Poland
Poland Political system
The Republic of Poland is a parliamentary democracy. The parliament is made
up of two chambers: the Sejm (460 members) and the Senate (100 members). The
chambers are elected every four years. The head of state is directly elected
every five years. It can be re-elected once. The right to vote is from 18
years. The country is divided into 16 administrative districts.

On November 16, 2007 the cabinet of the new Prime Minister Donald Franciszek
Tusk was sworn in by Polish President Lech Kaczyński. Tusk is the chairman of
the liberal-conservative party "Platforma Obywatelska" and took over the office
after his election victory on October 21, 2007 from his predecessor Jarosław
Kaczyński - the twin brother of President Lech Kaczyński - from the "Law and
Justice Party (PiS)".
On the morning of April 10, 2010, the Polish presidential plane crashed shortly
before the airport in Smolensk. 97 high-ranking representatives of the Polish
political, military and economic elite were killed in the crash - including the
country's president Lech Kaczynski and his wife Maria. The delegation was on its
way to a memorial service in Katyn to commemorate the 22,000 Polish officers
murdered by the Soviet secret police 70 years ago and other members of the
Polish elite at the time. This misfortune is considered to be the worst stroke
of fate in the country after World War II.
According to Digopaul.com,
the official name of the country is:
Rzeczpospolita Polska
Republic of Poland |
National anthem
The national anthem of a country is usually a piece of music underlaid with a
text, which is intended to express the state and lifestyle of a country. It is
usually played on particularly festive occasions.
The introduction of the national anthems in most European countries goes back to
the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The national anthem of the Republic of Poland has been Mazurek
Dąbrowskiego since 1927. Originally the title was "Song of the Polish
Legions in Italy" (Pieśń Legionów Polskich we Włoszech). Józef Wybicki wrote the
text as early as 1797 in the Italian city of Reggio. At the beginning of 1878
the song was sung in all three parts of Poland, 1830 - 1831 during the November
uprising (Powstanie listopadowe), 1863 - 1864 during the January uprising
(Powstanie styczniowe), by Poles of emigration (Wielka Emigracja), in 1905
during the Russian Revolution and in the first and second world wars. The text
differs slightly from the original "Song of the Polish Legions in Italy".
Polish text
Jeszcze Polska never zginela,
Kiedy my zyjemy.
Co nam obca przemoc wziela,
Szabla odbierzemy.Marsz, marsz, Dabrowski,
Z ziemi wloskiej do Polski,
Za twoim przewodem
Zlaczym sie z narodem.Marsz, marsz, Dabrowski,
Z ziemi wloskiej do Polski,
Za twoim przewodem
Zlaczym sie z narodem. Przejdziem Wisle, przejdziem Warte,
Bedziem Polakami,
Dal nam przyklad Bonaparte,
Jak zwyciezac mamy.
Marsz, marsz, Dabrowski,
Z ziemi wloskiej do Polski,
Za twoim przewodem
Zlaczym sie z narodem.
Marsz, marsz, Dabrowski,
Z ziemi wloskiej do Polski,
Za twoim przewodem
Zlaczym sie z narodem.
Jak Czarniecki do Poznania
Po szwedzkim zaborze,
Dla ojczyzny ratowania
Wracal sie przez morze.
Marsz, marsz, Dabrowski,
Z ziemi wloskiej do Polski,
Za twoim przewodem
Zlaczym sie z narodem.
Marsz, marsz, Dabrowski,
Z ziemi wloskiej do Polski,
Za twoim przewodem
Zlaczym sie z narodem.
Mowil ojciec do swej Basi
Caly zaplakany:
"Sluchaj jeno, pono nasi
Bija w tarabany."
Marsz, marsz, Dabrowski,
Z ziemi wloskiej do Polski,
Za twoim przewodem
Zlaczym sie z narodem.
Marsz, marsz, Dabrowski,
Z ziemi wloskiej do Polski,
Za twoim przewodem
Zlaczym sie z narodem. |
And in the English translation
Poland is not yet lost,
while we are alive,
what foreign power has taken from us,
let's get back with the saber.March, March Dabrowski,
from Italy to Poland,
under your leadership,
let us connect with the nation.Let's cross the Vistula and the Warta,
let's become Poles,
Bonaparte gave us an example of
how we should be victorious. March, march...
Like Czarniecki to Posen
after Swedish annexation,
So let's
return to the rescue of our homeland, through the sea.
