About  .  Contact  .  Donation this remarkable discovery marks a significant contribution to understanding the Neolithic period in Central Europe one of the earliest Neolithic cultures in Central and Eastern Europe thrived from approximately 5500 to 4500 BCE Its name is derived from the distinctive linear patterns found on ceramic vessels believed to have migrated from the Transcarpathian region and their way of life revolved around farming and animal husbandry and two pits containing objects made of obsidian a volcanic glass imported from what is now Slovakia or Hungary This suggests that the region was connected to distant trade routes during the Neolithic period a fragment of a Neolithic vessel from the Lublin-Volhynia culture was recovered suggesting that the area witnessed multiple phases of settlement activity over time which confirms the continuity of settlement in this area over several thousand years.” He further noted that all the discovered artifacts will undergo scientific study before being transferred to the Sandomierz Castle Museum for preservation Source: Nauka w Polsce and website in this browser for the next time I comment Δdocument.getElementById("ak_js_1").setAttribute("value",(new Date()).getTime()) Learn how to describe the purpose of the image (opens in a new tab) Leave empty if the image is purely decorative 5Space🚀Scientists aboard a plane with 26 cameras chase burning satellite and film its fiery fallChris Young17 hours ago 9Military🚀China deploys 5,000-ton torpedo frigate to hunt US nuclear submarines in open seasKapil Kajal19 hours ago 10Military🚀UK gets drone wingmen to make F-35 fighters invisible to even the smartest radarsJijo Malayil19 hours ago 1Culture🌟Tech games: Elon Musk wins as Sam Altman's Open AI drops full-profit shift for nowSujita Sinhaan hour ago 4Culture🌟Trump’s secure messaging app hacked, deportation airline also hit by cyberattackAamir Khollam10 hours ago 5Energy🌟US scientists end 70-year fusion struggle, paving way for better reactorsAamir Khollam12 hours ago 7Science🌟In a first, protons in biological system seen following quantum rules: Study Mrigakshi Dixit13 hours ago 9Space🌟US orders NASA to build first lunar time zone to guide astronauts on the MoonAamir Khollam13 hours ago Maria Mocerino M. Bajka/Provincial Office for the Protection of Monuments an archaeological team uncovered not one but two distinct Neolithic cultures sparking immense fascination in the world of ancient history archaeologists began excavations on a planned construction site in Sandomierz-Mokoszyn They initially believed they would find remains of the Funnelbeaker culture also known as “the first farmers of Scandinavia,” who lived in the Middle Neolithic period between 3700 and 3200 BCE Archaeologists uncovered large storage pits containing fragments of clayware These findings confirmed their expectations of the culture’s presence a “completely unexpected” and more intriguing discovery was also made: a longhouse dating from several thousand years before the Funnelbeakers (5300-4900 BCE) The discovery of two distinct Neolithic cultures indicates that Sandomierz-Mokoszyn was not merely a temporary settlement Although Paris has been inhabited for over two thousand years the site at Sandomierz-Mokoszyn exhibits a similar longevity spanning thousands of years beyond our immediate historical understanding Archaeologists excavated a remarkable structure along the site’s north-south axis no evidence of their presence had been found in the Sandomierz Upland they left behind some of the oldest ceramics in Europe Though the longhouse once stood 20 feet wide (6 meters) and 65 feet long (20 meters) Archaeologists believe the Funnelbeaker culture destroyed it The Linear Pottery settlement appears to have extended beyond the construction site and similar longhouses from this period have been found in other parts of Poland Furthermore, pits and “cops” around the large house provide insights into their cultural practices, including their techniques for building walls out of soil, according to Ancient Origins and obsidian objects (volcanic glass) sourced from Slovakia and Hungary suggests that this region was involved in long-distance trade networks from a very early period The discovery of the Linear Pottery Culture in this region is unprecedented offering archaeologists fresh perspectives on this fascinating group Furthermore, another Neolithic culture appeared in one of the pits: the Lublin-Wolyn culture This single mission revealed significant artifacts from the ancient past showing that the site experienced influences from multiple Neolithic cultures The archaeology team thanked the construction group for their support and encouragement during the project The treasures recovered from this early human settlement will be transferred to the Castle Museum in Sandomierz 0COMMENTABOUT THE AUTHORMaria Mocerino Originally from LA Maria Mocerino has been published in Business Insider Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines By clicking sign up, you confirm that you accept this site's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy Premium This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page Bajka/Provincial Office for the Protection of MonumentsRemnants of a longhouse built by the Linear Pottery culture around 5000 B.C.E Recent excavations of a Neolithic site in Sandomierz-Mokoszyn An archaeological team that was originally trying to confirm the existence of a settlement dating to 3500 B.C.E Researchers unearthed the remnants of a longhouse built by the Linear Pottery culture between 5300 and 4900 B.C.E These people were early farmers who were known for the unique designs they carved into the ceramic vessels they crafted The longhouse is the first of its kind ever found in the region and it’s providing new insight into this Neolithic culture A team of archaeologists in Sandomierz-Mokoszyn in southeastern Poland recently set out to confirm the existence of a settlement connected to the Funnelbeaker culture including large storage pits dating to between 3700 and 3200 B.C.E they also found much more than they expected Bajka/Provincial Office for the Protection of MonumentsCellars from the Funnelbeaker culture found at the site researchers unearthed the remnants of a longhouse that was 1,500 years older than the Funnelbeaker artifacts early farmers who lived in the area between 5500 and 4500 B.C.E The longhouse was about 20 feet wide and more than 65 feet in length. It was constructed using a post-and-beam technique, and its walls were built with material from nearby clay pits. As reported by Ancient Origins Marek Florek from the Provincial Office for the Protection of Monuments in Sandomierz stated “The discovery of the longhouse is the first of its kind in the Sandomierz Upland.” Bajka/Provincial Office for the Protection of MonumentsA piece of pottery featuring the namesake designs of the Linear Pottery culture researchers found ceramics decorated in the traditional Linear Pottery culture style they’re working to analyze these artifacts to learn more about the Neolithic people they once belonged to Historians believe the people of the Linear Pottery culture group migrated to Poland from Transcarpathia It’s known that they excelled in farming and animal husbandry but the discovery of their longhouse is revealing new information about the way they lived Bajka/Provincial Office for the Protection of MonumentsFragments of ceramic vessels from the Linear Pottery culture Similar longhouses have been found elsewhere in Poland this is the first uncovered near Sandomierz-Mokoszyn “This is an interesting discovery that indicates that in the early Neolithic period there was a settlement with permanent buildings it also confirms the continuation of settlement in this area over several thousand years.” The tools archaeologists found are also providing insight into the lives of the Neolithic people suggesting the Linear Pottery culture traded with other ancient civilizations Bajka/Provincial Office for the Protection of MonumentsAn obsidian scraper found near the longhouse As these artifacts make their way to the Sandomierz Castle Museum for preservation and future public display they promise to shed even more light on the region’s rich Neolithic heritage After reading about the Neolithic longhouse found in Poland, go inside nine of the most fascinating archaeological discoveries of 2023. Then, read about the Lovers of Valdaro the Neolithic remains of a couple who died together 6,000 years ago Feb 25, 2015 | History the Polish lands were often a haven for Jews escaping persecution in the West but the myth of Jewish ritual murder arrived from other parts of Europe to take a strong hold among some members of the clergy who encouraged its spread through the broader population Daniel Tilles offers a critical assessment of the Polish church’s recent attempts to come to terms with this history while giving credit to those within the church and beyond who have sought to further the cause of positive Jewish-Catholic relations in Poland the dead body of two-year-old Małgorzata was mysteriously deposited in a church mortuary in the Polish town of Sandomierz when summoned to explain the child’s death which meted out a mild punishment for failing to ensure that the child’s body was properly buried The matter would normally have ended there; but the court’s judgment was rejected by the Bishop of Krakow the mother suggested that on the Tuesday before Divine Mercy Sunday she had given Małgorzata’s dead body to a Jew Berek produced witnesses who confirmed that he had not been in Sandomierz on the day in question and her daughter had been alive at the time and denied completely the suggestion that Jews used the blood of children for ritual purposes both he and Małgorzata’s mother were found guilty and sentenced to death with Berek’s head nailed to a stake and his body quartered and hung in the street a decision was made in 2006 to remove the painting from public display and for the next eight years it remained hidden behind a curtain and a pointedly placed portrait of John Paul II the Polish pope celebrated for his efforts to encourage Polish-Jewish dialogue The unveiling took place on the Polish Catholic Church’s “Day of Judaism.” The choice of date was not as inappropriate as it may first seem – for a decision had been made to place alongside the painting a plaque containing text – in Polish English and Hebrew – that provided some explanation of its content It is this plaque that served as the inspiration for my recent visit to Sandomierz and my subsequent decision to write this piece; for I find its wording to be unsatisfactory I will begin by recounting the text in its entirety (from the English version This painting depicts a ritual murder that the Jews of Sandomierz allegedly carried out in order to add the blood of a Christian infant to the matzah they baked for Passover This event controverts historical truth and could not have taken