The architectural Eldorado lasted a little over 20 years. And this is also how long it waited for recognition in the Third Republic of Poland. The formal and substantial richness, the diversity of solutions, and the pursuit of international trends filtered through the Polish tradition produced a fascinating and inspiring mix. It is echoed in…
The course of the boundary between Moldavia and the Polish Crown was, on the surface at least, quite clear, especially in comparison with a fuzzier Polish-Ottoman demarcation further to the east. For most of its course, it ran along the rivers of White Cheremush, Kolachin and the Dniester, extending from the hilly and forested landscape…
When Czesław Milosz arrived in Warsaw in 1981, fresh from winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, one of the visits he made, was to a private apartment, to meet with the people responsible for bringing his poems to Polish readers. From 1951, when Milosz had refused to return to Stalinist Poland, a ban had been…
The June 1989 elections and the formation of the Solidarity government of Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki were earthshaking events in Poland’s recent history. Even though the communist authorities knew their power was slipping away, at the beginning of 1990 the secret police (Służba Bezpieczeństwa Security Service) was still firmly under their control. Up until the…
The 18th century was a time of enormous cultural, political and societal upheaval for the West. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, it was a period of decline that was completed by the partitions. However, reducing the 18th-century history of the Polish-Lithuanian state to a mere falling into political non-existence would be a simplified and thus false…
The unique document of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and one of the crucial elements of the legal and political tradition of Central Europe. The film tells the story of the creation of the original document of the Union of Lublin and its turbulent history. The creators of the copy discover the secrets of the work of…
