to delight your eyes? You have beautiful people, palaces, gardens, haberdashery, exquisite paintings, splendid and delicate works, and a subtlety of comedies and operas – especially operas and the Versailles garden – these two seduce a man’s memory.

As was already mentioned, Italy was also a permanent destination for the expeditions. Italy aroused interest due to the accumulation of works of art and the role of Rome as the capital of the Christian world. In addition, the universities in Bologna and Padua were highly esteemed. Venice was visited especially keenly during Carnival. The Apennine Peninsula was often the last stage of the Grand Tour – after that, one headed north towards the borders of the Republic of Poland.

The countries of the Reich (particularly Vienna) were also visited for political reasons – after all, a pro- or anti-Habsburg orientation was one of the vectors of Polish foreign policy at that time. Prague, then part of the Reich, was a popular choice as a place of study. Other countries were also traveled to, such as England, the Netherlands and Spain, but their importance or the time devoted to visiting them could not compare to France or Italy.

Typical Activities of a Polish Peregrine

What the young man was supposed to do during the Grand Tour was already planned by his parents in the aforementioned instructions. Peregrines combined sightseeing with studies – for example, the Jabłonowskis studied in Prague and Paris, in the latter city the subject being philosophy at the Jesuit college.

The Sobieskis, while in Paris, even had their typical days planned by their father (Jakub Sobieski). As Joanna Orzeł writes in the text The Grand Tour of Marek and Jan Sobieski (Grand Tour Marka i Jana Sobieskich), it was:

five hours of study a day: an hour in the morning, stylistic exercises in Latin; the next half hour, their correction under the supervision of a professor; an hour-long lecture by the professor, reading with a commentary on Roman history; half an hour, individual reading (a total of three hours in the morning); in the afternoon, two hours of learning French combined with French history. Paris was also where they studied fencing. Their father additionally recommended riding lessons and playing ball (on their days off). In addition, young men could decide on their own to learn to dance and play instruments.

It is worth noting that studies were perceived slightly differently than today – they did not have to be complete, regular semesters spent in one place and ending with exams, but rather listening to lectures by the most eminent professors and participating in disputes. Students often studied for several months, moving between specific academic centers.

Practical studies related to the military were an important element, which was particularly essential for the subsequent career of a young nobleman in the First Polish Republic. Anna Markiewicz, in the text Hercules Gallicus: The Educational Journey of Jerzy Stanisław Dzieduszycki (Hercules Gallicus: Podróż Edukacyjna Jerzego Stanisława Dzieduszyckiego), explained why the young man, who was traveling in the early 1790s, left Paris for the Netherlands:

The attractiveness of the country was usually associated with the possibility of convenient observation of many fortifications and territorial reinforcements located in this area, making it easier for the young nobility to acquire practical skills in the field of military art. The convenience of observing military maneuvers during numerous clashes that took place there was a practical supplement to reading and theoretical classes held at prestigious Parisian academies.

Military interests weren’t exceptional – for example, the already mentioned Wiśniowieckis pursued them. Learning foreign languages ​​was also indispensable. For example, Jabłonowski, the father, put emphasis on this, so his sons wrote letters to him from Paris in Latin and French, which was supposed to showcase their progress in mastering these languages.

Of value apart from studying was establishing contacts, i.e. audiences at royal courts and getting to know other young people from noble and aristocratic families. In May 1685, the Jabłonowskis were introduced to Louis XIV in Versailles. They also observed the audience granted by the King of France to the Doge of Genoa, or the solemn entry of the Muscovite envoy.

On the other hand, liaising with other Polish noblemen in the specific conditions provided by staying abroad and the young age of the people getting to know each other created bonds between them, which were maintained and paid off later in life. The common experience of youth, e.g. studying in the same place, often brought strangers closer together.

These trips were also connected with … shopping. In addition to souvenirs, the newest books were purchased but also works by classical authors, which later enriched magnate libraries. In Italy, especially in the 18th century, works of art were bought, both antique and contemporary. Cityscapes depicting Italian cities, so-called vedutas, are worth mentioning here. The popularity of this genre developed especially in Venice, where these were eagerly bought by English visitors to the city. They treated them as a special souvenir – these works, after returning to London, for example, were to be a reminder of the Grand Tour taken to Italy back in their day.

Grand Tour – What For?

Preceptors’ letters to parents often contained polite requests to send money; fathers, writing to their children’s guardians, in turn pointed out that the costs of the expedition were constantly rising. We may wonder – why send young people on such expensive expeditions? The educational aspect was undoubtedly important, but the peregrine was supposed to watch, experience and gain an understanding of something – and these are very intangible experiences.

As the popularity of the Grand Tour phenomenon among the Polish elites of the 17th and 18th centuries shows, this journey was indispensable and considered worth its price. Its main assumptions have survived, in changed forms of course, to this day.

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Filed under Austria, Czechia, education, France, Italy, language, Poland, religion, travel

by | 28 September 2026 · 5:58 am

Polish Nobles on the ‘Grand Tour’: Intro

This week’s edition of Culture.pl has an interesting historical article by Jakub Zarzycki, titled The Grand Tour, or the ‘Great Journey’ Through Europe, first published in 2023 and translated from Polish by Michał Pelczar. Here are some excerpts from the introduction.

The concept of a Grand Tour was introduced in the 1770s by an Englishman, Richard Lassels, to describe a journey serving to supplement education, develop aesthetic taste, acquire practical skills, broaden the knowledge of foreign languages ​​and acquire general refinement by young noblemen – this was one of the most important social and cultural phenomena in the 17th and 18th centuries. Young Polish nobles also made such journeys.

As noted by Anna Markiewicz in the book Educational Journeys in the Times of Jan III Sobieski: Peregrinationes Jablonovianae (Podróże Edukacyjne w Czasach Jana III Sobieskiego: Peregrinationes Jablonovianae), Richard Lassels ‘included in this term the meaning of the journey – it was grand because of the duration and length of the route, but it was also supposed to be a grand event, a journey of a lifetime’. In the 17th and 18th centuries, such journeys were very popular, if not common, among the richest stratum of the European and Polish nobility. From this designation, other terms were also coined, which still function today – the English ‘tourist’ being someone taking part in a Grand Tour.

The very premise of the Grand Tour was very simple. As Markiewicz wrote, the following were visited:

France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and England. A great foreign trip was then the last stage of education of European elites, undertaken in order to gain knowledge, skills, to get to know the world, foreign countries, their cultures, customs and language. Young people visited foreign universities, courts, academies and military camps.

In the 1730s, Stanisław Lubomirski explained the goals of such an expedition to his sons Aleksander and Jerzy: ‘One should [become familiar with] anything about [the functioning of] a good institution, polish wit and good spirit, and comprehend all wisdom and decorum.’

The point was therefore to see what principles of a foreign system (political or social) could be useful in Poland, to acquire knowledge and skills indispensable in public life, and also to acquire refinement and a certain ability to ‘be in the world’.

Trips in the 17th century – which needs to be emphasized – were, for social, moral and financial reasons, reserved only for young men from wealthy noble families.

However, in the 18th century, the Grand Tour underwent changes – the educational aspect (i.e. gaining specific knowledge) becomes less important, and what matters most is developing the right taste, which is why Italy becomes the most important destination. As Marek Bratuń notes in the article Grand Tour: Birth – Development – Dusk (Grand Tour: Narodziny – Rozwój – Zmierzch): ‘The main purpose of the Grand Tour in the 18th century are the broadly understood arts that contribute to the development of good taste, the most perfect forms of which were preserved under the Italian sky.’ It is also connected with the archaeological excavations of the times, in Pompeii (1738) and Herculaneum (1748), bringing a new wave of interest in the art of antiquity.

