Poland Culture & Language

Polish culture has been shaped by the repeated need to preserve itself when the state was not there to do it.

Chopin

Fryderyk Chopin left Poland at twenty and never returned, and his music — mazurkas and polonaises built on Polish dance forms — became the sound of the nation in exile. His heart is interred in a Warsaw church, and the international piano competition held in his name every five years is a national event.

Reconstruction as heritage

Warsaw’s old town is a UNESCO World Heritage site because it is a reconstruction, not despite it. After the Germans destroyed the city block by block in 1944, it was rebuilt from photographs, drawings and the eighteenth-century Bellotto paintings, and UNESCO listed it as an outstanding example of deliberate, near-total reconstruction.

The table

Pierogi in a dozen fillings, bigos hunter’s stew, żurek sour rye soup served in a bread loaf, herring, and pączki doughnuts eaten in quantity on Fat Thursday. Wigilia, the Christmas Eve supper of twelve meatless dishes with an empty place laid at the table, is observed well beyond the devout.

Folk traditions

Regional costume, paper cut-outs from Łowicz, painted houses at Zalipie, and the highlander music and dress of Podhale, which is a living tradition rather than a revival.

Amber

The Baltic coast has produced amber for four thousand years, and the trade route that carried it south to Rome is the reason places in Poland appear in classical sources at all. Gdańsk is still the centre of the craft, with a street of workshops and a museum devoted to it, and the material — fossil resin, sometimes with an insect inside — is worked here rather than merely sold.

Film and poster art

The Polish School of cinema — Wajda, Kieślowski, Polanski — and the Polish poster school, which turned film advertising into a graphic art form recognised worldwide.

Polish is the official language and is a West Slavic language with a reputation for difficulty that is largely deserved — seven cases, complex consonant clusters, and sounds English lacks. The spelling is at least consistent once the digraphs make sense: sz is sh, cz is ch, w is v.

English is widely spoken by younger people, in the cities, and throughout tourism and business; Poland ranks well on European proficiency measures. German is useful in the west, and Russian is understood by many older people though not always welcomed.

A few words go a long way and are genuinely appreciated: dzień dobry for good day, dziękuję for thank you, proszę for please and you’re welcome, przepraszam for excuse me, and na zdrowie for cheers.

Use pan and pani with strangers; going straight to first names is presumptuous.