The declaration of the Warsaw Confederation was approved on January 28, 1573, at the Convocation Sejm held in Warsaw after the heirless death of King Zygmunt II August (Sigismund II Augustus) and prior to the first free election of a monarch. The Sejm was convoked in order to lay down the principles for electing the…
Auschwitz-Birkenau is the world’s largest Jewish, Polish and Roma cemetery. This is neither rhetoric nor poetry. For centuries, the earth will continue to hide here the ashes from the crematoria and bits of unburnt bones. It will be saturated with human blood and fat. Literally. by Marek Zając That’s how one should see it….
In 1815 the Congress of Vienna, convened after the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, decided to create a Kingdom of Poland. Through the person of the Tsar, it was joined in a personal union with Russia. The Tsar and King in a single person, Alexander I, guaranteed the new Kingdom its own constitution, along with a…
On January 22, 1863, the Polish ‘Central National Committee’ proclaimed the outbreak of an uprising and issued a manifesto whereby it proclaimed itself the Interim National Government. The document appealed to all the inhabitants of the former Polish-Lithuanian Rzeczpospolita (Commonwealth), within its pre-partition borders, to fight against tsarist rule for liberty. The manifesto heralded the…
He carried out the first measurements in Australia, discovered the Snowy Mountains, the highest range of the Great Dividing Range, and named the highest peak in Australia Mount Kosciuszko in honour of the Polish general. Meet Count Paweł Edmund Strzelecki. by Piotr Bejrowski On 15 February 1840, Paweł Edmund Strzelecki became the first person…
The first underground groups in German-occupied Poland began to be established as early as in the autumn of 1939. The Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK), an underground army subordinate to the Polish government in exile and the Commander-in-Chief, took its final shape in February 1942. Its Commanders-in-Chief in chronological order were: Stefan Rowecki ‘Grot’ (arrested…