The activity of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and his work devoted to the history of ancient art, published in 1755, was also significant. The proof of this influence is the work published in 1815, titled On the Art of the Ancients, or Polish Winckelmann (O Sztuce u Dawnych czyli Winkelman Polski) by Stanisław Kostka Potocki, one of the pioneers of Polish archeology and aficionado of ancient art.

Marek Bratuń also adds that ‘it is the primacy of aesthetics in the Italian Grand Tour of the second half of the 18th century […] that will effectively transform the original educational journey into an aesthetic and tourist journey, without a preceptor; in the footsteps of the departing gentlemen, the braver ladies would also follow.’

This tendency is also noticed by Agata Roćko in the article Polish Grand Tour of ‘Fashionable Ladies’ (Polski Grand Tour ‘Dam Modnych’), writing that ‘Polish ladies have already followed on the beaten track of the Grand Tour, just like the ladies in Europe, even though their journeys were not educational and cognitive, but rather aesthetic and touristic.’ Among Polish travelers, one can mention, for example, Izabela Lubomirska née Czartoryska (she went to Italy with Kostka Potocki in the years 1785 to 1786) or Teofilia Konstancja Morawska née Radziwiłł (author of Diary of a European Journey in the Years 1773-1774 [Diariusz Podróży Europejskiej w Latach 1773-1774]).

The trips themselves over the course of time ceased to be reserved only for the aristocracy, becoming in the 19th century also available to the moderately wealthy nobility and the wealthier bourgeoisie. Thanks to this, the phenomenon has been permanently recorded in the history of the Old Continent, because it is then that modern travel around Europe begins to take shape as a typical activity consisting in going to a foreign place and visiting it, completely unrelated to a specific reason (e.g. pilgrimage, a diplomatic deployment or commercial mission). In a way, the idea of ​​such an ‘uninvested’ trip (because its purpose was to see art and visit interesting places) continues to this day – this type of tourism is a typical cultural activity of the European middle class, and a trip to Italy remains its quintessence.

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Filed under education, Europe, France, Italy, language, Poland, travel

by | 23 September 2026 · 4:32 am

Poland’s Oddities Under Communism

Last week’s edition of Culture.pl has an article by Wojciech Oleksiak, first published in 10 March 2015, titled 10 Mind-Boggling Oddities of Poland Under the Communist Regime. Here are some excerpts without his illustrative images.

We are all taught at school about communism as a social system, but do we really understand what it meant for those who had a chance to experience it firsthand? Empty stores, propaganda, and censorship, but also a plethora of funny details, born of attempts to make the best out of life.

1. You could hire someone to stand in line for you.

The shortage of most common products could make everyday life a nightmare. During many of the frequent economic crises, store shelves would literally be empty. Memories of huge shops supplied with only vinegar and Georgian tea are one of the most commonly recalled flashbacks to the communist period.

Furthermore, most products were subject to a rationing system which made some products available only to the bearers of special cards. All these inconveniences resulted in what is called a ‘queue culture’. People would queue for hours and days to get a washing machine, a pram or a pound of meat. Spontaneous queueing committees watched the order of queues, and retirees would make additional money by being a ‘stander’ (stacz in Polish) – a person who stands in a queue for somebody else.

2. There was 0% unemployment, but a lot of workers with nothing to do

We want to achieve a new and better order of society: in this new and better society there must be neither rich nor poor; all will have to work. Not a handful of rich people, but all the working people must enjoy the fruits of their common labour.  – Vladimir Lenin

The right to work is a foundation of the communist socio-political system, thus the Polish United Workers’ Party put enormous effort into maintaining 100% employment, even if it was completely inefficient. This is why workers would have nothing to do at work for weeks, and would instead just pretend they were working. Danuta Nowak, a lathe operator at the Żerań Factory, says:

I worked on the morning shift. I would come to work at 6AM, punch in, get a coffee, chat with people for hours and have nothing to do until 1PM or so… People were so bored that they often did terribly stupid pranks that not once or twice had serious consequences.

3. Attending parades was mandatory

May 1st, International Workers’ Day, was celebrated more uproariously than any other occasion. The most important part of the yearly celebrations was the huge parade that aimed at presenting support for the Polish United Workers’ Party and for communism, as well as the overall happiness and motivation to work.

The celebration was to be joyful, spontaneous and reminiscent of a hoedown. Yet, it was far from spontaneity – the plan was carefully laid out, roles cast and the marching crowd thoroughly controlled by the organisers. – Tomasz Leszkowicz, histmag.org.

Because spontaneous participation in the parade was mandatory and absence could bring on unpleasant consequences, people used to sign the attendance list and then use every opportunity to escape. Nevertheless, the May 1st parade was critical for propaganda reasons, and, regardless of its real result, was always proclaimed to be a huge success and proof of the nation’s love for the Polish United Workers’ Party.

4. There were inferior quality substitute goods for everything

Petrol was not the only imported good that was missing on the market. Chocolate, good cigarettes, acceptable-quality cars as well as all kinds of innovative products were an unaffordable rarity. Without appropriate resources, domestic producers came up with ‘something-like’ products. Chocolate-like products used vegetable oil instead of cocoa, while God knows what the substitute of quality tobacco was in cigarettes like Giewonty [named for a mountain peak in the Tatras] or Sporty. The most popular car of the period, the toy-sized Maluch, could, with no offence to its quality, be classified as a car-like product.

5. Dachshunds were crazily popular

This noble breed of dog, the creation of which dates back to the times of ancient Egypt (at least, according to its fans), was by far the most popular of 1980s communist Poland. Ladies walking with two or more dachshunds on a leash was a very common sight, and the breed somehow fitted the mundane reality of the Polish People’s Republic: not too big, not too small, cheap in upkeep and (what is always important in a police state) highly unobtrusive.

Surprisingly, dachshunds are almost absent on the streets of present-day Poland. According to a recent ranking of the popularity of dog breeds, they have dropped out of the top 10 in terms of ownership. Where are you, sausage dogs? That being said, they do reappear once a year in a special parade in Kraków dedicated purely to these particular canines.

6. There was normal petrol and ‘commercial’ petrol

In 1988, the communist economic system of everything being state-owned and state-controlled started to seriously waver. It forced the Polish United Workers’ Party to introduce signs of liberalisation; one of those was ‘commercial petrol’. How could petrol, one of the most popular commercial goods, not have been commercial before?

Up till then, every driver had a yearly allocation of several litres that they were entitled to buy. After running out of this limit, their cars would become useless for the rest of the year unless they bought some petrol on the black market (which was severely penalised). From July 1988, every Polish citizen could buy some ‘komercyjna’ (the Polish adjective for ‘commercial’) petrol, which was much more expensive than normal even though it was exactly the same type and quality of petrol. It was sold in only 64 stations in all of Poland, but free of the rationing system.

7. There was hardly anything to watch on the telly

Television in the Polish People’s Republic was state-owned and carefully controlled by the censorship office. Despite several educational and cultural programmes (some still loved, such as The Old Timer’s Cabaret or Four Tank-Men and a Dog), the communist powers used TV as their main means of distributing propaganda. Programmes like Film Chronicles of the Polish People’s Republic or Daily News conveyed messages ordered by the Communist Party and often blatantly blurred the truth. In response, Polish citizens organised massive acts of civil disobedience, such as turning their TV screens to the windows or gathering on casual walks during these news shows in the times of Martial Law.

8. There were vending machines with glasses attached

This was surely one of the grossest inventions communist-era engineers created. The machine in this photo was used to serve carbonated water with or without raspberry juice. The ugly part is that it didn’t dispense disposable plastic cups but had glass cups attached by string. After each use, they were merely rinsed with water and assumed ready for the next person to use. No wonder it made it into history with the nickname gruźliczanka, which can be translated as ‘tuberculosis-lady’.

