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 President, Lech Kaczynski. This morning’s crash wiped out a large part of Poland’s political elite as, apart from the President and his wife, there were 94 other high-ranking dignitaries onboard the plane.

Among those who tragically died in the accident were the former London-based President of Poland in Exile, Ryszard Kaczorowski, deputy heads of both chambers of the Polish parliament: Krzysztof Putra, Jerzy Szmajdzinski and Krystyna Bochenek, the head of the Polish National Security Office, Aleksander Szczyglo, the head of the Polish National Bank, Slawomir Skrzypek, several MPs, top army leaders, church leaders and numerous members of the late President’s entourage.

The painfully ironic, if the word is appropriate here at all, aspect of the tragedy is the fact they were en route to Katyn near Smolensk to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre. Seventy years ago Soviets killed over twenty thousand Polish prisoners of war. By murdering top intellectuals, military personel, public servants etc. they wiped out the Polish elite. For decades, until 1990, Moscow denied any involvement, blaming Nazi Germany for it.

The fact that this tragedy mirrors the events of March 1940 is a very cruel twist of history and a massive blow to a country which in recent years has been emerging from decades of humiliation and suffering. And that’s regardless of what whoever thinks about the President, whose conservative policies and controversial comments often polarised the society.

Poland will need to brace itself for a very difficult period of rebuilding its power structures. Questions will be asked about the incident, about security policies, about the next steps. But I just hope this time Poland will take a more mature, less divisive approach to these issues.

The former Polish President, Aleksander Kwasniewski, referring to today’s tragedy in the forest outside Smolensk and the Katyn Massacre of 1940 said: “This place is damned.”

It’s very difficult to disagree with him.

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 started singing before the war and kept performing well into the 1980s. Always well-groomed, well-mannered, he appealed to the melancholic middle-aged ladies, who always dreamed of having a husband like him.

Needless to say, when I was a teenager it wasn’t particularly cool to listen to him. Actually, it wasn’t cool at all.

Fast forward twenty-odd years to 2008 and Fogg is back in fashion, but this time among the hip, twenty-something crowd.

Several young Polish artists re-recorded or remixed some of his old songs and released an album called Cafe Fogg. If you’re familiar with the Verve Remixed series, Cafe Fogg is in many ways very similar to that.

Here’s my absolute favourite, Bo to sie tak zwykle zaczyna (That’s the way it usually begins). The original song was remixed by The Bumelants and I love it:

Here’s another one I like – a song called Kiedy będziesz zakochany (When you’re in love), re-recorded by Novika:

Dear Santa! Got it?!

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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 audio guide from Warsaw City Hall’s website (in English and other languages) or you can get in while walking through the capital as there will be several ‘music banks’ with special codes, which you can scan using your mobile – and get the audio files this way.

If you are a Chopin fan, you’ll be pleased to know that next year over 2,000 evens are planned across the globe to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth – and over half of them will take place various cities across Poland.

Just remember that – as Chopin was born to a French father and Polish mother – his name will often be spelt in two different ways in Poland. Frederic Chopin is the internationally recognised spelling of course, but Poles will refer to him as Fryderyk Szopen. The pronunciation is similar, just swap the French accent for a Polish one

So, if you haven’t been yet, it looks like 2010 might be a good year to visit Poland at last!

Frederic Chopin Statue in Warsaw – image © Patrick F via Flickr, used under Creative Commons licence

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? Until a few months earlier his books – like thousands of other books, plays etc – were banned in Poland and I suspect all other neighbouring Communist countries too.

But that was 1989, the year when Communism in Central and Eastern Europe collapsed for good (with a few exceptions), largely thanks to Solidarity’s victory in what is referred to as the first free parliamentary elections in modern Polish history. (For those of you who are not familiar with Solidarity, it was the first official union formed  in 1980 and led by Lech Wałęsa; Solidarity was the first non-Communist trade union in a Communist country – the fact it was formed is widely perceived as the beginning of the end of the Communism in Europe).

Tadeusz Mazowiecki (above) becomes the first non-Communist Prime Minister in Poland after the war. And the rest is history.

Today Poland celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the 1989 parliamentary elections. It’s been a couple of very eventful decades: numerous governments have formed and collapsed, Poles slowly (and not without problems) got used to the newly-regained freedom and the fact they were also able to travel freely, Poland’s economy had to learn how to cope with the notion of the free market, there have been some dramatic changes in the cultural, moral and spiritual fabric of the society.

But now, twenty years later, Poland – a member of NATO and the European Union (both as abstract and unimaginably unattainable in 1989 as a walk on the Moon) – remembers the events and can largely be proud of its achievements of the past two decades. Yes, there will be those who will always complain, question and see the bad sides. But without what happened in June 1989 I doubt I’d be able to write this blog.

Were you in Poland in 1989? Do you remember the events? I’d love to know what your memories are – post a few words in the comment box below.

Image © ewewlo via Flickr, used under Creative Commons licence