March, march...
The father said to his Basia,
completely in tears:
"Just listen, it seems that ours are
beating the kettledrum."
March, march... |
National flag
The white eagle has been an important symbol of Poland since the beginning of
the 13th century. Even today, the eagle is in the middle of the national flag in
government organizations, comparable to the federal eagle in the German federal
flag. Based on flag descriptions by
Countryaah.com, this flag was officially introduced as the national flag of Poland on
August 1, 1919, and reintroduced in 1956 after the end of World War II. The
Polish flags have been regulated in the Polish constitution since 1997, and
since 2004 Poland has even celebrated Flag Day on May 2nd. The white stripe in
the flag is supposed to symbolize the country's desire for peace.

Poland: Known People
Pope John Paul II (1920 - 2005)
The 264th Pope was the first Pole to sit on the papal throne and also the first
non-Italian Pope since 1523. He was from October 16, 1978 to April 2, 2005, i.e.
over 26 years in office.
He was born as Karol Wojtyła on May 18, 1920 in the small village of Wadowice
near Auschwitz. In 1942 he entered a seminary in Krakow, which was banned by the
National Socialists. In order not to be deported, he worked in a quarry and
later in a chemical factory. Woityla was ordained a priest in 1946. He then
studied for two years in Rome, where he received his doctorate in 1948. In the
same year he took up his first parish in Cracow. From 1953 he was a professor of
moral theology. He was ordained Bishop of Krakow in 1958. In 1964 he was made
archbishop and in 1967 cardinal.
His election as Pope on October 16, 1978 came as a huge surprise. In 1981 he
was the victim of the Turkish assassin Ali Agça, whom he later forgave for the
attack in a personal conversation. From this time on, the health of this
originally very healthy and sporty Pope steadily went downhill. For years he
suffered from the consequences of Parkinson's disease. After a long suffering,
but completely unbowed, he died on April 2nd, 2005. He was solemnly buried on
April 8th in St. Peter's Basilica. On May 1, 2011 he was in Rome by Pope
Benedict XVI. pronounced "blessed".
Magdalena Abakanowicz (born 1930)
sculptor, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan/Posen, lecturer at
Californian University. The multiple award-winning artist also received the
Grand Prize of the Cultural Foundation in 2001.
Frédéric François Chopin (1810 - 1849)
Composer and piano virtuoso. He is one of the romantics.
Maria Skłodowska-Curie (1867-1934)
physicist and chemist. She did research mainly in the field of radioactivity and
discovered radium and polonium, among other things. For her groundbreaking
discoveries she received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and the Nobel Prize
in Chemistry in 1911.
Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, (1686-1736)
physicist. The temperature unit "degrees Fahrenheit" is named in his honor.
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 - 1543)
astronomer, doctor and canon. He questioned the geocentric view of the world,
that is, that the earth is the center of the world. He showed that the earth is
a sphere and rotates around the sun with the other planets known at the time. In
his honor, people still speak of the "Copernican worldview" today.
Agnieszka Holland (born 1948)
Director for film, theater and television. She has lived and worked abroad since
1981.
Jarosław Kaczyński (1949)
politician. Lech Kaczyński's twin brother is chairman of the national
conservative party PiS. From July 2006 to 2007 he was Prime Minister of Poland.
Lech Aleksander Kaczyński (1949-2010)
Kaczyński was the fourth President of the Third Polish Republic from December
23, 2005 until his death on April 10, 2010. He and his wife Maria died on the
way to a memorial service in Katyn when his plane crashed just outside the
Smolensk airport in Russia. He has a twin brother - Jarosław Kaczyński - who was
Prime Minister of the country from 2006 to 2007. The twin brothers are the sons
of Rajmund Kaczyński, who took part in the Warsaw Uprising. Lech Kaczyński and
his wife were buried on April 18th in the presence of numerous heads of state
and government in the Wawel Cathedral in Krakow - the coronation and burial
place of numerous Polish kings and other important personalities.