9. You needed to wait 20 years to have a phone installed

To have a phone line allocated and installed, one could wait as long as 20 years. The deficit of private phones was not only a result of poor infrastructure, it was also very lowly prioritised by the communist powers. Fewer phones meant fewer conversations to control, and less conspiracy and trouble.

In the village Sierpowo, from 7:45AM till 3PM the school phone was used in the office, but during afternoons it became a public device […] numerous visitors who had urgent calls to make would come to use it. People would call ambulances or the police or to inform their family about a new child or a death. It was the only phone in a radius of several miles. – Radek, bufetprl.com

10. There was only one shop selling foreign goods, and it did not accept local currency

Pewex [Przedsiębiorstwo Eksportu Wewnętrznego] is short for Internal Export Company, and that should already give you an idea of how crazy it was, because:

The term export means shipping the goods and services out of a country.

Pewex was introduced in 1970s to help the country’s foreign currency deficit and offered most goods unavailable elsewhere (such as toilet paper, jeans and electronics), but it only accepted foreign currencies The exchange ratio was outrageous and possession of foreign currency in cash was forbidden (it had to be exchanged for bank cheques), but Pewex had no competition and so became one of Poland’s most beloved shops until the fall of communism.

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Filed under economics, industry, labor, philosophy, Poland

by | 22 September 2026 · 5:44 am

German ‘Workforce Turnover’, 1942

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 155-57, 181, 191:

If things were bad in Berlin, they were far worse on the eastern front, where many soldiers were freezing to death. The people back home caught glimpses of the Russian campaign on the Wochenschau [weekly newsreels]: horse-drawn carriages and tanks bogged down in knee-high snow; soldiers in white camouflage outfits, rather like hooded bathrobes, skiing or plowing their way through the ruins of Russian villages that were “utterly destroyed by the mighty arms of our heroic shock troops”; German planes dropping food parcels for the soldiers marching in the glacial steppes. Letters home spoke of frostbite and amputated limbs. There were images of “Bolshevik corpses” littered around the icy Russian plains, but never of German soldiers, for that would be too upsetting.

One of the main items on the Wochenschau in January celebrated a domestic campaign that had been ordered by the Führer in December 1941: to donate socks, pullovers, scarves, ski boots, furs, fleeces, blankets, or anything else to keep the troops warm on the front lines….

What was not reported on the Wochenschau, or anywhere else, was an event that occurred at much the same time, on the western shore of the Wannsee, in a grand Italianate villa that once belonged to a rich industrialist and now served as a guesthouse and conference center for SS officers. Houses around the lovely Wannsee were sought after by the wealthiest Berliners. Before 1933, Jews lived in some of the finest homes. After the Nazis came to power, these were confiscated by senior figures in the regime. Goebbels owned a house on the lake, at Schwanenwerder. Walther Funk, the minister of economics, resided in a grand house that had once belonged to a Jewish family, now decorated with swastika tiles. Albert Speer lived nearby, as did Heinz Rühmann, the movie star.

…

Reinhard Heydrich, director of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), invited fourteen senior figures in the Nazi regime to a secret meeting followed by breakfast on January 20 at the SS guest house on the Wannsee. They included top bureaucrats from various ministries, as well as Roland Freisler, the notorious judge on the People’s Court who sentenced more than five thousand people to death between 1942 and 1945. Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible for managing Jewish deportations, was asked to take the minutes. What needed to be discussed on that chilly morning, alleviated by a steady supply of fine brandy, were some practical aspects of the extermination of the Jews.

That the Jews were to be eradicated was no longer a matter of dispute. Just one week before the Wannsee Conference, Goebbels wrote in his diary, “The Führer once more expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no sentimental squeamishness about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them.” Mass killings had already been taking place in Poland since 1939. Jews who were not murdered on the spot were to be worked to death. But two questions still needed to be cleared up. How to administer the genocide in an orderly and efficient manner? And how to define who was Jewish? Should Mischlinge be included in the killing program? Heydrich believed that they should. Others wanted to postpone the decision until after the war. After some to-ing and fro-ing, Heydrich settled for that. The logistical issues were cleared up pretty quickly to everyone’s satisfaction, so the gentlemen could enjoy a leisurely glass of cognac in front of the fireplace.

…

The first sign that deportations were imminent was a questionnaire sent through the mail to be filled out meticulously: financial assets, family history, personal details, and so forth. After some days, or sometimes weeks, the Gestapo would come beating on the door. There was no way back after that. In 1942, sixteen transports, each with loads of roughly one thousand people, left the Berlin railway stations. The trains carrying their human freight were mostly bound for the ghettos of Warsaw or Riga, or the death camps of Auschwitz and Sobibor, where those not deemed fit to be worked to death were immediately gassed. In the summer of 1942, the killing of Jews had reached a bloody peak. Millions had already been shot or murdered by other means before the gas chambers of Auschwitz were employed day and night. The General Gouvernment had become a giant killing field, presided over by Governor General Hans Frank.

…

There were now more than three million foreign workers in Germany. Many were French POWs. A number of men from occupied countries in Western Europe, such as the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the Scandinavian countries, had volunteered for work. Then there were male and female workers from Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and other parts of the Soviet Union. Some had come willingly, many had not. The Russians and Eastern Europeans, called Ostarbeiter, often mere teenagers, were treated appallingly. Cooped up in dismal work camps, they were so underfed that many died, or had to be shipped home in horrible conditions. One description of these transports: “There were dead passengers on the returning train. Women on that train gave birth to children that were tossed from the open window during the journey, while people sick from tuberculosis and venereal disease rode in the same coach. The dying lay in freight cars without straw, and one of the dead was thrown onto the embankment.” Treatment of Jewish slave workers in concentration camps, such as Sachsenhausen, was of course even worse.

And yet, a semblance of normalcy for most Berliners continued despite the griping, the bad news from different battlefronts, the horrors endemic in a murderous police state, and “Berlin pessimism.” The soccer competition carried on as always. BSB from Berlin Mitte beat Minerva from Schmargendorf. Tasmania was too strong for Tennis Borussia. And FC Wacker from Reinickendorf lost to Blau-Weiss 90.

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Filed under France, Germany, industry, labor, migration, military, nationalism, Netherlands, Poland, religion, Scandinavia, Ukraine, USSR, war

by | 15 September 2026 · 3:08 am

Sitzkrieg Begins in Berlin, 1939

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 50-51:

The next air raid, on September 9, was as harmless as the first. The alarm lasted for forty-five minutes, but nothing happened at all. This, too, helped to further calm the nerves of Berliners. Helmuth von Moltke wrote to his wife from Berlin that “an infectious optimism has spread in the well-known way of mass psychology; the optimistic assumption is that the people of France won’t fight; it is claimed that French soldiers put big placards on their bunkers, in German: ‘If you don’t shoot, we won’t start.’ The story seems too fantastic. Still, it is true that nearly a week after the outbreak of the war the French and British have not yet done anything to come to the aid of their ally [Poland].”

Moltke had been drafted into the Abwehr, the military intelligence service, run by Wilhelm Canaris, a Nazi supporter who began to turn against Hitler after the invasion of Poland. As an intelligence insider, Moltke knew more than most people, but even he was puzzled by the lack of action from the Allied powers. Many Berliners hoped this meant that the war would be over soon. Surely, the occupation of Poland would be accepted as a fait accompli, just as the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the annexation of Austria had been in 1938. Rumors of imminent peace started spreading around town. As Christabel Bielenberg, the Anglo-German living in Dahlem, had already observed before the invasion of Poland: “With all normal channels of information successfully under control, rumor and hearsay took over and ran riot.”