place because the laws of Judaism prohibit the consumption of blood Jews could not and did not carry out ritual murders On account of similar accusations they were often persecuted and killed popes forbade spreading such false accusations and protected Jews against them two respects in which the plaque’s text is lacking and both concerning the involvement of the church in this dark passage of Sandomierz’s – and Europe’s – history concluding that such charges were “false and calumnious.” the “convenient and reassuring belief” that there was some “tradition of the church” that “systematically denied…the blood accusation” is no longer tenable As well as glossing over the mixed legacy of the papacy with regard to the blood libel deficiency is its complete failure to acknowledge the specific role that the church played in the episodes that took place in Sandomierz certain questions may spring to mind when reading the plaque It states tersely that blood-libel accusations “happened in Sandomierz” – but when and how blood-libel accusations were dangerous falsehoods that caused great harm to Jews then why was this painting displayed in a cathedral as part of a series of images purportedly depicting historical events And if “popes forbade spreading such false accusations and protected Jews against them” why did the church in Sandomierz deliberately disobey their commands Żuchowski was rewarded for his efforts by being appointed commissioner for Jewish affairs by the diocese of Kraków allowing him to pursue further cases against Jews – an indication that the Polish church not only tolerated the blood-libel myth but positively encouraged it and was responsible for the production of publications designed to confirm the authenticity of the blood libel of the various antisemitic tracts relating to alleged Jewish ritual murder published in Poland the majority were the work of Roman Catholic clergy sufficient to do full justice to this complex it is not unrealistic to expect that a text explicitly created to explain the historical context of the painting should do something to acknowledge the fact that the church played such a central role in that history while today’s church bears no direct responsibility for events that took place three centuries ago it is not unreasonable to hope that the plaque could include an expression of remorse for its past role in what remains a particularly painful feature of Polish-Jewish collective memory Trumped up stories of “ritual murders” of Christian boys by Jewish communities were common throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and even much later These fictions cost many innocent Jews their lives and the alleged victim was buried in the Cathedral in the year 1255 Such stories do not redound to the credit of Christendom by adding claims that the “church opposed the dissemination” of blood-libel accusations and that “Jews in Poland were legally protected and even possessed many privileges.” While containing grains of truth both statements clearly misrepresent events in Sandomierz “seems to mark the end of longstanding hostility between Jews and the local Catholic diocese and town.” no explanatory plaque of any kind is present the nun watching over the church had been extremely welcoming on my arrival; but once it became apparent what I had come to see and it was made clear that my interest in the paintings was not welcome As a smaller church with far fewer outside visitors the St Paul’s images have received much less attention than the cathedral’s; but their continued presence is perhaps more telling Church authorities have responded to widespread criticism by first concealing the painting and then adding a plaque it is tempting to see the action taken in the cathedral as a reluctant concession rather than a genuine effort to deal with this aspect of the town’s and the church’s history This leads, finally, to the question of what should be done to improve the situation. In his article fourteen years ago, Father Musiał declared that for Sandomierz’s blood-libel paintings – both in the cathedral and at St Paul’s – to remain in place even with an explanatory inscription alongside them would be an “to insult human dignity.” Instead he suggested they be relocated to a specially created museum of antisemitism in the town where they could be viewed and understood in a “clear context outside the sacred space.” My own feeling is that the sacred space in which the paintings are located is essential to their understanding: how they came into being what they represented at the time of their creation why they remain important artefacts today – honest answers to all such questions must take into account the church’s role and removing the paintings from their original context risks obscuring an essential aspect of their history It is hard to think of anything more offensive towards a religion than falsely suggesting that its members slaughter the children of another and use their blood for ritual purposes Moreover, by remaining in place, especially in churches, which are symbols of trust and authority in such a deeply religious country, the paintings risk lending continued credence to the blood-libel myth. Tokarska-Bakir’s findings (pp 26) are particularly telling – and worrying – in this regard One of her interviewees comments of the cathedral’s painting that “since it hangs in a church…there must have been some truth to it”; another suggests that if the scenes depicted in the paintings “hadn’t been true and the church’d take some stand on it.” Others make similar observations It is hard to find clearer testament as to the power of the images and of the harm caused by the church’s failure to take any action whatsoever regarding those in St Paul’s although local residents have a strong attachment to the paintings as part of the town’s heritage there are those (albeit seemingly a minority) who accept that openly displaying them in churches is problematic and that covering or relocating them would be acceptable it is hard to think of any reasonable justification for the continued public display in St Paul’s of such false which have little artistic merit and represent such a poisonous legacy one whose tolerance damages the church’s moral standing and is contrary to its own policies regarding Jewish-Christian dialogue Musiał finished by reminding his fellow Catholics of the words of Stanisław Gądecki then chairman of the Polish Episcopate’s Council for Interreligious Dialogue and today Archbishop of Poznań who earlier that year had delivered a sermon on the Polish church’s Day of Judaism Gądecki had criticised disingenuous “exculpatory judgments” where “fault was confirmed by serious historical research” the church would make a “request for forgiveness” as an “expression of the compelling need for truth.” As Musiał noted then – and as has been further confirmed since – historical research leaves no doubt that senior figures in the Polish church were intimately involved in perpetuating the blood-libel myth and in encouraging the persecution that arose from it all of which inflicted profound physical and psychological damage on the country’s Jews For Sandomierz’s new plaque to ignore, and even distort, these facts suggests that the Church favours “exculpatory judgments” over any “compelling need for truth.” Moreover, despite Archibishop Gądecki’s further suggestion that there should be “remorse” for “mistakes of the past” there is no evidence of such a sentiment in the plaque This represents a missed opportunity to come to terms with a difficult historical episode and to truly advance Jewish-Christian dialogue which must be founded on an honest appraisal of the past who like countless other Catholic Poles – the largest single national group honored by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations – risked his life to save theirs a member of the Polish Council of Christians and Jews suggests that “Sandomierz could become the scene of preserved memory of the centuries-long coexistence of Poles and Jews” if only it could “at long last liberate and cleanse [itself] from the odium” brought by its attachment to the blood libel Józef Niewiadomski, a priest and scholar, has argued that “the paintings from Sandomierz – properly used – can…become the cornerstone of a new consciousness.” Events in the town this year represent an important step forward in this process; but as long as wording of the new plaque remains inadequate and certainly while the paintings in St Paul’s Church remain untouched and unexplained Poland’s confrontation of the darker aspects of its past and the related progress that has been made in Polish-Jewish dialogue Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications Insights, Politics Insights, Law, Politics History, Insights, Society Apr 30, 2025 | Defence, Hot news, News, Politics That response will include “large Polish and NATO exercises in Poland” Apr 29, 2025 | Business, Hot news, News, Society Those employed in Poland work on average the third-longest hours in the European Union Apr 28, 2025 | Business, Energy & Climate, Hot news, News, Politics Westinghouse and Bechtel were first chosen in 2022 as partners on the 192 billion zloty ($51 billion) project please consider helping us to continue and expand it [email protected] Copyright © 2025 Notes From Poland | Design jurko studio | Code by 2sides.pl Senior Research Fellow at the Global Europe Centre ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR Weronika Strzyżyńska is currently studying journalism at Goldsmiths as a Scott Trust Bursary recipient She  has written on issues immigration and Brexit for New Statesman and Prospect Agnieszka Wądołowska is managing editor of Notes from Poland She has previously worked for Gazeta.pl and Tokfm.pl and contributed to Gazeta Wyborcza ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland and assistant professor of history at the Pedagogical University of Krakow The Independent and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR Stanley Bill is the founder and editor-at-large of Notes from Poland.He is also Senior Lecturer in Polish Studies and Director of the Polish Studies Programme at the University of Cambridge Stanley has spent more than ten years living in Poland He founded Notes from Poland in 2014 as a blog dedicated to personal impressions cultural analysis and political commentary He is committed to the promotion of deeper knowledge and understanding of Poland He is the Chair of the Board of the Notes from Poland Foundation ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR Professor of European Studies at Oxford University ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR Professor at the Institute of History of the Jagiellonian University ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR Executive Director of Taube Family Foundation ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR Associate Professor at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Science ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article Sandomierz Basin, lowland region, southeastern Poland, located south of the Lublin Uplands and north of the Western Carpathian foothills. It is drained by the Vistula River and its tributary the San River We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings. Search Logo for Cambridge Core from Cambridge University Press. Click to return to homepage. BrowseServicesOpen researchInstitution LoginSearchMenu links Excavations in marginal areas of the loess uplands in southern Poland have revealed that the northern periphery of the Sandomierz Upland was intensely colonised in the sixth and fifth millennia BC by Linearbandkeramik and Malice Culture Danubian communities This research suggests that analogous settlement clusters may exist in other marginal regions of the Central European loess belt Study area (a–c) showing the locations of sites (drawing by M The results of these excavations confirmed that permanent vast LBK and Malice Culture settlements had existed in this area which is an atypical ecological landscape for such communities These discoveries became the principal reason for undertaking research focused on estimating the character range and intensity of settlement and economy of Danubian communities as well as reconstructing environmental conditions and the impact of these activities in the northern part of the Sandomierz Upland Tominy 6: a) aerial view of the site; b) plan showing Linearbandkeramik (LBK) features; c) excavated area; d) LBK ceramics from the site; e) Kapušany-Tiszadob group of the Alföld-LBK/Bükk Culture ceramics; f) chart showing percentages of faunal remains; (a–e) photographs and drawings by M Zawada 14: a) aerial view; b) geophysical anomaly plot; c) excavated area; d) flint assemblage; e) ceramic small finds; (a Wojciechówka 2: a) aerial view of the site; b–c) flint assemblage; (a) photograph by P a) Digital terrain model showing the locations of Wólka Wojnowska 33 Jastków 1 and 46; b) geophysical anomaly plot of the Jastków 1 and 46 sites; c) excavated area at Jastków 1; (a & c) prepared and photographed by M The results of fieldwork and post-excavation analyses confirm that the northern periphery of the Sandomierz Upland was intensely colonised in the sixth and fifth millennia BC They also attest to early agricultural colonisation of upland areas located on the edge of loess formations and especially outside their compact range This reveals the remarkable skills of local LBK and Malice Culture communities in adapting to different environmental conditions The data make it possible to extrapolate that analogous settlement clusters existed in other marginal regions of the Central European loess belt constituting an important area for further research The project is financed by the National Science Centre - No HTML tags allowed- Web page URLs will display as text only- Lines and paragraphs break automatically- Attachments Your email address will be used in order to notify you when your comment has been reviewed by the moderator and in case the author(s) of the article or the moderator need to contact you directly shared ownership in or any close relationship with any organisation whose interests may be affected by the publication of the response Please also list any non-financial associations or interests (personal religious or other) that a reasonable reader would want to know about in relation to the submitted work This pertains to all the authors of the piece Medievalists.net Researchers in Poland have discovered new details about a nearly complete medieval chess set By obtaining DNA from pieces of the Sandomierz chess set they could determine what animals were used to make them Discovered in 1962 during an archaeological in Sandomierz The very small pieces – the two kings are 25 mm and 23 mm in height while the rest are below 20 mm – were created in the 12th or early 13th century On one side of the chessboard there were figures with deep and clear carvings while the other had shallow carvings that even disappeared in places Dr. Danijela Popovic from the Center for New Technologies at the University of Warsaw carried out genetic testing on three pawns. She told Science in Poland DNA is preserved in very small quantities and is difficult to analyze we managed to obtain almost complete mitochondrial genome sequences which allowed us to find out what animal species the pieces we studied were made from.” While researchers had hoped that the items were made of elephant ivory it turns out that they have more mundane origins – the first pawn came from the bones of a horse When the chess pieces were discovered over 50 years ago, some scholars dismissed them as crude items. However, recent research reveals that they were more intricate and detailed, making use of an Arabic style. In an article published in 2018 Agnieszka Stempin suggests that the chess set came from Western Europe possibly a workshop located in northern Italy The chessmen do not all come from the same period: at least one piece and one pawn were added to the suite at a later time The craftsman making the whole set was up-to-date with fashions in manufacturing chess pieces understanding the significance of individual pieces and making them skilfully with forceful strokes and giving them their final appearance by smoothing their surface They appear to have been fashioned by groups (of pawns of bishops and knights and of queens and kings) Dr. Wojciech Rajpold, an archaeologist with the Sandomierz Castle Museum emphasized that the chess pieces are a unique find of this type in Poland and that few similar ones can be found in Europe Popovic’s team is important because thanks to it we know among others: how to conduct proper conservation of this monument we are not able to say whether the chess pieces were created in our area or whether they were made by Italian craftsmen,” he added We've created a Patreon for Medievalists.net as we want to transition to a more community-funded model We aim to be the leading content provider about all things medieval podcast and Youtube page offers news and resources about the Middle Ages We hope that are our audience wants to support us so that we can further develop our podcast and remove the advertising on our platforms This will also allow our fans to get more involved in what content we do produce Member Login Roma (Ruth) Glowinski was born in 1931 in Kalisz Her sister Genia was seven years older than her Ephraim was a leather trader and Hela was the principal of a private local school The family maintained a traditional Jewish lifestyle Genia attended the Hebrew Gymnasium in Kalisz and Ruth started at the school run by her mother but the war broke out two years later and interrupted her studies the girls and their mother would travel to the village of Krzeszowka with relatives and Ephraim would come and visit at the weekends and Kalisz's proximity to the German border the two girls cut their vacation short and returned home early but were forced to go back there when the Germans occupied the city the deportation of the Jews of Kalisz began The Glowinskis were deported in cattle cars and reached Sandomierz after many trials and tribulations Gucia and Ruth moved from Warsaw to nearby Piastow where they lived under assumed identities with Anna and Andrzej Kostrzewa an impoverished Polish couple who lived in a one-room apartment with no running water Anna was a seamstress and Andrzej was the school caretaker daughter of a Polish officer whose whole family had been killed Their economic situation gradually deteriorated: Ruth and Gucia's money ran out and Anna was forced to sell her sewing machine reduced to eking out a living as a laundress and Ruth spent her time at the local library and doing odd jobs for the neighbors for a meager sum Gucia did not return at the appointed time and told them that Gucia had been caught buying and selling on the black market her Jewish identity had presumably been exposed and you will also start praying." Ruth learned the prayers and I also started believing… and that gave me strength There was a priest there who did not preach antisemitism… It wasn't a matter of being disloyal [to my upbringing] but simply that I knew then that there were no Jews Ritual Murder: Karol de Prevot?s painting was recently unveiled in a cathedral in Sandomierz an obsession with Polish poetry led me to two ideas: First So I wrangled a Fulbright fellowship and spent a year traveling in Poland but because it bugs me when travel writers don’t mention money Probably because they’d be embarrassed to write “Eat My goal was to look beyond the stereotype of Polish anti-Semitism I traveled and I took notes — about the Poles I met and what it felt like to be a Jew in Poland it was “too Jewish for Poles and too Polish for Jews.” Nevertheless I feel very good about that year in Poland It taught me how to look beyond the facile prejudices of American Jews And I learned a lot about what it means to be a Jew — a lesson that resurfaced when I read about the recent unveiling of a painting in Sandomierz a small city about 200 kilometers south of Warsaw a historian — one of the many Christian Poles who have dedicated their careers to preserving Jewish history — urged me to seek out a certain painting in Sandomierz All I could get out of him was that it was in the cathedral I felt less than enthusiastic as I searched for the cathedral This was my sixth or seventh foray into Ye Olde Poland and I knew what to expect: narrow streets Sandomierz had been a tempting target for a millennium After each invasion the Poles had buried the dead and rebuilt the city Thus the town square retained a kind of blunt charm: the imposing brick ratusz was attached to a whitewashed baroque tower and the houses edging the square looked pretty against the snow vaulted ceilings and a lovely organ above an archway in the rear huge 18th-century canvases depicting gruesome scenes of Christian martyrdom But you couldn’t exactly call them world-class: the artist I was thinking about lunch as I checked out the pictures beneath the organ The first one illustrated the Swedes blowing up the town in 1655: Flying through the air Two more paintings showed scenes from the Tatar invasion of the 13th century — the slaughter of dozens of monks Then I saw the painting and I lost my appetite The setting is the interior of a synagogue confers with another Jew over the corpse of a child; the body has ritual cuts on its extremities three Jews tip a barrel containing another dead child; a Jew with an oversized nose holds up a bowl to collect the blood The dismembered bodies of children are scattered about the floor and a dog has a human foot in its mouth a leering Jew strokes a boy’s chin while another Jew offers a woman a coin for her child I got the gist of the Latin inscription: “In the Year of Our Lord 1698 had their throats cruelly slit by the Jews of Sandomierz.” The scene was ludicrous — among other