Stanislaw Lem (1921 - 2006)
Lem was a philosopher, writer and one of the most important and sophisticated
science fiction writers. His best-known work is "Solaris" from 1961. He received
numerous awards and honors: 1973 the Great State Prize for Literature of the
People's Republic of Poland, 1981 an honorary doctorate from the Technical
University of Wroclaw, 1986 the Austrian State Prize for European Literature,
1987 the Alfred Literature Prize Jurzykowski Foundation, 1991 the Austrian Franz
Kafka Literature Prize, 1996 the "White Eagle Order", 1997 honorary citizenship
of the city of Kraków, 1998 honorary doctorates from the Universities of Opole
and Kraków and the State Medical University of Lviv and in 2003 an honorary
doctorate from the University of Bielefeld (Dr. rer. Nat. Hc)
Simon von Lipnica (1438-1482)
priest and member of the Friars Minor. He died caring for plague sufferers. On
June 3, 2007 he was welcomed by Pope Benedict XVI. canonized.
Adam Malysz (born 1977)
ski jumper. Since the beginning of the 2000/01 season he has had many excellent
victories.
Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004)
poet, writer, essayist and translator. He received the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1980, the Polish Nike Literature Prize in 1998 for his work "Puppy
on the Road" and several honorary doctorates, including from Harvard University
and the Jagiellonian University in Cracow.
Krzysztof Penderecki (born 1933)
Composer and conductor. Professor at the Krakow Music Academy, lecturer at the
Universities of Essen and Yale.
Józef Klemens Pilsudski (1867-1935)
Marshal and politician. Pilsudski is considered to be the founder of modern
Poland in 1918 after the end of the First World War. His remains are in the
crypt of the Wawel Cathedral in Krakow - the coronation and burial place of
numerous Polish kings and other important personalities.
Roman Polanski (born 1935)
actor, director and screenwriter. He worked in England, USA, France and Poland.
Irena Sendler (1910-2008)
Irena Sendler, who saved the lives of 2,500 Jewish children during World War II,
died on May 12, 2008 at the age of 98 in Warsaw. Before the war, Sendler worked
as a social worker to look after Jewish families in Warsaw. From the autumn of
1940 she helped people in the Warsaw ghetto established by the Nazis by bringing
them food, clothing and medicine. As a Polish nurse, she had access to the
ghetto. As a member of a Polish resistance group, she got Jewish children out of
the ghetto - they hid them under her coat or in suitcases and were then
transported out by the fire brigade and the garbage disposal.
Sendler made sure that the children were then placed in Catholic families,
monasteries or homes. She wrote the names of the children on paper and hid them
in her neighbor's yard so that they could return to the families later.
In October 1943, however, she was arrested by the Gestapo. Despite severe
torture, she did not reveal the names of the children who were rescued. After
her death sentence, however, she was rescued with the help of a Wehrmacht
officer bribed by the resistance. In 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace
Prize.
About 500,000 Jews were crammed into the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazis. In the
summer of 1942, around 300,000 of them were taken to the Nazi extermination camp
in Treblinka and gassed there.
Władysław Eugeniusz Sikorski (1881-1943)
Sikorski was Commander-in-Chief of the Polish soldiers in exile and Prime
Minister of the Polish government in exile from 1939 to 1943. He was killed in
an airplane accident on July 4, 1943 near Gibraltar. His remains were later
interred in the Wawel Cathedral in Kraków - the coronation and burial place of
numerous Polish kings and other important personalities.
Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012)
poet, literary critic and winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Olga Tokarczuk (born 1962)
Olga Tokarczuk received the 2019 award for 2018 - in that year it was not
awarded due to scandals in the Nobel Prize Committee - for her narrative
imagination, which represents the crossing of boundaries as a way of life with
encyclopedic passion.
Andrzej Wajda (1926-2016)
Director. He is one of the so-called immortals, members of the French Academy of
Fine Arts. For his oeuvre he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film
Festival in 1998 and an Oscar in 2000.
Lech Walesa (born 1943)
The strictly Catholic Walesa began his political career as an electrician at the
Lenin shipyard in Gdansk. There he was from 1980 to 1990 the leading head of the
opposition union Solidarność. In 1983 he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his
commitment. Because of his work, incidentally with the support of Pope John Paul
II, democratic change has taken place in the country. After the collapse of the
communist system, he was the first freely elected President of Poland from 1990
to 1995 with around 74% of the vote. In the 1995 election he was narrowly
defeated by the old communist Aleksander Kwaśniewski. When he ran again in 2000,
he received less than 1% of the vote.
Poland: plants
Trees
The flora of Poland is very diverse, partly because many forests have been
preserved.
A specialty is the Bialowieza National Park on the Belarusian border, which is
the last primeval forest and the largest contiguous forest area in Europe.