This is exactly what happened on October 10. Quite how the rumor of imminent peace negotiations began is unclear: A misinformed telegram sent by a clerk at the Berlin central post office was the explanation of the SD, short for Sicherheitsdienst, the fearsome Nazi security service. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich: “A rumor is running through town this morning, like wildfire: the English government has fallen; a ten days’ truce is proposed…. All Berlin is on the telephone. ‘Had you heard…. Is it really true?’ ”

People stopped working in offices. Students at the Friedrich Wilhelm University were celebrating. There was a rush on government bonds at the stock exchange. Christabel Bielenberg went shopping at her local market, passing the church of Martin Niemöller, who had been arrested in 1938 for resisting Nazi persecution of Jewish converts to Christianity. Groups of people gathering around stores and street corners discussed the sensational news. The French had given up all resistance. The abdicated King Edward VIII, who held rather warm feelings toward the Führer, was about to reoccupy the British throne. Hands were stretched to Christabel in congratulation. Frau Schmitz, who ruled the food market behind her vegetable stall, “all overcoat and apron, a bulging monument to the peculiar ribald stoicism which characterizes the true Berliner,” knew exactly what was up: The gentlemen at the top had changed their minds, they were coming to an agreement! A plane all the way from Britain was about to land that afternoon at Tempelhof airfield. Extra rations of tomatoes, bread, and cabbage were slipped into the shopping bags of grateful customers. Rationing would soon be history anyway.

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by | 13 September 2026 · 4:35 am

German Border, 31 August 1939

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 3-4:

The beginning of World War II began as a deadly theatrical performance staged by the SS. Hitler wanted to invade Poland, so an excuse had to be invented. Poles were cast as the aggressors. On the night of August 31, in an operation named “Grandmother Died,” the Gleiwitz radio station on the German side of the Polish border was “attacked” by German agents disguised in Polish uniforms. A brief anti-German message was broadcast in Polish. To make the imaginary act of Polish aggression seem more plausible, the corpses of a few “Polish” attackers were left on the site. They were in fact murdered concentration camp prisoners dressed up as Poles.

Similar deceptions were staged at other places along the Polish-German border, an area where Polish- and German-speaking populations had been at home for centuries, not always amicably. In a place named Hochlinden, not far from Gleiwitz, a German customs post was attacked on the same night by a number of men in Polish army uniforms. (They also sported heavy beards and sideburns, to make them look more “Polish”—in German eyes, that is.) A show was made of repulsing the attack by men dressed up as German border guards. All of them were Nazi commandos. Again, a few unfortunate concentration camp prisoners were forced to play their roles as Polish soldiers killed in the make-believe skirmish. Photographs of the murdered men were sent to Berlin as evidence of Polish belligerence.

At ten o’clock, on the following night, Hitler, dressed in the grayish-green uniform of the German army, the Wehrmacht, made a speech to members of the Reichstag, a rubber-stamp parliament now hastily assembled in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin’s Tiergarten district. Since the Reichstag building itself had been heavily damaged in 1933 by an arson attack that the Nazis might have staged themselves as an excuse to crack down on political opponents, the opera house now had to do. Many seats were empty, since their occupants were away on military duty. The stage, upon which great new music by Hindemith and Schoenberg had once been performed, now had a gaudy backdrop of a giant eagle with a swastika in its claws, flanked by massive red, white, and black Nazi flags. When Hitler’s speech reached its sweaty, fist-shaking climax of screaming bombast, the uniformed delegates stomped and cheered like brawlers in a beer hall. Hitler claimed that Germany had had no choice but to respond to Polish hostility with maximum force. “This night,” he barked, “for the first time, Polish regular soldiers fired on our territory. Since 5:45 a.m. we have been returning the fire, and from now on bombs will be met by bombs.”

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Filed under Germany, nationalism, Poland, publishing, war

by | 12 September 2026 · 6:39 am

Silesian: Pō Naszymu

This week’s edition of Culture.pl contains an article by Agnieszka Warnke titled Pō Naszymu: A Linguistic Portrait of Silesian. Here are some excerpts.

The complexities of Silesia begin with the very origin of its name. Its turbulent history, marked by shifting borders and Polish, Czech and German influences, is reflected in the region’s distinctive speech – but is Silesian a language, a dialect of Polish, or something in between?

Difficulties already begin with the etymology of the word ‘Silesia’ itself. The popular theory in the interwar period about the word’s link to the Old Germanic tribe of Silings was rejected by Polish researchers. They almost unanimously opt for the Old Slavonic etymology: the name of the Silesians tribe and the entire region originates from the name of the Ślęza River or Mount Ślęża. Additionally, the morpheme *slęg– (meaning ‘damp’) was retained in the cant word ślęgnąć (‘to get wet’).

With time, history divided the region into two parts: Lower Silesia and Upper Silesia (with the latter appearing in the 15thcentury). While we rarely hear the Silesian vernacular in and around Wrocław, the Silesian language has survived in Opole, Rybnik, Katowice and Cieszyn, where the inhabitants use the language they grew up speaking. Officially, Silesian has the status of a dialect comprising a group of Silesian dialects, but there’s an ongoing fight – currently unsuccessful – for it to be recognised as a regional language. It’s currently used by nearly half a million people. One needs only to glance at the past to understand the important role of a common language with regard to integrating Silesians with each other but also with the Polish state.

…

Silesian Rej

The linguistic rift is fully reflective of the geopolitical situation of medieval Silesia, which then constituted an object of a feud between Poland and Czechia. As early as in the 16th century, when the Silesian land was already under Habsburg rule, Łukasz Górnicki asserted in Dworzanin Polski (Polish Courtier) that the region was dominated by Czech. One should not forget, however, the prominent Silesian pressmen (such as Hieronim Wietor and Jan Haller), working in early Renaissance Kraków. They modernised medieval spelling, laying the foundations for contemporary Polish orthography.

While one can talk about the visible weakening of cultural ties between Silesia and Polish lands at the brink of the 15thcentury – especially when compared with previous centuries – they weren’t broken completely. The Renaissance Polish language of Mikołaj Rej and Jan Kochanowski is full of turns of phrase now present in different dialects. Those who then worked to preserve the Silesian vernacular were evangelicals, notably Adam Gdacjusz of Kluczbork (also known as the ‘Silesian Rej’). The charismatic preacher was a fervent opponent of Germanisation, who introduced Silesian into literature, and his sermons, collected in a volume titled Postilla Popularis, presented the difficult life of the Silesians and the deterioration of morality after the Thirty Years’ War. In 2019, the Academic Publishing House ‘Śląsk’ (Silesia) reprinted his most popular work.

Another, earlier noteworthy text, one that remained forgotten for years, is Walenty Roździeński’s poem Officina Ferraria (1612). The simple smelter manager and forge owner described the state of his industry, listing practical information while following the conventions of poetics and versification. It was the first ever text concerning the work of a miner and steelworker written in the Polish language. It was found in Gniezno 300 years later and translated into English in 1976.

Idiotisms & beauty

The 19th century was not only a time of progressing Germanisation but also a time of uprooting dialects at schools and a ban on cultivating Slavic customs. Polish-language newspapers were released alongside German-language press, and mid-19th century was a time when Polish-language Silesian literature started to develop (by authors such as Józef Lompa, Karol Miarka, Konstanty Damrot).

At the beginning of the 1930s, after the 1921 Upper Silesia plebiscite mandated by the Versailles Treaty to determine ownership of Upper Silesia between Weimar Germany and the Second Polish Republic and the Silesian Uprisings, Zofia Kosak-Szczucka wrote in Nieznany Kraj (The Unknown Country): ’It’s a large area inhabited by around million people, speaking not another language like Polish but rather a beautiful Silesian dialect, dignified with its archaic, preserved forms.’

