Poland Travel Guide

Introduction to Poland
In many ways, Poland is one of the success stories of the new Europe, transforming itself from communist-bloc one-party state to parliamentary democracy and European Union member in a remarkably short period of time. More than a decade and a half of non-communist governments have wrought profound changes on the country, unleashing entrepreneurial energies and widening cultural horizons in a way that pre-1989 generations would have scarcely thought possible. Gleaming corporate skyscrapers have taken root in Warsaw, and private shops and cafés have established themselves in even the most provincial of rural towns. The country has a radically different look about it, having exchanged the greyish tinge of a state-regulated society for the anything-goes attitude of private enterprise – and all the billboards and window displays that go with it.

All this may come as a shock to those who recall the Poland of the 1980s, when images of industrial unrest and anti-communist protest were beamed around the world. Strikes at the Lenin shipyards of Gdańsk and other industrial centres were the harbingers of the disintegration of communism in Eastern Europe, and, throughout the years of martial law and beyond, Poland retained a near-mythical status among outside observers as the country that had done most to retain its dignity in the face of communist oppression.

For many Poles, the most important events in the movement towards a post-communist society were the visits in 1979 and 1983 of Pope John Paul II, the former archbishop of Krakow, for whose funeral in April 2005, televised live on huge video screens, crowds of almost a million massed in the city. Poland was never a typical communist state: Stalin's verdict was that imposing communism on the nation was like trying to saddle a cow. Polish society in the postwar decades remained fundamentally traditional, maintaining beliefs, peasant life and a sense of nationhood to which the Catholic Church was integral. During periods of foreign oppression – oppression so severe that Poland as a political entity has sometimes vanished altogether from the maps of Europe – the Church was always the principal defender of the nation's identity, so that the Catholic faith and the struggle for independence have become fused in the Polish consciousness. The physical presence of the Church is inescapable – in Baroque buildings, roadside shrines and images of the national icon, the Black Madonna of Częstochowa – and the determination to preserve the memories of an often traumatic past finds expression in religious rituals that can both attract and repel onlookers.

World War II and its aftermath profoundly influenced the character of Poland: the country suffered at the hands of the Nazis as no other in Europe, losing nearly twenty percent of its population and virtually its entire Jewish community. In 1945 the Soviet-dominated nation was once again given new borders, losing its eastern lands to the USSR and gaining tracts of formerly German territory in the west. The resulting make-up of the population is far more uniformly "Polish" than at any time in the past, in terms of both language and religion, though there are still ethnic minorities of Belarusians, Germans, Lithuanians, Slovaks, Ukrainians and even Muslim Tatars.

To a great extent, the sense of social fluidity, of a country still in the throes of major transitions, remains a primary source of Poland's fascination. A decisive attempt to break with the communist past as well as tenacious adherence to the path of radical market economic reforms adopted in the late 1980s have remained the guiding tenets of Poland's new political leadership – a course seemingly unaltered by the changing political complexion of successive governments. Few would question the economic and human toll reaped by Poland's attempt to reach the El Dorado of capitalist prosperity – not least among the most vulnerable sectors of society: public sector employees, farmers, pensioners and the semi- or unemployed. Paradoxically, many of those who made the country's democratic revolution possible – militant industrial workers and anti-communist intellectuals – have found themselves marginalized in a society in which street-smart businessmen and computer-literate youth are far better poised to take advantage of the brave new Poland's burgeoning opportunities.
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