It has not been cleared for 500 years and no forest work is carried out, so that
a unique flora and fauna has been preserved here.
Particularly noticeable are the size of the spruces, which often reach heights
of over 50 m, and the age of the oaks standing here, with 125 years being the
average age of all trees.
Typical for this primeval forest are dead trees that remain lying around and
contribute to the preservation of the primeval forest in the form of supplying
important nutrients.
Most of the forest includes oaks and hornbeams, but pine, maple trees, elms and
linden trees also grow here.
Black birch and Polish larch can be found in the low and highland plains, a
relic from the Ice Age is the stone pine, which can only be found in Poland in
the Tatra Mountains. But birch trees can also be found.
Crops
The most important crop is grain, with wheat, rye and increasingly also
rapeseed playing the most important economic role. Potatoes, sugar beets, fodder
crops and legumes are also common crops.
And of course you can also find various fruit trees here - to the delight of the
people, often on the avenue edges.
In autumn you can see numerous stalls on the streets offering various types of
mushrooms, including the very popular porcini mushroom.
Medicinal plants
In the past, but still today, sundew was used as a medicinal herb against dry
coughs. In the meantime, the plant was also used as a remedy for all kinds of
lung diseases, consumption, epilepsy and mental illness.
Eyebright is only used as a medicinal plant in folk medicine and homeopathy.
The above-ground parts of the plant collected at the time of flowering are said
to provide relief for eye infections, tired eyes and, when drunk as tea, for
coughs and sore throats. However, this effect has not yet been scientifically
proven.
The rootstock of the Siberian iris is used in the ground state in cough teas
and tooth powders.
The broom has a heart-calming, water and diuretic effect and promotes labor in
pregnant women.
However, an overdose can lead to cardiac arrest.
Poisonous plants
The globe flower with the yellow spherical flowers at the end of the stem
belongs to the buttercup family. These bloom May - June and reach a diameter of
3 cm. In Poland it grows on the wet meadows of the Mazury, but it is mainly
found in the mountains, Alps and Northern Europe.
Due to the alkaloid magnoflorin, it is slightly toxic and causes burning of the
oral mucous membranes, gastrointestinal complaints, diarrhea and severe
cramps. It can also lead to circulatory problems and fever, as well as skin
irritation and blisters. The globe flower owes its name to the spherical
appearance of its flowers, as the Latin translation of "trulleus" means "round
vessel" and the name was slightly modified in Old German. The globe flower is
protected.
The pasque flower from the buttercup family, which is 5-50 cm in size and
occurs in Masuria, blooms from April to May with a light purple flower. The
entire plant is poisonous due to the anemonine and the consumption of parts of
the plant can lead to circulatory or respiratory paralysis. The broom grows in
bright and sunny spots on rocky or stony ground.
All parts of the plant are poisonous and it can lead to abdominal pain, nausea,
vomiting and cardiovascular disorders.
However, the gorse, which belongs to the butterfly family, also has healing
properties.
Introduced plants
The introduced plants include the arborvitae, the hibiscus, the rose hip, the
azalea, magnolias and the rhodedrendron.
More plants
A typical plant of the Baltic Sea area is the bell heather, which is also
known by many other names such as swamp heather, bog-bell heather and spring
heather. Adonis florets and dwarf cherries, which found their way from Hungary
to Poland, grow on dry limestone soils.
The Carpathian Mountains in southern Poland are home to many interesting
plants. These include bluegrass, eyebright, the endemic (only found here)
Zawadzki chrysanthemum and the laser herb, which grows on the upper tree line
and can reach a size of up to 2 m.
There is also a special flora that is well worth seeing in Masuria, an area in
north-eastern Poland. The carnivorous sundew can be admired here, with only
three species of this genus occurring in Poland: the round-leaved, long-leaved
and medium-sized sundew.
All sundew species are characterized by a sugary secretion secreting glands on
special tentacles, which in turn are located on the leaves of the plant. This
secretion attracts insects that stick to the tentacles and eventually suffocate
or die of exhaustion. Enzymes break down the dead insects, giving the sundew the
nutrients it needs to grow.
Furthermore, in Masuria there is the Siberian iris with the long stem and the
purple-colored flower, the poisonous globe flowers and pasqueflowers, the yellow
lady's slipper - a very rare orchid species - which is under strict nature
protection, the peat bark and the bear moss.
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