The reality, however, wasn’t quite as colourful. As early as 1849, Dziennik Górno-Szlązki (The Upper-Silesian Daily) included a column titled Idiotyzmy i Germianizmy szląskie (Silesian Idiotisms and Germanisms), aimed at polonising the language of the Silesians. They admonished the readers for saying siadłocha instead of kwaśne mleko (sour milk) and jata instead of szopa.. What was lacking, however, were tips on which regionalisms should be preserved. In 1880, in Gazeta Górnoszląska (Upper-Silesian Gazette), one would read:‘we don’t say kopidoł but grabarz (undertaker)’, even though it’s the allegedly Polish version grabarz that has German origins.

In Głosy znad Odry (Voices of the Odra River), released between 1918 and 1924, a the ‘Kącik Językowy’ (Language Corner) column appeared several times, contrasting the ‘weed-grown speech’ of the Upper Silesians with ‘pure language’. However, on top of German and other borrowed words and -isms, they also noticed ‘relics of Old Polish’ – words no longer present in the common literary language but preserved in that region. In issue 3/4 of Głosy from 1922, P. Piast insisted:

An Upper Silesian doesn’t use the German ‘lichtarz’ because they have the native ‘świecznik’ (candlestick), they don’t need the Greek ‘inkaust’ or the Latin ‘atrament’, already having the Polish ‘czernidło’ (ink). […] They don’t look into a ‘zwierciadło’ but rather a ‘zdrzadło’ (mirror). When they accept an invitation, it’s not for a ‘kolacja’, as ‘wieczerza’ (supper) is better. […] For a fair, a holiday or a ‘radośnik’ (‘chrzciny’; christening) they will bake a ‘kołacz’ (kolach) rather than ‘placek’ (cake), cook a tasty bite of ‘owięzie’ meat (‘wołowe’; beef) with ‘moczka’ (capitalists only know the French ‘sauce’) and a calf ‘pieczonka’ (‘pieczeń’; roast).

The post-war changing of borders and forced resettlement resulted in the Silesians having to reassess their identity. Before that, they had strongly identified with a particular town or region, but all of a sudden were required to declare their nationality. The communist regime emphasised the development of official culture, excluding regional varieties. It was only after 1989 that democracy and freedom of speech allowed us to rediscover local histories and accept language variety.

…

After the political transformation, the disputes concerning the status of Silesian were rekindled in Poland. Many would consider Silesian a regional language, confirming the linguistic (rather than national) separateness of the area. The proponents of this idea emphasise that without appropriate education, the possibility of obtaining national and EU funds for the development of Silesian press, literature or theatre, the Silesian language won’t survive. Such an opportunity was granted to Kashubian – so far Poland’s only regional language, officially acknowledged as such in 2005. Since then, it’s been taught at schools and one can even take the matura (matriculation) exam in Kashubian. There are radio and TV shows in this language (not to mention press) and there’s Kashubian literature of all genres. Why not create similar development opportunities for Silesian? In June 2019, the Sejm decided against discussing a legislation project – the fifth one since 2007 – regulating this issue.

Among linguists, opinions differ. Professor Jolanta Tambor, leading the works of the Silesian language codification group, believes that, considering the benefits of ‘a minority group having their own language, there’s no reason not to consider the speech of the Silesians a regional language’. At the same time, one ought to remember all its types: Upper Silesian, Cieszyn and Opole. Meanwhile, Professor Jan Miodek, born in Tarnowskie Góry, sees no need for a top-down codification and highlights that ‘the literary variety of Silesian is Polish’. Professor Bogusław Wyderka, who has edited the multiple-volume Słownik Gwar Śląskich (Dictionary of Silesian Dialects) since 2000, proves in his research papers that historically, the Silesian dialect was a variety of Polish, although nowadays it’s impossible to stop the Silesian language movement.

The arguments related to different linguistic traits of Silesian are either non-existent or successfully challenged. The vocabulary and phonetic features characteristic for the region are to a large extent shared by other varieties of Polish. What mostly distinguishes the inhabitants of Silesia who use their native vernacular is the strong sense of Silesian identity, the willingness to preserve and develop their own tradition and culture. Professor Tambor emphasises that today, recognising Silesian as a regional language is an exclusively legal-political issue.

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Filed under Czechia, education, Germany, language, Poland

by | 11 September 2026 · 5:27 am

Polish Baby Names

Last week’s compilation from Culture.pl includes an article about Polish naming conventions by Aleksandra Jagielska. (Public transport vehicles in Poland that show the current date and time to their passengers also typically show the Christian saint names for those days, one male and one female.) Here are excerpts from the article.

There are 1,063,756 women called Anna in Poland, more people than live in Kraków. Last year, eight boys were named Dobromir. Somewhere between those two numbers sits the story of how Poland has named its children – Slavic wishes, Christian saints, Enlightenment novels, and a 2014 law that finally let you call your daughter Jessica.

Traditional, international or original? After your ancestors, literary heroes or maybe after a patron saint to put your child under their protection? One name, two or more? Let’s check what sort of changes have been happening in the fashions for names in the Polish language.

Even though we don’t choose our own names, they stay with us from birth for our whole lives as an important part of our identity. That right is guaranteed by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, under which ‘a child from the moment it is born will have the right to a name’. Because although its basic function is identification for formal and social reasons, having a name says something about our dignity.

Names are given to children the moment their birth certificate is drawn up in the Civil Registry Office. According to the Civil Status Records Act from November 2014, you can pick one or two names, but no more. This is mostly to ensure the need for clarity in identity documents (i.e. to simplify them for processing by Poland’s bureaucratic apparatus) and ignores the wishes of any parents hoping to name their son after all four Beatles or anything else equally creative.

Names also have to be separate and cannot be hyphenated – no Mary-Sues allowed in Poland. They cannot be diminutives (so William would be fine, but not Bill), ‘ridiculous’ or inappropriate (Lucifer, VAT or Courtesan would all be disallowed). The Polish Language Council also recommends avoiding country names and geographical terms (no Monaco or Pacific, thank you).

Before 2014, the rules were even stricter. If both parents were Poles, they had to choose names rooted in Polish linguistic tradition. You’d have to call your son Jan instead of John, and your daughter Zdzisława instead of Jessica. You also had to choose names that clearly indicated the sex of the child, i.e. all girls’ names had to end in ‘a’. But once the law changed in 2014, you were finally allowed to name your child something foreign regardless of the parents’ citizenship, and able to pick a name that didn’t grammatically indicate the sex but was generally understood as assigned to one, eg. Nikol.

Sometimes, in a hasty rush to fill in all the paperwork, parents don’t always like the name they so quickly put to paper and start to regret their choice. Luckily, there is a six-month window in which a newborn’s name can be changed to something else. This late administrative change needs to be accompanied by serious justification though, like proving it’s a ‘ridiculous’ name or that the baby has continually been called something else. Should we really take our time and want to change the name of a child who’s already past its 13th birthday, then the child themselves also has to agree.

Despite all the laws listed above, there is no official list of banned names – the Polish Language Council and other linguistic advisors can offer their opinion, but the final decision, like so many in Poland, belongs to the civil servants processing the application. If the name does not fulfil the requirements (say it’s diminutive, ridiculous or inappropriate), then the civil servant has the right – nay, the duty – to throw it out. They even get to pick a new name themselves, a commonly-used one, and the parents have just two weeks to appeal the decision.