things I was recording the inscription in my notebook when someone tapped me on the shoulder she told me that I was not allowed to do that here The woman chugged away and returned with a 60-ish man who was stooped like a shepherd’s crook He had to repeat himself three times until I understood: “The mayor of the city says that no one can write here.” Most likely the sages would not approve of discomfiting those who are While the man muttered and the woman panted with evident fury I was mulling over a story that my grandmother once told me Her uncle had been a housepainter in a town not too far from Sandomierz when he was working in a neighboring village — this would have been around 1915 — he heard that a Christian child had disappeared Both sides of my family had emigrated from southeastern Poland; the Jews of the painting were All this came back to me with startling intensity when I read about the unveiling — the anger and humiliation When I managed to actually read the article I learned that I had been lucky representatives of the Jewish community and the Catholic Church decided that it was better to display it and a plaque was added: “This event is not historically accurate The Jews could not and did not perpetuate ritual murder.” I realize that the story of my brief visit to Sandomierz will do nothing to dispel Jewish preconceptions about Poland but I see no point in pretending that such hatred no longer exists a mediocre painter was hired to depict the blood libel as history apparently it’s still necessary to insist that it’s a fiction Gordon Haber is a frequent contributor to the Jewish Daily Forward His most recent fiction is the novella “Adjunctivitis.” Gordon Haber writes about religion and culture in addition to editing the CANVAS Compendium I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward American Jews need independent news they can trust At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S rising antisemitism and polarized discourse This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up Copyright © 2025 The Forward Association USGlass Magazine & USGNN News The Info Source of record for architectural glass leaders features a special photocatalytic façade paint that reduces air pollution The mural covers most of a pressure tower rising high above the park It was painted with a photocatalytic coating which neutralizes harmful components of exhaust fumes and smog The paint was created under the supervision of Sandomierz’s conservation officer as a result of NSG Group’s cooperation with the Sandomierz City Hall and its municipal and housing enterprise benefits Sandomierz residents because the more photocatalytic paint supplied Photocatalytic paint offers self-cleaning properties via breaking down and decomposing dirt reduce microbial growth and does not rely on additional energy inputs The mural was painted by Wroclaw-based Donut Studio which specializes in painting environmental murals We understand that ads can be annoying to website visitors but it helps us provide our content to you at no cost so we'd appreciate it if you would allow our advertising partners to appear in your browser We use cookies to enhance your browsing experience We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below The cookies that are categorised as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site We also use third-party cookies that help us analyse how you use this website and provide the content and advertisements that are relevant to you These cookies will only be stored in your browser with your prior consent You can choose to enable or disable some or all of these cookies but disabling some of them may affect your browsing experience Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors Performance cookies are used to understand and analyse the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customised advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyse the effectiveness of the ad campaigns A New Dialogue: The bishop of Sandomierz and the chief rabbi of Poland pray together at a Jewish cemetery One could not be unmoved when a group of young clerics from the local Catholic seminary sang a popular Israeli song in Hebrew “Hevenu Shalom Aleikhem” (“We Brought Peace”) during a Catholic service in a small (and in January very sleepy) town in southeastern Poland And this was the second song sung in Hebrew by the young men; the first was a beautiful performance of Shema Yisrael What was even more remarkable was the fact that the service was taking place in the Sandomierz Cathedral known in Poland and the West more for its notorious 18th-century painting depicting Jews killing Christian children than for its historical beauty and unique medieval frescoes The service by the local bishop with other prominent church dignitaries observed each year by the Catholic Church in Poland with the aim of fostering a dialogue with Judaism and the Jewish community is to “propagate exposition” of biblical texts “which in the past may have been interpreted in an anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic way” in the spirit of the legacy of the Second Vatican Council and Nostra Aetate “to explain to the faithful the tragedy of the Jewish extermination,” and “to present anti-Semitism as a sin.” the Day of Judaism was celebrated in Poland on January 16 which this year fell on Friday and would have conflicted with the Sabbath which in the winter in Poland begins very early including exhibitions of Judaica in the local museum highlighting the devastation brought by the Shoah events organized by students from local high schools among them workshops about Jews in Polish and Sandomierz history competing for the title “The School of Dialogue,” a reward for their efforts to explore the Christian and Jewish shared past in Poland one of the high schools in Sandomierz earned the title for their work on the history of the Jews in their town The local students’ accomplishments demonstrated that the Day of Judaism was not just a staged event facilitated by high-profile officials of the Catholic Church and the Jewish community but that it represented a wider effort to engage with the history and culture of the people who had shared the town’s and the country’s history for long centuries The week-long celebrations in Sandomierz and the high-profile Day of Judaism seemed to mark the end of longstanding hostility between Jews and the local Catholic Diocese and town caused by the explicitly anti-Jewish painting from the 18th-century As a result of the flare-up of controversy since 2006 the painting had languished behind a plywood cover and fabric scrim. But by the time participants arrived in Sandomierz for the 17th annual Day of Judaism the painting was visible to visitors along with a new plaque the fruit of long years of difficult negotiations between the Polish Council of Christians and Jews the Committee for Dialogue with Judaism at the Conference of the Polish Bishops The newly mounted plaque explicitly states that what the painting depicts is not “historically true” and “could never have happened because Jewish law prohibits the consumption of blood and thus Jews could not and did not commit ritual murder Because of such accusations [Jews] were often persecuted and murdered Since the thirteenth century popes prohibited the spread of such false accusations and sought to protect Jews from them.” outside of its broader historical and artistic context the nearly 300-year-old painting under the choir of the Sandomierz Cathedral had become a lieu de mémoire which crystallized in one image the memory of Jewish-Christian relations in Poland lieux de mémoire exist because the milieux de mémoire despite the efforts to revive the Jewish community there has been no Jewish community that would have been an inseparable part Poland’s everyday reality the way it had been for centuries until 1939 Thus the memory about Jews and about that gone-forever past is located in the lieux de mémoire memory and associated with it lieux de mémoire necessarily simplify the past the recollection of intensified ant-Semitism during the interwar periodand the destruction of the Jews during World War II influenced the reading of the Sandomierz painting reducing it to a symbol of a much simplified version of a much richer Polish-Jewish past The 18th-century representation of blood libels in Sandomierz became tied up with the more recent past engendering polemics and emotions on all sides This made it difficult to engage not only with the history of the painting and the events behind it but also with the larger topic of Jewish-Christian relations The Sandomierz painting seems to have made the dialogue between Jews and Christians in Poland more challenging many of them devout Catholics committed to Jewish-Christian rapprochement or at the very least a proper description to accompany its display informing the viewers that the painting did not represent true events but rather anti-Jewish fantasies — the last was the position taken by members of the Jewish community including some high profile members of the clergy refusing to denounce the events of almost 300 years ago angering both Jews and Poles ashamed of the dark past in Polish-Jewish relations But the controversy over the painting was not really about its 300-year-old past The long stalemate could certainly be attributed to the fact that for both the Poles and the Jews the painting was not a representation of a long-gone history but a symbol of contemporary Polish anti-Semitism The long-festering controversy over the painting did not make anyone feel good — not Jews who felt the painting’s presence in a cathedral church without any explanation legitimized historical blood libels and was evidence of continuing Polish anti-Semitism which became associated with and tainted by the broad notion of Polish and Catholic anti-Semitism 2014 seemed to mark a turning point in the long rankling controversy and the almost two-decade-long stalemate The celebration of the Day of Judaism and the uncovering of the controversial painting with a proper and prominently displayed description was greeted with a sigh of relief by all Due credit was given to Sandomierz Bishop Krzysztof Nitkiewicz,and Chief Rabbi of Poland Michael Schudrich who called the unveiling of the controversial painting and the new plaque “a wise solution,” and emphasized that Jewish-Catholic relations had never been better than they were now those efforts at rapprochement have been taking place since the Second Vatican Council and for the last two decades or so in Poland they had never succeeded in breaking the stalemate And here a case can be made for historians lending a hand in difficult to overcome situations I was one of the participating historians in Sandomierz.) A year before the historic celebration of the Day of Judaism in Sandomierz a smaller gathering took place just steps from the Cathedral Scholars from Poland and the United States discussed questions of the history and historiography of Jewish-Christian relations and the local context for the divisive painting in a symposium called “Jewish-Christian Relations in History and Art: European Context for the Paintings in the Sandomierz Cathedral.” The symposium was a fruit of an unprecedented collaboration between the Diocese of Sandomierz After meeting the bishop in the summer of 2012 when the cobbled streets of the beautiful town were lightly covered by snow we traced Sandomierz iconography to its Italian roots notably to the history and iconography of Christian martyrologies and to the iconography of the most notorious example of a blood libel What the symposium succeeded in doing was to help untangle the past from the present and find language to discuss the painting openly and a bishop would deliver a moving homily marking the Day of Judaism 2014 — in the very cathedral that had been a source of tension for years Magda Teter is a professor of history and Jewish Studies at Wesleyan University is divorced from the historical origins of the term But it's worth taking a moment to revisit the original meaning of the phrase and the violent context from which it emerged a history professor at Penn State who has written extensively on blood libel and early modern Europe He explained that the term generally refers to the medieval "fantasy in Christian belief that Jewish communities needed Christian blood for Passover."  "It was based on an ignorance and fear of Jewish rituals on the part of Christians and also the Christian fixation on blood," he says. Most often the idea often surfaced after the murder or abduction of a child accusations would be made against Jews after specific incidents Sometimes the accused Jew would be tortured into confessing The first documented case of a blood libel which was also known to Christians as "ritual murder," was in the 12th century Perhaps the most famous blood libel occurred in 1475 in Trent in northern Italy, a case that is the subject of a monograph by Hsia. He summarized the case in an article a few years ago: the dead body of a 2-year-old Christian boy named Simon was found in the cellar of a Jewish family's house in Trent Town magistrates arrested 18 Jewish men and five Jewish women on the charge of ritual murder - the killing of a Christian child in order to use his blood in Jewish religious rites In a series of interrogations that involved liberal use of judicial torture the magistrates obtained the confessions of the Jewish men Those executions in Italy occurred in the middle of the period of highest prevalence of the blood libel: the 14th to the 17th century "Christian Europe was undergoing a great deal of crisis and anxiety," Hsia says citing the Protestant reformation that divided Christianity as well as the advance of the Ottomans Justin Elliott is a reporter for ProPublica. You can follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon.com Associated Press articles: Copyright © 2016 The Associated Press Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time Sandomierz is a beautiful little town in south-eastern Poland surrounded by apple orchards and verdant green fields As we walked along the streets that were once Jewish streets this group of American and Australian Jews to suggest that the Jews of Sandomierz had a history going back hundreds of years but still there were people on the streets I saw trays piled with an array of kielbasa - Polish sausage - and on the counter what looked like jars of pickled cucumbers and I wondered for a moment whether the kielbasa and the cucumbers would taste like the sausage and the cucumbers of my Melbourne childhood Michael Gawenda's parents (at right) on their wedding day in Lodz in 1925 who were both murdered during the Holocaust in these well-kept and pastel-coloured apartment buildings I wondered whether they knew what had happened to the people who once lived here and did the ghosts of the dead Jews ever come to disturb their sleep I had not come to Poland to reclaim the past I had been to Poland in 1985 when the communists were still in control I came as a journalist and I met Solidarity leaders and leaders of the Polish democracy movement There was nothing to suggest that this had once been the home of millions of Jews the point from which hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported to death camps from the Warsaw ghetto in the summer of 1942.Credit: Getty Images we were greeted by the principal who ushered us into the staffroom On the table were plates of Polish biscuits and small cakes I knew the taste of these biscuits and these cakes the students we had come to see were waiting for us They were holding posters and folios stuffed with papers and some of them were using their phones to take photos of us They were 16 and 17 years old and when they stood together at the front of their classrooms in front of the portraits of Polish patriots who had fought for Polish freedom from the Russian and German occupiers who had divided Poland between them for centuries I wondered how their parents and their grandparents regarded the long-vanished Jews of Sandomierz On them were drawn maps of the streets where the Jews of their town had once lived Some of the posters were photographs of buildings that had once been Jewish communal centres Some of the kids leafed through bound folios of typed interviews with local people about the Jews of Sandomierz Gawenda's family in Melbourne in the 1950s with the author sitting on his mother's knee.Credit: courtesy of Michael Gawenda These young people were full of a sort of defiant and boisterous joy the sort that comes from discovering something that had been hidden from you we walked with them through their town and they took us to the new markers of Jewish life in Sandomierz that I had thought did not exist They stood in the rain to show us the places they had marked on their maps where the Jews had once lived these boys and girls unburdened by guilt or shame where they had searched out the names of the Jews of their town This building had once been the synagogue of Sandomierz and on the walls were what I thought were psalms in faded Hebrew lettering The kids took photographs on their phones and when perhaps I looked too grim a boy asked me to smile and I did smile and the stone in my heart felt smaller The rain came down harder on the walk to the little Jewish cemetery and in the centre of the cemetery there stood a sort of monument shaped like a pyramid that was constructed of old tombstones The kids had cleaned the tombstones and they had cleared the weeds from the paths A girl called Agata came and stood beside me and asked if I would like to light a remembrance candle with her She had a broad Polish face and a nice smile and perhaps I was just imagining this we knew that we were both connected to this place We stood together in front of a moss-covered grave at the café where we ate local apples and the cakes the kids had baked for us Agata asked me how come I understood some Polish words I told her my parents had spoken Polish when I was a child and they didn't want me to understand what they were saying "Where did they come from?" she asked I told her my mother was from Lodz and my father from a small town called Lowicz "So you are Polish,'' she said whose families lived in Poland for many generations It was not just the years of genocide that had embittered them distorted - their view of Poles and Polish anti-Semitism "I guess I am Polish in a way,'' I said "Do you think I am Polish?'' I asked hundreds of kids are working on projects like the one in Sandomierz I wondered what would last from these discoveries for these children who once had no inkling that Jews had lived in their towns Their parents had never spoken to them about the Jews of their town The communist regime had been determined to rid Poles of any memory of the country's Jews with the kids of Sandomierz somehow accompanying me I thought that the past cannot be undone but perhaps it can be reclaimed I had left Poland in 1985 sure that I would never return but when the invitation came last year for me to come back for a week-long forum in Poland on Polish-Jewish relations I went with my history and with a sort of dread that I would be forced to spend a week visiting graveyards and Holocaust monuments and discussing the possibility of a dialogue between living Poles and dead Polish Jews The Forum for Dialogue Among the Nations is a small organisation run by a group of Poles in their 30s who for the past decade or so have been working to get Poles and Jews of Polish origin talking to each other given the troubled and tortured post-war relationship between Poles and Jews The Holocaust obliterated a thousand years of Jewish history in Poland all that remained alive of that history were the years of genocide during World War II But there have been changes since the demise of the communist regime There are now Jewish Studies departments in every major Polish university There are courses in the history of Polish Jewry one of the courses offers Yiddish and Yiddish literature It is run by a Polish woman in her 30s who has studied all the major works of Poland's Yiddish writers there are small but growing Jewish communities there's a new Jewish primary school of several hundred children but all the children are taught Jewish history and they celebrate the Jewish religious festivals The Forum receives a small grant from the Polish foreign office and it has received donations mainly from American Jews and from a couple of Jewish philanthropic organisations for its work It would be fair to say that it is not a major recipient of Jewish support Yet those young Poles have managed to run the schools program and have brought dozens of Jews from America and Israel - and a few from Australia - to Poland for a week of school visits I could not work out what motivated this group of young Poles neither their fellow Poles nor the Jews of Polish origin that they hope to reach have any interest in talking to each other Zuzanna Radzik is 28 years old and is a leader of the forum She is a theologian and a deeply committed Catholic when she was just out of school and about to start her theology studies at Warsaw University she noticed one day that in the basement of her church including the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion Zuzanna went to see the church's senior priest She was surprised to find that he knew what was being sold in the bookshop but argued that the church had no control over what books were sold by the owner She complained to the officials of the Warsaw Diocese and when she was fobbed off with the excuse that the church was powerless to act against the bookshop she wrote to the Catholic Primate of Poland and demanded an audience She managed to get an audience with his assistant "Nothing was done,'' she told me My parents found it hard to understand what I was doing Those books sitting there in the basement of my church Zuzanna