8 things you need to know about Poland (part II)

1.      Poland has 120,562 square miles (312,255 km2) of the area. That’s a bit more than the territory of Italy and a bit less than Norway or Germany, which makes the country 69^th in the world and 11^th in Europe by area.

2.      The population of Poland is estimated to be 38 438 854 people, that’s a bit more that in Canada and a bit less than in Argentina (35^th place worldwide, 9^th in the Europe). However, it is estimated that up to 21m Poles live abroad (around 1m in the UK, France, and Canada, 2m in Germany and Brasil, 10m in the US). The city with the higher percentage of Poles worldwide is Chicago (up to 2m). My German teacher from Frankfurt was always joking that The Polish language was used only in Poland and Chicago. Obviously, he was right.

3.      Poland shares its borders with seven countries (starting from the west): Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Russia. On the north, we have an access to the Baltic sea.

4.   Warsaw not always has been the capital of Poland. The very first one in the 10^th/11^th  century was Gniezno. Later this title was held by Poznań, Płock, Kraków (for the longest period of time) and of course Warsaw. 

5.      Poland is a member of all the most important national organizations. We are a founder member of UN (1945) and WTO (1992). We also joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union on May 1^st, 2004.

6.      The Jagiellonian University in Kraków was established by King Casimir III the Great in 1364 and is the oldest university in Poland and one of the oldest worldwide. Among its graduates, we can find such great personalities as Nicolas Copernicus (renaissance astronomer who’s the author of the theory that the Sun is the centre of our universe), Jon Paull II (polish pope), Stanisław Lem (writer of science fiction, the author of Solaris) and Wisława Szymborska (poet, Nobel Prize winner in Literature). The Jagiellonian University still remains the most prestigious one in Poland.

7.      Adam Mickiewicz, one of the most outstanding polish poets, is the author of the Polish national epic poem Pan Tadeusz (full title: Sir Thaddeus, the Last Lithuanian Foray: A Nobleman's Tale from the Years of 1811 and 1812 in Twelve Books of Verse).  The poem that was written in 1834 ironically begins with the verse Lithuania, my fatherland! but it refers to a geographical region rather than a country. It’s compulsory reading in Polish schools and we always have to memorize the first 20 lines by heart (every Polish knows it!).

8.      Mikołaj Rej (1505 – 1569), was the first Polish author that started writing exclusively in the Polish language and that’s why he’s the so-called Father of Polish Literature. This is one of the most significant quotes in polish literature, coming from one of his poems:

Let it by all and sundry foreign nations be known
that Poles speak not Anserine but a tongue of their own.

You might also want to read part I or top reasons to visit Poland.