If you’re wondering how many people in Poland have the same name as you, or are wondering if rarer names really are that rare, you can check the freely available database provided by the Ministry of Digitisation at dane.gov.pl. There you’ll find information about given names across different years, according to all the names accumulated in Poland’s PESEL registry (the country’s centralised identity database).

The latest figures posted in January 2026 say the most common boys’ names are Piotr (682,516 people), Krzysztof (631,898) and Tomasz (533,217), while for girls the clear leader is Anna (1,063,756) followed by Katarzyna (602,474) and Małgorzata (572,067). The top tens also include Andrzej, Paweł, Michał, Jan, Marcin, Jakub, Adam, and Maria, Agnieszka, Ewa, Barbara, Magdalena, Elżbieta and Joanna.

But when it comes to newborns, the lists are completely different. In 2025, the most popular names given to baby boys were Nikodem, Antoni, Leon, Jan and Aleksander, and for girls it was Zofia, Zuzanna, Maja, Laura and Hanna.

Trends take time to change. The most popular names in 2024 were Nikodem and Maja. And in 2023 it was back to Nikodem and Zofia again. In 2022, it was Antoni and Zofia, and before that, for 2021, 2020 and 2019, it was Antoni and Zuzanna.

So yes, with one stubborn exception in 2024, a girl born in Poland since 2019 has stood a very good chance of being landed with a name starting with Z.

But let’s go back to the statistics from the start of the century. In the years 2001 to 2012, the top names were Jakub and Julia – yes, for over a decade, it was the same names over and over again. It was only in 2013 that the name Lena dethroned Julia. Jakub was dethroned as late as 2016 by a name you’ve already seen: Antoni.

So those are the most popular names, but what about the rarest? In 2025, among the rarest names given to a boy in Poland were Zbyszko, Teodozjusz, Światosław, Gromisław and Gaweł. There were also a few non-typical Polish names like Riczard and Rajan. When it comes to girls, names that were given to only a handful of children included Wincentyna, Leonora, Laurencja, Henryka, Delfina and Afrodyta.

…

Slavic names carried a wish inside their etymology: Bronisław means ‘to defend fame’ – ‘(may he) defend fame’; Kochan, ‘may he be loved’; Świętopełk, ‘holy regiment’ or ‘strong band’ – ‘(may he have) a strong band behind him’. A name that stays with a person for life was meant to work like a shield, a declaration of good fortune for whoever carried it. Bequeathing a name, writes the onomastician Maria Malec, was an anthropological act of a sacral character, by which the child acquired the status of a human being.

Protective names existed across the Slavic world too – decoys used in place of the ‘real’ name to hide it from evil forces when a child’s life seemed at risk. You can spot them by the negation built in: Niedan, Niemir, Niemój (‘Not-given’, ‘Not-peace’, ‘Not-mine’). A child saddled with one of these was supposed to slip past the attention of demons.

When Poland accepted Christianity in 966 CE, it entered the orbit of Christian culture. Much like in the rest of Christian Europe, the cults celebrating individual saints became popular in Poland, and with them the custom of naming children after martyrs and other saints, as well as Biblical names from the Old and New Testaments. The act of giving a name was associated with organising a christening and, much like how the native names contained wishes, the names from Christian culture were linked to patrons who were to protect their namesakes.

For several centuries, Slavic and Christian names appeared in fairly even numbers. In the 15th century however, the latter became significantly more popular, and in the century after that they had all but driven the native ones out entirely. This followed the recommendations of the Council of Trent (1545–1563), which held that names given at baptism should belong to Christian saints. The exceptions were Old Polish names that had acquired patron saints of their own – Kazimierz, Wojciech, Stanisław, Władysław. To this day, Christian names remain the backbone of the Polish go-to stock of names.

Among the names that never really took off in Polish culture were those drawn from ancient and medieval literature – Achilles, Paris, Hector, Roland, Tristan, Isolde – which may well have gone the way of several native Old Polish names after the Council of Trent. A run of Old Testament names failed to catch on too: Abraham, Ezekiel and Isaac were rejected in the 16th century by Protestants.

Meanwhile the Polish name vault gained newly minted saints such as Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier and Teresa of Ávila. Protestants were also the first to start calling their daughters Maria – for centuries considered an affront to the reverence owed to the Mother of God, with Marianna used as the respectful workaround. This may explain the lopsided statistics mentioned earlier. Centuries of treating Maria as too holy for daily use pushed it into the middle slot, where it could sit quietly doing its devotional work without anyone having to shout it across a courtyard. The taboo may have dissolved a long time ago, but the custom didn’t.

…

Old Polish names started to return to fashion after Poland lost its independence in the late 1700s. The revival in patriotism and efforts to maintain a national identity led to people reaching for forgotten Slavic names. In 1827, an entire calendar of Slavic names appeared in a supplement to the Przewodnik Warszawski newspaper, prepared by Tadeusz Wojewódzki.

…

Although Old Polish names linked to the centuries-old veneration of saints are not that popular today, they still pop up now and then. In 2025, 376 baby boys were named Mieszko, 49 Zbigniew and 8 Dobromir, while 27 girls were called Dobrawa, 18 Mirosława and 17 Bogumiła.

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Filed under language, Poland, religion

by | 8 August 2026 · 5:21 am

Małgorzata Rejmer’s Book Bukareszt

This week’s newsletter from Culture.pl contains some articles about Polish connections with Romania. Here are some excerpts from an article by Mikołaj Gliński titled “Everyone Remembers Their Own Past Differently: Małgorzata Rejmer on Romania & Albania“:

The author Małgorzata Rejmer talks about similarities between Romania and Poland, and reveals the way Poland is perceived from a Romanian perspective. She shares details of the first reactions to her book ‘Bukareszt’, which is due to be released in Romanian. The writer also reveals the beginnings of her latest project, a book about Albania.

Mikołaj Gliński: When and how did you first find yourself in Romania?

Małgorzata Rejmer: I think it all began with the documentary Dzieci z Dekretu (The Decree Children), which I saw in 2007. It tells the story of a Romania in which Ceaușescu banned access to contraception, and it conveys how the absurd becomes normal, and how the everyday becomes hell, with a constant string of humiliation. It’s [shot in] the late 1980s, and factories run gynaecological check-ups of women, with testing material made of frog skin which changes colour in contact with the urine of a pregnant woman. I read all of Herta Muller’s books at the time, but it was only after my trip to Bucharest in 2009 that my curiosity was truly aroused. It was the longing for a city which I associated on the one hand with chaos and crumminess, and on the other hand, with beauty and pathos. For me, in a way it was a ‘crooked Paris’, an absolute mishmash, the glamorous and the plebeian all in one.

MG: When did you first have the idea of writing about Romania?

MR: In 2010, I began to write my doctoral thesis about Romanian cinema, and I read many books about Romania in a short period of time. And I just couldn’t believe it all. I knew that Romania was a fascinating country for a writer and anthropologist. On the one hand, it’s European and looks up to France and Germany, and on the other hand, it also looks back onto the Balkans and Turkey, it’s a mix of the culturally unique, of the provincial and the peripheral.

MG: Why did you choose reportage as a form of description? Your previous book, Toksymia, was a novel…

MR: I am not too attached to the idea that Bukareszt is a reportage piece. I don’t really consider myself a writer, and even less so a reporter. I am just a person who writes. I don’t have the workshop of a journalist, it’s difficult for me to write about a given subject. Either a subject flows out of me and writes itself, or no one could drag me with horses to sit down by my laptop. My writing is very capricious, and it costs me a lot of energy.

MG: The style in Bukareszt is very rich and diverse. You used different conventions (for example, the chapter about the revolution is written as a play, or even a parody, with acts, etc). You also draw on different cultural texts, (The Ballad of Master Manole, the epic of a lamb) as well as styles. I suppose those are not the typical elements of a reporter’s workshop?