campaigned for the bookshop to be closed She wrote articles for a liberal Catholic monthly about the bookshop and about Pope John Paul II's teaching about anti-Semitism After five years of protest and campaigning Zuzanna spoke of that time as if she had no choice but to protest and campaign because her faith compelled her to act: the Catholic Church should never turn a blind eye to anti-Semitism also travelled with me and I realised that Poland often felt familiar In Warsaw and Kraków and the small towns I visited I felt as if I knew these places and I knew these people They looked like my parents and my sisters had looked more than a half century ago I spent one Friday night at the Jewish Community Centre in Kraków in the middle of Kraków's old town centre I was there for the Friday night Sabbath meal and I sang a song with an old man who cried as he sang but tears ran down his cheeks and his hand that was resting on my arm trembled as he sang for his voice was lovely and his Yiddish was the Yiddish of my childhood and I could hear my father singing He had been surprised that I could speak Yiddish and he insisted that I sing with him Perhaps 100 people had come for the start of Shabes and they had brought with them their children and their babies had only recently discovered that they had Jewish ancestors and they were on a journey without a clear destination The tables were covered in white tablecloths and we ate a Shabes meal of herring and good rye bread and then kasha - roasted buckwheat - and stewed meat A young man delivered an exposition of the week's Torah portion with flair and the sort of theatricality that reminded me of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof some of the older people closed their eyes and hummed along but it felt like we were taking them back to the annihilated world of their childhoods it has come to encapsulate the world of pre-war Polish Jewry when there were almost 3 1/2 million Jews in Poland and more than 10 per cent of the Polish population was Jewish Poland had the largest Jewish population of any country in the world a third or more of the population were Jews More than three million Polish Jews were murdered during World War II Most of them were gassed in the Nazi death camps in Poland: in Chelmno and Treblinka and Sobibor and Belzec and Auschwitz-Birkenau Most of the 300,000 Jews who survived had fled to the Soviet Union before the conquering Germans were able to seal off the Jews in ghettoes from which they were eventually transported to the death camps mother and their two daughters fled Lodz and spent the war in the Soviet Union I hired a car and drove the 260 kilometres to Lowicz the town where my father was born and where he spent his childhood It was a particularly mild late autumn for Poland and there was sunshine and the fields were green and many fields were planted with rows of cabbages I wondered whether my father had ever travelled this road when he came back to Lowicz from Lodz to visit his sister They lived in Lodz after they were married and my sisters were born there Lowicz is a town of wide streets and cobbled lanes and it has two large and impressive town squares and an imposing Gothic cathedral just around the corner from the streets that were once Jewish streets and where the Lowicz ghetto was established by the Nazis Of the town's 23,000 inhabitants in 1939 19th-century buildings that have been nicely renovated and there are clothing boutiques and pizza parlours and Asian restaurants my father lived with his older sister and their parents My father was a member of the Lowicz landsmanshaft (society) in Melbourne and he dragged me along every year to the Holocaust commemoration evening organised by the committee of the landsmanshaft but each poem expressed one of the numberless horrors to which the Jews of Lowicz - along with all the Jews of Poland - had been subjected His sister and her husband and their eight-year-old daughter did not escape From the ghetto in Lowicz they were removed and from there sent to their death at Treblinka and in the cobbled lanes I noticed there were coffee shops and little bars and the music was the music of everywhere in this digital age but I found a small Polish restaurant and I ordered herring and vodka and rye bread and cabbage soup with pieces of smoked meat and then I had tea with lemon and a slice of poppy seed cake one of the forum's leading lights and a lecturer in Holocaust studies at Warsaw University came to take me to meet the mayor of Lowicz Jakub was a passionate man in his early 30s Jakub was born and grew up in Lowicz and was eager for me to meet the mayor who was once his high-school history teacher and was still his mentor greeted me formally in his office and we sat at a table near a window that overlooked the main town square He told me that several years ago he had convinced the council to erect a monument near the site where thousands of slave labourers - Poles Russians and Jews - had been brought by the Nazis to divert the river on the town's outskirts because it regularly flooded Many of them had died of disease and starvation I asked the mayor why he'd fought for the monument the mayor said that his wife had Jewish ancestors and that while she was a committed Catholic Jakub took me to the Lowicz archives office a man I thought old enough to have lived in Lowicz pre-war had set down on a desk for me a pile of fading brown folders and he sat with me as we leafed through every folder of some of the Lowiczer that my father knew in Melbourne was a register of everyone who lived at 35 Zdumska Street between 1880 and 1920 and there was my father's name and his date of birth - October 24 1900 - and there was his father's name - Moishe - and his father's occupation - he was a tailor - and there was recorded the fact that my father came back from Lodz for a month to visit at 35 Zdumska Street when he was 22 There was a record of his army number and the battalion in which he served My father had never mentioned the fact that he had served in the Polish army There was something almost magical about the handwriting the letters light on the upstroke and firm on the down and for several moments it felt as if my father had come alive - his childhood resurrected It was an hour's drive from Lowicz to Lodz I found myself singing a Yiddish lullaby by Mordechai Gebirtig the greatest of all the Polish Yiddish songwriters When my father and mother and sisters lived there full of textile factories - some of which were owned by Jews More than a third of the city's population of 600,000 was Jewish and mostly the Jews worked in the textile mills or set themselves up with a couple of machines at home and wove carpets of the finest quality I was there to catch a glimpse of its past The people in the archives office were eager to help me find the street My sister had once described the house for me with its communal courtyard and large wooden windows and the narrow staircase leading up to their home And so I walked up and down that street and looked for signs that might reveal the house and the courtyard and the narrow staircase leading to .. Would I then climb those stairs and knock on the door Would I say to whoever opened the door that my family once lived here That when they returned to Lodz from the Soviet Union when the war ended their house was occupied by some of their former neighbours who did not exactly welcome them I was told that the street where my family lived had been a major thoroughfare of the Lodz Ghetto in which the 230,000 Jews of Lodz were sealed off shortly after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 Most of the Jews were gassed in the Chelmno death camp or were taken by cattle trucks to Auschwitz where some of the young people who were able to work survived the war I knew little about my mother's family I knew that my mother and her sisters and brothers worked in a sock factory and that they were skilled in their trade I knew that my mother never went to school that she could barely read and that she couldn't write I knew that she couldn't speak Polish There was no trace of my mother or her family in the archives I walked to the Jewish cemetery that was a half-hour walk away from the street where my family had lived The cemetery was vast and in the heavy fog it seemed to go on forever The paths leading off the main cemetery road were dew-covered the dead leaves soaked and slippery and the trees were dead stunted - it seemed to me - by the burden of the past with their classical columns and domes and hand-painted ceilings the resting places of the Jewish textile magnates of Lodz I did not want to end in this cemetery in Lodz the place in Warsaw where the Nazis assembled the Jews of the Ghetto and where the Jews waited to be loaded into the cattle trucks that would transport them to Treblinka and Auschwitz stands the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews its gentle curves and pale glass panels suggesting a living but large in its dreaming and in its ambition The museum was opened recently but its core exhibition covering a thousand years of Jewish history in Poland It will be officially opened this September It is a 200-metre walk from the umschlagplatz monument with its tombstone-like walls on which there are names of some of those who were once assembled here to the museum which no doubt will memorialise that assembly point and that time of annihilation but that will only be part of the narrative of the Jews of Poland I was aware of the almost fragile beauty of this building It made me think of what the Yiddish Nobel Prize-winning writer Isaac Bashevis Singer once said about Yiddish and Yiddish culture that it captured a "frightened and hopeful humanity" Poland will always be a place of darkness for Jews with the lukewarm rays of the sun illuminating the glass panels the museum felt like a place of fragile but determined optimism I thought of the children of Sandomierz and I thought of Zuzanna and her campaign against the bookshop in the basement of her church who referred to me as a fellow landsmann of Lowicz and I thought about how the story of a thousand years of Polish Jewish history did not have to end in a cemetery at the caf\\u00E9 where we ate local apples and the cakes the kids had baked for us I told her my parents had spoken Polish when I was a child and they didn't want me to understand what they were saying \\\"Where did they come from?