the POLSKI blog

This first post after a long break is a rather impressive video produced by the Public and Diplomacy Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Poland. It features a whole host of Hollywood A-listers and other celebs – from Natalie Portman to Russell Crowe, from Robert Redford and Tom Hanks to Daniel Radcliffe and [...]

Sad news this morning – Polish composer, Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki, best known for his “Third Symphony”, died in Poland at the age of 76. Born in Silesia, he spent most of his life working and teaching in Katowice, the heart of the most industrialised region in Poland. Until early 1990s he remained largerly unknown, even [...]

If you watched the World Cup last month, and the matches where Germany played in particular, you probably noticed a German player called Lukas Podolski. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that the name sounds Polish and that he might in fact be Polish. He is, well, he was. He was born [...]

This is undoubtedly the biggest tragedy Poland has endured since the end of the Second World War. This morning the presidential plane, en route to Smolensk in eastern Russia, crashed in thick fog as it came to landing. The initial reports were unclear and confusing, but now we know that Poland has lost its current [...]

I just want one CD for Christmas. I know it’s almost a year old, but I’ve only just been told about it. (Yeah, thanks, ‘friends’ for keeping me up to date). And I instantly fell in love with it. Mieczyslaw Fogg was a very famous Polish crooner, whose career spanned half a century. He first [...]

This one is for music lovers planning a trip to Warsaw. To mark the bicentennial of Frederic Chopin’s birth (yes, he was Polish), the Polish capital has published a Chopin audio city guide. Available in eight languages, the guide will take tourists to some key locations related to the great pianist. You can download the [...]

Can’t believe it’s already been twenty years since Communism in Poland collapsed. I was still at school, had just a year or so to go till my matura (final secondary school exams) and couldn’t quite believe it when my literature teacher asked us to start reading  The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. You what?! Solzhenitsyn? [...]