MR: Bukareszt is literary and varied in style, because I had the feeling that this city is eclectic, and and that all of Romania is one big patchwork, and this was something that I wanted to render in the book’s language. When I write about a famous Romanian ballad, the language imitates the ballad, and when I write about the chaos of the revolution, I choose the form of a drama. I wanted to adapt the style to the theme, for the polyphony of the book to match the diversity of Bucharest. In the end, if I tried to write all the texts in one style, I would die of boredom. I have to have some fun in my life, to play around with form, and to try out different things. I adore Herta Muller’s reportage from Hunger and Silk, although nobody calls Muller a reporter. Using short sentences, she sketches out touching human portraits and universal stories about humanity. Muller is relentless, she writes with images, doesn’t back away from symbols, and she is at the very centre of the texts herself. I prefer this kind of writing to the most meticulous kind of reportage about some incredibly important and pertinent issue of our times.

MG: How did your Romanian friends react to your book? You do write about rather terrifying and shameful things from the country’s history: the terror of the security services, people spying on each other, prisons, the completely inhuman stories of women which resulted from the 1966 anti-abortion decree, and the taboo of a revolution – which perhaps never even took place?

MR: The book was read by a couple of Polish friends who live in Romania, and they were quite enthusiastic.  Some time ago, a Romanian woman wrote to me saying that after reading Bukareszt, she felt proud of her country again, and wanted to get to know its history. This was moving for me. Only the chapter on abortion has been released in Romania so far, and it was well received. I read comments by young people for whom the text was a discovery, because they had become accustomed to an idealised vision of the Ceausescu era.

Bukareszt is my way of seeing Romania, and a certain selection of facts. You can polemicize about this selection, but it would be harder to argue with the facts. The question of memory is a separate issue – everyone remembers their own past differently, and everyone has their own vision of it. Bukareszt would be a collection of these crumbs, but they are all fragments of a shattered mirror, and they don’t reflect a reality but rather convey a mosaic.

Bukareszt will probably get released in Romania this year, and, possibly, there will then be a discussion around it. It’s possible, but not certain. Romanians are not interested in working through the collective memory. Even at book readings in Cluj and Bucharest, the question hanging over me was “Why do you write about such difficult things from the past? If the present is terrible, why would we need to dig into the past, on top of that?”

MG: Was the work on Bukareszt a difficult experience for you, personally? I am addressing the talks that you had to conduct with people who have had some terrible experiences. Almost all of the topics from the first part touch upon some kind of trauma…

MR: I always approached my protagonists with the conviction that I really want to talk to them, and not that I want to do an interview. These talks went on for hours. I had to recover after many of these stories, and I repeatedly returned to some of them. At times, I would cry together with the people who told me those stories. Suffering is inscribed into life, but I am most interested in the way that these people were able to cope with it.  We all strive for normality even in the most abnormal of times.

MG: What was the most difficult thing for you get used to when you lived in Romania?

MR: I didn’t have any problems with getting used to Romania, but for a long time, I live there in house which very much resembled a squat, with parties running on until 5 in the morning. Recently I went to Bucharest once again, and I decided to stay in the old place out of nostalgia. There was a party once again, and this is something that is hard to get used to.

But apart from that, I didn’t have any problems getting acquainted with Bucharest. I spent some time growing up in a small town, and some time in the northern Praga district [in Warsaw], so Bucharest is close to my heart both in terms of the aesthetics and the atmosphere. And when a Romanian friend came to visit me, he even began to mark out [the district of] Grochów in his own way. For him, the Wiatraczna roundabout was evocative of the Fifth Iancului, the Astoria restaurant reminded him of Intermacedonia, and he would call the local kebab place the same way he would in Bucharest: ‘Ali Baba’.

MG: While reading your book, one can have the impression that many of these historical experiences and situations are, to a certain degree, similar to Polish history, except for over there, things were somehow… a lot worse, a bit like a nightmare. Is it possible to compare these histories? Where do the parallels end?

MR: I cannot answer your question, because I am not able to define where the limits of these similarities lie. I am not the one to trace them out, let the Polish and Romanian readership do it themselves, in accordance with their own subjective feelings.

But looking at this issue from an objective side, looking at the facts, we could say that after 1965, the Romanian version of communism was completely different to the Polish one. It had the face of one man, Nicolae Ceaușescu. He was the one responsible for the situation in the country, he bestowed all of the important posts upon members of his family, and prepared his son to become his successor. Historians call this ‘dynastic communism’. Ceaușescu was Romania. But let’s not forget that in the 1960s and 1970s Romanians led rather good lives, and in many ways, their situation was much better than the one in Poland. It was only the 1980s that brought about a sudden collapse and the fall of the state, as well as a suffering of the people with the complete indifference of the authorities.

The chapters on Romanian communism stir a lot of emotion, but it’s enough to read Kolymskoye Stories to see a completely different scale of human suffering. No matter what atrocity we would think of, man is capable of inventing a greater and more effective one. In this place, the book should have some kind of quotation about man being the most cruel of all animals. I agree.

MG: What is the stereotypical idea that Polish people have about Romania?

MR: To put it bluntly, Poles associate Romania with poverty, Gypsies and Dracula. It’s all stems from ignorance. Just go there, visit Transylvania, Bukovina and Maramuresz and your whole stance towards Romania changes. Poles have no idea about the scale of Romanian influence on European heritage. They don’t know what extraordinary intellectuals surfaced in Romania in the interwar period. A majority of the most acclaimed ones emigrated. And very few Poles know that Romanian cinema has been storming European film festivals for more than a decade, it’s the country’s best export commodities.

MG: Was your perspective as a person coming from Poland at all helpful in understanding Romania? Poland is unarguably also a country from the East of Europe, and a member of the former communist bloc. It possibly has a similar cultural and historical background, being a quite big but peripheral country, under foreign rule for a period of time, and one looking up to the West with both admiration and fascination…

MR: Yes, I think that this kind of stance that we are saturated with as Poles – the sense that we have been wronged by history, that we are underappreciated and marginalised in Europe – helped me understand Romanians. I often explained to them that Poles have a very similar inferiority complex, a problem of peasant roots, and that they are terribly sensitive to any outside criticism. But for Romanians, Poland is Europe, and it’s almost Germany. When I told them about the 123 years of history under partitions, about the sense of inferiority, Romanians would cry out: ‘But in the Middle Ages you were a superpower! And we never had a period of imperial Romania.’ They would also often say: ‘we have a common enemy, Russia!’ In the area I lived in in Bucharest, I once saw a huge, dirty garbage container with the phrase ‘Russia e gunoi’, meaning ‘Russia is garbage’.

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by | 27 July 2026 · 6:09 am

European Nationalist Revolts in 1905

This week’s edition of Culture.pl contains an article by Zachary Mazur written in 2022 that heralds his new book entitled To Kill a Spy: Everyday Nationalism and Political Violence in Fin-de-Siecle Europe from Amsterdam University Press’s CEU Press imprint later in 2026. Here are excerpts from most of the text of the article, without illustrations.

For decades, the Revolution of 1905 has been tucked away in history books as a mere ‘dress rehearsal’ for the Soviet rise in 1917. But for the Poles, Jews, Lithuanians and Ukrainians living under the Tsarist yoke, 1905 wasn’t a rehearsal for someone else’s drama – it was their own leading role. It was the moment the modern mass nation was born, an epoch-making explosion of culture and defiance that shattered imperial censorship and provided a blueprint for the independent states that would follow.