\\\" she asked \\\"I guess I am Polish in a way,'' I said The communist regime had been determined to rid Poles of any memory of the country's Jews It is run by a Polish woman in her 30s who has studied all the major works of Poland's Yiddish writers there's a new Jewish primary school of several hundred children Zuzanna went to see the church's senior priest She wrote articles for a liberal Catholic monthly about the bookshop and about Pope John Paul II's teaching about anti-Semitism In Warsaw and Krak\\u00F3w and the small towns I visited I spent one Friday night at the Jewish Community Centre in Krak\\u00F3w in the middle of Krak\\u00F3w's old town centre A young man delivered an exposition of the week's Torah portion In big cities like Warsaw and Krak\\u00F3w one of the forum's leading lights and a lecturer in Holocaust studies at Warsaw University on the town's outskirts because it regularly flooded I asked the mayor why he'd fought for the monument and there was my father's name and his date of birth - October 24 1900 - and there was his father's name - Moishe - and his father's occupation - he was a tailor - and there It was an hour's drive from Lowicz to Lodz More than a third of the city's population of 600,000 was Jewish and mostly the Jews worked in the textile mills or that she could barely read and that she couldn't write that it captured a \\\"frightened and hopeful humanity\\\" Eurovoix World Latest News From Song Contests Around The World Polish broadcaster TVP is set to organise a ‘Mini Eurovision’ on August 27 according to WirtualneMedia The Polish public broadcaster is set to organise a ‘Mini Eurovision’ with performers from seven countries due to compete in the event will be held in Sandomierz and will be broadcast live on TVP2 Participants from the following countries are due to appear in the event: As part of the show the Polish public will be able to vote for their favourite through SMS voting The concert comes on the back of “Łączy nas Bałtyk” in Riga which was a concert for Latvian Poles featuring Polish performers as well as Alika from Estonia and Tautumeitas from Latvia TVP is due to reveal more details of the event in the coming days Image Source: EBU | Source: Wirtualnemedia it has been a pleasure to find out more about this amazing continent through the Eurovision Family of Events it's been brilliant to see the site grow and flourish and continue to bring our readers everything from the world of Eurovision The "World of Father Matthew" wax figure museum is a response to the high interest of tourists who come to Sandomierz following their favorite characters from the TV show For those who are not fans of the "Father Matthew" series it is also an interesting place where you can see very carefully made figures of well-known Polish actors (including Kinga Preis broadcasted by Polish television since 2008 The setting of the series in a picturesque town has significantly increased the popularity of Sandomierz and the development of tourism It is a great example of successful city promotion which has benefited the residents providing services for tourists The wax figure cabinet is located right on the market square on the first floor of one of the historic tenement houses The museum consists of several rooms: a chapel Each of them has been carefully arranged to make us feel like we are on a film set we will learn basic facts about the series in the kitchen we will meet the housekeeper and the churchman a criminal. The titular character himself waits for us in the bishop's office Your kids don't know the series and you don't know whether it's worth taking them to the Father Matthew museum Seeing the wax figures will certainly be an attraction for children - just remember that they cannot be touched Another attraction will be a visit to the police station and the opportunity to play as a policeman: taking fingerprints and taking a picture on the "wall" for detainees It's hard to hide that like most places of this type it's a typical commercial attraction a chance to take cool photos to post on social media it must be admitted that the place is very carefully arranged and its visit can be considered an opportunity to get acquainted with the recent history of Sandomierz and the role played by the series about the priest - detective So is it worth buying a rather expensive admission ticket to the Father Matthew museum Ps.  There is a possibility of buying a joint ticket to the World of Father Matthew museum and Magic Potions:   Its patron is the famous resident of Sandomierz: Marcin from Urzędów - a priest The museum's exhibition can be seen as an expansion of his passion and research This place is on our list of favorite places in Sandomierz What attractions does this picturesque city by the Vistula River offer everyone will find something for themselves: you will discover extraordinary stories and dark legends and get to know Sandomierz from every angle: from above and 'inside out' Log in and download the free e-publication of the latest A&B The printed version is available for sale online in our store and press salons throughout Poland unique e-mail [will also be used as login in the portal] Only name - check the correctness of the data Only the last name - check the correctness of the data password must be at least 8 characters long * fields required for registration; data can be completed in account settings after logging in ** establishment of a student account follows verification of the validity of the student ID card Please try later or let us know: contact Technology: aitnet.pl Ⓒ AiB Publishing House 2025 Dec 6, 2021 | Culture, Society This article is illustrated with photographs by Jerzy Ochoński. More images from villages and towns around Poland are available on his website A recent selection of Europe’s most beautiful towns by CNN Travel surprised many in Poland by singling out Tarnów as its Polish pick “But wander the Old Town and you’ll find it still has that small-town feel with pretty medieval buildings that give a feel of how nearby Krakow was before mass tourism arrived.” Poland offers many other beautiful and interesting small towns off the beaten path that are a treasure-trove of culture each with populations of around 65,000 or fewer Photo: © Jerzy Ochoński/photospoland.com Sandomierz played a key role in Polish history and was an important medieval urban centre Its location near the confluence of the Vistula and San rivers made it attractive from a trade and commerce perspective and the town was particularly prosperous prior to the Mongol invasions in the late 13th century Having escaped extensive damage through the course of the world wars Sandomierz is associated today with its charming and well-preserved old town which has become particularly well known in Poland as the setting for Ojciec Mateusz (Father Matthew) lined with original buildings with the beautiful town hall at centre stage There is also an underground tourist route Follow the cobblestone streets south to find Sandomierz Castle overlooking the Vistula River Not only does it offer excellent views of the surrounding area it also houses a museum that features exhibits related to local art and history Photo: Jerzy/Flickr (under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) Photo: © Jerzy Ochoński/photospoland.com On Poland’s northern Baltic Sea coast a name that translates as something like “by the shore” the expansive sandy beach is dotted with attractions including a bustling boulevard and many easily accessible bike paths If you’d like a better view with a dash of local history which offers a bird’s eye view of the sea as well as the pier and several historical buildings in the harbour which was historically part of the Hanseatic league and maintains close ties to other cities and towns along the Baltic and North Seas can also take a boat trip to Bornholm Island Photo: © Jerzy Ochoński/photospoland.com Zamość, in Poland’s southeast, is best known for its immaculate old town, classified as a UNESCO world heritage site Known as a prime example of a 16th-century renaissance town Zamość’s original construction was completed with the help of the Italian architect Bernardo Morando who modelled his plans on Italian theories of the “ideal city” you can also take a look at the Zamość Fortress a series of fortifications encircling the town that were able to withstand the forces of the Cossacks as well as survive the Swedish Deluge they were among the largest of the fortifications in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth Photo: Mariusz Cieszewski/MFA (under CC BY-ND 2.0) Photo: © Jerzy Ochoński/photospoland.com Located on the Olza river along Poland’s border with the Czech Republic, Cieszyn was historically the capital of the Duchy of Teschen. Ruled first by the Polish Piast dynasty and later by the Habsburg Dynasty of Austria, Cieszyn has long been characterised by its blend of regional cultures the town was split in two between Poland and Czechoslovakia Today (Covid restrictions notwithstanding) you can cross the Friendship Bridge (pictured below) where Poles and Czechs celebrated together as they both entered the European Union and the Schengen Area enabling them to freely move from country to country Cieszyn also offers the opportunity for plenty of outdoor activities such as hiking and skiing in the Silesian Beskids mountains you can eat a Prince Polo chocolate bar where it was originally produced or visit the longest continuously operating brewery in Poland Photo: Maksym Kozlenko/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY 4.0) Photo: © Jerzy Ochoński/photospoland.com a village located at the tip of a narrow sandy peninsula jutting into the Gdańsk Bay whose diabolical name has led to many jokes Besides featuring some of the best sandy beaches in Poland along the Baltic Sea its location has also made Hel strategically important both economically and militarily throughout the ages the Hel peninsula was one of the longest-defended areas by the Polish Army with around 3,000 soldiers from the Coastal Defence Group managing to continue fighting until early October 1939 the harbour is thankfully used more for yachts and fishing boats with regularly scheduled ferry routes to the Tri-City area of Sopot Hel also has great options for those interested in diving or in the local wildlife There is a seal sanctuary (the Fokarium) and a fishing museum that’s affiliated with the larger National Maritime Museum in Gdańsk It's got so cold in Poland that even the seals' whiskers at the aquarium in Hel Hel has literally frozen over. pic.twitter.com/ruJbaEiGVz — Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) February 28, 2018 Photo: Elapros/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) Nestled on a hill overlooking the Vistula River Kazimierz Dolny is a popular resort that is first on many people’s list when asked to name Poland’s most beautiful town It flourished during the 16th and 17th centuries and features many well-preserved buildings and old town squares from this period Kazimierz has attracted the Polish upper crust for centuries and other artists leaving behind a rich legacy It was also formerly a centre of Jewish life with Jews accounting for half of its interwar population Visitors wandering around the town today will also see craftsmen set up stands featuring their wares including stained glass and folk art in public squares The natural features of the area around Kazimierz Dolny also provide many opportunities for discovery The region is