Greater Poland Culture & Language

Greater Poland’s culture is founded on being first, and expressed through a particular practicality.

The founding monuments

Gniezno cathedral’s bronze doors, cast around 1175, show eighteen scenes from the life of Saint Adalbert in relief and are among the finest Romanesque bronzes in Europe. Poznan cathedral’s crypt holds the remains of Mieszko I and Boleslaw the Brave, and the pre-Romanesque baptistery found beneath it is plausibly where Poland was baptised.

The goats

At noon every day, two mechanical goats emerge from the tower of Poznan’s Renaissance town hall and butt heads twelve times while a bugler plays. The story involves a cook, a scorched goose and two goats that escaped and fought on the roof. It has been running since 1551 and a crowd still gathers.

Organic work as a cultural idea

The nineteenth-century programme of building institutions rather than mounting revolts shaped the regional character, and the cooperative movement, the Raczynski Library and the Poznan Society of Friends of Learning all date from it.

Music and theatre

The Poznan Nightingales boys’ choir is internationally known, the Wieniawski violin competition is held here, and the Malta Festival is one of central Europe’s larger performance festivals.

Modernist Poznan

The interwar years left the city a body of confident modernist and art deco building, much of it put up around the 1929 national exhibition — a vast trade and cultural fair staged to show what the reborn Polish state could do, and held here rather than in Warsaw precisely because this region had the organisational capacity. The exhibition grounds still host the trade fairs, and several of the pavilions survive.

Rogale

The Saint Martin’s croissant is a protected product with a guild that certifies bakers.

Polish is the language. The Poznan dialect has enough distinctive vocabulary to be a local point of pride: pyra for potato, tej as a conversational filler, szneka z glancem for an iced bun, and a set of words other Poles find baffling. There is a dictionary and there are t-shirts.

English is widely spoken in Poznan, particularly by younger people and in the trade-fair economy, and less so in the small towns.

German is more useful here than elsewhere in Poland, given the proximity to the border and the volume of German business visitors.

Useful: dzien dobry for good day, dziekuje for thank you, prosze for please, przepraszam for excuse me, na zdrowie as a toast.

Attempting pyry z gzikiem in a Poznan milk bar will be received warmly.