The catalyst: a war of hubris & machine guns

On the eve of the revolution, the Russian Empire was engaged in an embarrassing war with Imperial Japan. The two powers fought over control of northeast China (Manchuria) and the Korean peninsula. The Japanese, from the European perspective, were an upstart Asiatic power that had only recently emerged from isolation and the variable dark ages of feudalism. Fuelled by an unapologetic anti-Asian racism, most people expected that the tsar’s Russia would destroy the Japanese army in a matter of weeks when the war began.

Instead, Russian troops faced continuous setbacks. Japanese commanders used trenches and machine guns – new technologies of the day – to break the will of their opponents. On the seas, Japan’s gunships destroyed the Russian Pacific fleet, leading to an epic journey for the Baltic fleet around the horn of Africa, 18,000 nautical miles.

After the nearly 8-month ocean voyage, Russia’s sailors again faced a thrashing in May 1905. With two fleets destroyed and numerous losses on land, Russia admitted defeat in the summer. US President Theodore Roosevelt invited the sides to negotiate peace in New Hampshire at an American naval base and the Treaty of Portsmouth ended the Russo-Japanese War in September 1905.

On the home front, the people of the Russian Empire took the brunt of the war effort. Among the newly formed urban working classes, a concomitant economic slowdown put severe pressure on the people as they faced unemployment and hunger. Already in 1904, there were anti-war protests in Warsaw and in a few other cities around the Russian-controlled partition of the Polish lands.

The true beginning of the revolution, however, came when Russian subjects led by a charismatic young Orthodox priest tried to petition the tsar in January 1905. A crowd of calm marchers solemnly moved toward the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, and despite the fact that the tsar was not even there, the guards panicked and opened fire on the people. The resulting mayhem and death became the rallying cry for radicals all over the empire. The tsar had tried to cultivate an image of a benevolent father figure, but after ‘Bloody Sunday’, even his most fervent supporters were disillusioned.

A hotbed of revolt: strikes & the October Manifesto

For the next two years following the events of January 1905, protests and strikes broke out all over the Russian Empire. The Polish part of the empire, that included the large cities Warsaw, Łódź, Radom, Kielce, Piotrków and Białystok, was the most industrialised region. As a result, it was poised to be a hotbed for revolutionary activity. Organisers went to work gathering support for strikes, and confrontations with police often turned violent. In Łódź, a huge centre for textile manufacturing, workers fought pitched battles on the streets with barricades and makeshift weapons.

General strikes, where whole industries stopped work, and especially striking railroad workers, forced the hand of the tsar. Finally, he had to give up some concessions to the protestors. In October, the tsar issued a decree that allowed for limited democratic freedoms of press and assembly and the formation of a parliamentary assembly, called the Duma. Though many of the protestors felt that this did not go far enough and continued their fight for further privileges, the so-called October Manifesto created an outpouring of publications, theatre and cultural life that the Russian Empire had never seen before.

Prior to this moment, censorship had been stifling, strictly regulating the languages in which books could be published or theatre performed. Lithuanian, Yiddish and Ukrainian had been banned for decades. While the suppression of the Ukrainian language continued – seen as a threat to the Russian ‘heartland’ in a policy of identity erasure that remains tragically relevant today – Lithuanian, Yiddish and other suppressed languages finally began to gain legal recognition within the empire.

The linguistic renaissance: breaking the imperial silence

Lithuanians gained the right to publish newspapers in the Latin alphabet as early as the spring of 1904, but the popular press exploded thanks to the Revolution of 1905. The proliferation of daily newspapers, such as the Vilniaus žinios (Vilnius News) signalled the beginning of a mass Lithuanian culture. The first great national assembly of Lithuanians took place in Vilnius, with 200 delegates, between 4 to 5 December 1905. All sections of society – from Belarus, East Prussia (where many Lithuania speakers lived as well) – took part.

They ended by demanding political autonomy for Lithuania, and to have their own provincial parliament with boundaries defined on ethnographic terms. Lithuanian scientific and artistic associations grew at the time, establishing the cultural arms of the Lithuanian national movement. These became vital just a few years later for the establishment of the independent Lithuanian state after World War I.

Yiddish too experienced a renaissance (or naissance) based on new-found freedoms in cities with large Jewish populations, such as Warsaw, Łódź and Vilnius. The tsarist authorities lifted bans on Yiddish printing and theatre in 1905, allowing for the creation of art and literature in a vernacular that practically all Jews used on a daily basis. Finally distinctly Jewish art could move to the public stage and reach audiences that had never experienced such forms of culture. The demand was clearly there, since four new theatres popped up in Warsaw almost immediately after the ban was lifted. In Mokotów, there was Bagatela, Elizeum on Karowa Street, Jardin d’Hiver on Chmielna and Muranower on Bonifraterska, all performing exclusively in Yiddish. Sholem Aleichem’s play Scattered and Dispersed saw its debut at this time (directed by Mark Arnshteyn). Yiddish dailies also appeared, and their content shows the popularity of theatre at the time. Jardin d’Hiver was playing two shows per day, with the exception of Shabbat. In 1908, the dedicated journal Teater Velt (Theatre World) appeared. All this newfound energy for Yiddish culture caused a modernisation of the language and uniformity that did not exist before among the Jews of the Russian Empire. This emergence also allowed for literary theatre to grow. On top of that, American actors with new plays written in New York came over and were the most commercially successful pieces.

Shadows of the revolution: the Pimps’ Pogrom

In the midst of the social upheaval and suffering, people looked for scapegoats to blame leading to one of the most bizarre episodes of the revolution: the Pimps’ Pogrom. In the working class Warsaw neighbourhood of Wola (today the site of skyscrapers, giving it the nickname ‘Hong Kong’), a seedy underworld of pimps, prostitutes and the men who frequented these establishments operated with the approbation of the local police.

In the Russian Empire, the sex trade was officially regulated, requiring both brothels and individual prostitutes to register with the police. Pimps supported the Tsarist status quo rather than the revolutionaries, as they could turn a profit under the state’s protection. Consequently, the sex trade was seen as an extension of the Russian regime and its police – the same officers who beat protesters and fired into crowds. The violence, however chaotic, was a strike against the very infrastructure of Russian control.

A song from that time:

Oj, lumpy to szpiedzy, [Oh the pimps are spies]
Prowokatorzy; [Provocateurs]
Chodzą na ‘giełde’, podsłuchują [They go to the market, eavesdropping]
potem donoszą na policje [then they tell the police]

It’s unclear what exactly sparked the riots against the brothels, but at the end of May 1905, a series of events led workers to destroy dozens of brothels, leaving at least 15 people dead. They moved from one house to the next, destroying furniture, smashing mirrors, tearing up clothes and bedding.

In one bordello, the sex workers put up a fight. A prostitute grabbed a copper pipe and hit a rioter over the head with it. In response, someone stabbed her with a knife and she died on the spot. In another brothel, the pimps fled, leaving the girls alone. Frightened for their safety, they hid under beds and in closets. The rioters pulled them out and beat them. The women yelled hysterically, called them names and cried: ‘What do you want from us? What did we ever do to you?’

Although a majority of the pimps and prostitutes were Jewish, both Polish and Jewish workers gathered on the streets to exact vengeance. In this way, it was very different from anti-Jewish pogroms, many of which took place in the context of the revolution. Some historians see this event as a moral crusade, while others claim that the association of the pimps with the Russian police was the strongest motivator. There were also witnesses who claimed that competing pimps were the most virulent rioters, so some plain old business competition was at play too.

These events brought attention to problems with prostitution in the Polish lands, sparking some difficult public discussions about issues that were normally left undisturbed. It also inspired several poems, such as Leo Belmont’s Po Pogromie (After the Pogrom) and novels, mostly published in Yiddish.

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