Joachim Lelewel: a bibliophile whom others followed to the barricades

Incredibly insightful as a historian, he wrote in a heavy-handed style. But for one sentence: ‘For our freedom and yours!’, he should have been named the first copyrighter among the revolutionaries. by Wojciech Stanisławski   Above-average ten-year-olds, collectors of maps and insects, incidentally mastering numerous languages, often become serious scientists. Their parents, and especially their…


Antoni Patek and the most expensive watches in the world

The 19th century Polish insurgent and immigrant Antoni Patek was a pioneer in the industrial production of watches. Patek, the company he founded and which has been in the hands of another family for years, has been producing some of the best and most expensive watches in the world for almost two centuries. by Piotr…


Maurycy Mochnacki: an entangled revolutionary

Passionate, volatile, demagogic and captivating: Maurycy Mochnacki both co-creates and embodies the model Polish Romantic hero. It seems as if he descended from the pages of the poems and novels that he praised and promoted. And yet he lived, burned and suffered a defeat in the most real of stories. by Wojciech Stanisławski   He…


The November Uprising: More Than a Romantic Rebellion

One of the several classic ‘Polish insurgences’: armed, bloody and lost. Apart from the romantic legend around it, it is distinguished by the fact that the episode lasting a year was unusually effective in unsettling things as they were. After the lost uprising, two paths of development, possible before, were not available to the Poles…


Dr. A. Buława: November Night is "the second Warsaw Uprising"

On November Night, the lower classes of the Warsaw community joined the young cadets. According to Dr. Adam Buława, a historian from the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, some historians even use the term “the second Warsaw Uprising”, as the first was the April 1794 insurrection.   Polish Press Agency: One of the historians…