Poland historical timeline

Origins

Poland dates itself from 966, when Mieszko I accepted Christianity and brought the Piast lands into Latin Europe. Casimir the Great is said to have found a country of wood and left one of stone. In 1385 a marriage joined Poland to Lithuania, and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth that grew from it became one of the largest states in Europe, with elected kings, a parliament of nobles, and a degree of religious toleration unusual for the period.

Turning points

The Commonwealth’s constitution of 3 May 1791 was the first codified national constitution in Europe. It was also nearly the last thing it did: between 1772 and 1795 Russia, Prussia and Austria partitioned the country out of existence, and Poland did not appear on a map for 123 years. Independence returned in 1918. On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded, on 17 September the Soviet Union did, and the occupation that followed killed around six million Polish citizens, three million of them Jews, in a country where the extermination camps were built. The Warsaw Ghetto rose in 1943 and the city rose in 1944; the Germans then destroyed Warsaw block by block. In 1945 the borders moved several hundred kilometres west and the populations moved with them. The Solidarity movement began at the Gdańsk shipyard in 1980, survived martial law, and negotiated the partly free election of June 1989 — the first crack in the eastern bloc. NATO followed in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.

Influential people

Nicolaus Copernicus, who moved the earth. Fryderyk Chopin. Maria Skłodowska-Curie, the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. Joseph Conrad, who wrote in his third language. John Paul II, whose 1979 visit drew crowds that showed the country what it was. And Lech Wałęsa, an electrician who became the face of the movement that ended communist rule.

Cultural evolution

Catholicism became the carrier of national identity precisely because the state kept disappearing, first under partition and then under communism. Warsaw’s old town is a UNESCO site not despite being a reconstruction but because of it: the city was rebuilt from photographs, drawings and eighteenth-century paintings after being deliberately levelled. Wigilia, the Christmas Eve supper of twelve meatless dishes with an empty place set at the table, is observed well beyond the devout. And after 2004 several million Poles left to work elsewhere in Europe, a good many of whom have since come back.

Present-day significance

Poland has grown faster over the last three decades than almost any other European economy and avoided recession in 2009 entirely. Since 2022 it has been the front-line state of the Western alliance, taking in millions of Ukrainians and undertaking one of the largest military build-ups in Europe. A falling birth rate and the return of emigration questions are the main long-term pressures.