On the night from 6 to 7 October 1620, a seventy-three-year-old Crown Grand Hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski perished on the battlefield in the last act of a drama that had begun a month prior. At the beginning of September, amid growing political tensions between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire, the Hetman entered Moldavia –…
While writing rhetoric textbooks, he illustrated a critique of macaronic, heavily latinized language with excerpts from his own youthful works. Acting as if he was a political scientist avant la lettre, he created the first systematic critique of the liberum veto system, advocating the introduction of the principle of majority voting in parliament of the…
When it comes to the relationship between the Bolsheviks and monarchs, the arrest and subsequent murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family quickly come to mind. However, in other communist-occupied countries, such as Bulgaria and Romania, monarchs were allowed to abdicate and secretly go abroad. What was it like in Poland? by Wojciech Stanisławski…
After 1976, Hungarian dissidents paid special attention to the situation in Poland and how it developed. Many of them even visited Poland to see it with their own eyes. The idea of “Solidarity” found fertile soil in Hungary, where, under Polish influence, the democratic opposition solidified significantly and expanded its reach. by Gábor Danyi …
31 August is considered the holiday of Solidarity (NSZZ Solidarność) and the Gdańsk Accord signed on that day its founding act. However, the shape of the union was being ‘forged’ throughout the following several days. In August, there was no talk of a Polish nationwide organisation and a path towards it turned out a winding…
Out of the many countries in Europe with which Russia has had conflicts over historical interpretation, Poland occupies a special place. It belongs to those countries – alongside Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – which have been criticized by Russian authorities and Kremlin-friendly commentators the most frequently and vehemently. One can also claim, without exaggeration,…