referred to as the Lesser Poland Gorge of the Vistula and it contains many hills and ravines to explore Photo: © Jerzy Ochoński/photospoland.com Photo: © Jerzy Ochoński/photospoland.com The village of Lanckorona lies southwest of Kraków in southern Poland Its eponymously named ruined castle was originally constructed to protect the road leading to the former royal capital It was the site of several intense battles in the 17th and 18th centuries first damaged during the Swedish Deluge and later in the Battle of the Bar Confederation attempting to fight off Russian influence and power over the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth The castle ruins are also associated with a UNESCO World Heritage site: the Mannerist Architectural and Park Landscape Complex and Pilgrimage Park Today Lanckorona is also well-known for its array of well-preserved wooden houses in the centre of the village that date back to the 19th century You can check out their ethnographic museum to get a glimpse of what everyday life was like for the village’s inhabitants in the 1800s Photo: © Jerzy Ochoński/photospoland.com Mikołajki lies in the heart of the Masurian Lake District a region in northeastern Poland with over 2,000 lakes The area is particularly well-loved by locals in the summer due to the many options for leisure: everything from spa resorts and “glamping” in the woods to water sports and hiking trails while winter brings opportunities for ice skating or cross-country skiing as well as the popular tradition of “ice boats” on the lake – small sailboats fitted with skating blades so they can glide across the surface The village of Mikołajki is itself a picture-perfect resort town with a lovely lakeside promenade lined with cafes and restaurants that have views of the harbour There’s also an observation tower in the Church of St Nicholas that offers panoramic views of the village and surrounding lakes Photo: Flickr/Ministry of Foreign Affairs (under CC BY-NC 2.0) In southeastern Poland in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains and close to today’s border with Ukraine the historical town of Przemyśl abounds with cultural and architectural gems The Tatar Mound is thought to have been used as a place of worship for the old Slavic gods; today it offers breathtaking views of the surrounding town and countryside If you’re interested in castles and fortifications Przemyśl also has a lot to offer: old forts and 19th- century defensive buildings pepper the surrounding hills while Casimir Castle is adjacent to the historic old town The centre itself is full of beautiful churches and classic buildings that house several whimsical museums such as the Museum of Bells and Pipes or the local branch of the National Museum Photo: Piotr Marynowski/Wikimedia Commons (Under CC-BY-SA-3.0) In southwestern Poland not far from the Sudety Mountains Świdnica’s location resulted in a blend of German and Polish culture and traces of German influence can still be found A Lutheran church in the town, the Holy Trinity Church of Peace, was officially recognised by UNESCO as a world heritage site It is the largest wooden baroque temple in Europe The town square is also well-preserved and features some interesting museums dedicated to the history of trade in Silesia Świdnica is considered a good kicking-off point for those interested in hiking as four landscape parks are within easy reach of the town: Książ Landscape Park Those interested in castles would particularly like the first park with its magnificent Książ castle overlooking Pełcznica river gorge Church of Peace in Świdnica (Jar.ciurus/Wikimedia Commons, under CC BY-SA 3.0 PL) Main image credit: Flickr/Ministry of Foreign Affairs (under CC BY-NC 2.0) Shannon Listopad is a contributing editorial assistant at Notes from Poland With degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Jagiellonian University she has experience in market research and data insights and has contributed to publications and studies including the European Union EUROMEC project [email protected] Home   News   Article Newark's mayor has returned from the Polish twin town of Sandomierz where he took part in Poland's independence day celebrations Newark was twinned with Sandomierz following the official signing of the charter in Newark in 2006 Sandomierz twinning associate Roman Rynski has been involved in the movement for more than 20 years and first visited Newark in July 2002 He said: “Those were the first steps to encourage people of Newark to see Sandomierz After some talks between mayors and councillors and they agreed that they were enthusiastic to sign.” Newark first joined the twinning movement in 1984 Sandomierz and Emmendingen ­— are now twinned with each other Newark’s town clerk Matthew Gleadell said: “Over many years the towns have seen trips to each other’s towns by delegations from the respective twinning committees visits by bands and musical performers between the two towns there have been athletes that have attended and participated in sporting events in each other’s towns and schools from respective towns have been involved in working with each other on educational activities "The twinning relationships open up opportunities for people from respective towns to experience other cultures and create real friendships that are valued by those within them “In a world where division and conflict is all too regular the message of unity and friendship that twinning represents cannot be understated.” Newark town mayor Laurence Goff and Mr Gleadell had dinner with Sandomierz town mayor and the Polish town twinning associate Roman Rynski Mr Goff said it was a special honour and privilege to represent the Newark at the visit It was the first time the current town mayor and clerk had visited a twin town After joining the Independence Day celebrations they were taken on a tour of the town’s cultural and heritage offerings underground tourist route and Diocesan Museum in Długosz House Mr Gleadell said: “Over time whilst the towns remain the people and faces involved change either through sadly passing away or changes in life circumstances “In order to keep the benefit of twinning continuing new people have to get involved new people have to keep the relationship going we are younger and both fairly new to any exposure to twinning It is he and I who can help to continue to secure the future of twinning for both towns “Roman has a longer exposure to twinning and his knowledge of the history of the twinning relationship is very helpful to hear and understand.” Sandomierz town mayor Martin Marzec said: “For us meeting our twinning partners from Newark was something special and perhaps this is something that will tie our relations “The partnership with Newark is very important to us is a great initiative that facilitates joint activities between local government units “This form of co-operation gives an opportunity for internationalisation adapting good practices and institutional support Sandomierz representatives are expected to visit Newark next year in June or July towns celebrations involving both cultures and interests Galeria Sandomierz has 4,382 gla and its tenants include Carrefour The Focus Estate Fund bought the mall in June 2016 and it is managed by White Star Real Estate “We are happy that we have had the opportunity to contribute to the outstanding performance of Galeria Sandomierz ten new brands have opened their stores in the mall and the shopping centre is now 100 pct leased,” said Piotr Katkiewicz the director of property management at White Star Real Estate CA Immo exits non-core market Serbia with the sale of the 19,600 sqm office building Sava Business Center in Belgrade Both the sales price and the buyer are subject to confidentiality As the PBSA sector finally takes off in Poland it is now increasingly attracting international operators and investors Eurobuild CEE spoke to Xior's investment manager about why it has such confidence in the Polish market Residential developer Develia has signed a preliminary agreement to acquire all the shares in Bouygues Immobilier Polska the Polish subsidiary of Bouygues Immobilier ESA logistika has leased 15,000 sqm in Prologis Park Piotrków GLP has completed the development of its Wrocław V Logistics Centre and has received a BREEAM rating of Outstanding Panattoni has secured EUR 40 mln in financing from BNP Paribas for the development of Panattoni Park Sosnowiec IV Newgate Investment (NGI) and Redkom Development are developing a large retail park in Bydgoszcz Deutsche Hypo – NORD/LB Real Estate Finance has provided a five-year green loan to Olivia Seven for the refinancing of the Olivia Prime A office building in Gdańsk-Oliwa communications and security company Motorola Solutions has signed a five-year lease renewal 18,000 sqm at the Green Office complex in Kraków’s Podgórze district Falling interest rates and easing monetary policy across the eurozone and CEEi are boosting investor confidence in the region’s commercial real estate market reveals Colliers in its ‘Beyond Real Estate | Economy’ report Panattoni is to build the Panattoni Park Mainz Süd in Erbes-Büdesheim bei Alzey Axi Immo has presented its latest report “Warsaw Office Market – Q1 2025 The market opened in 2025 on a steady footing with a notable increase in leasing activity and a modest decline in vacancy landlords continue to focus on upgrading existing assets and prioritizing quality over quantity Convenience store chain Żabka has officially opened a new logistics centre in Kąty Wrocławskie The first stage of the development will serve 1,500 stores in the Wrocław area Romanian Post has leased over 5,000 sqm of logistics space in CTPark Bucharest to serve as its temporary regional courier and logistics hub for Bucharest JLL has announced the sale and leaseback of two properties by a manufacturing company in a deal worth over PLN 1 bln Warehouse developer CTP is adding 2,000 sqm to its Clubco coworking development in Brno pbb Deutsche Pfandbriefbank has extended an investment facility to PineBridge Benson Elliot for the Diuna Office Park in Warsaw The hotel market in Bucharest continued its recovery in 2024 while the ADR has finally surpassed the milestone of EUR 100 Torus has announced its All.inn students’ residence concept that is soon to appear on ul BIG Poland has acquired the Multishop Suwałki retail park comprising 13,000 sqm of retail space The company now owns nine fully commercialized retail parks in Poland Slate Asset Management has sold three OBI retail stores to the Lindner Group from Germany Cushman & Wakefield has conducted a survey the findings of which are presented in the report From Shopping to Experiences: A Customer’s View on Shopping Centres and Retail Parks Cushman & Wakefield notes that despite evolving shopping trends both retail formats continue to hold strong appeal Multi Poland has taken on the management of the Galeria Przymorze shopping centre in Gdańsk The store offers lifestyle and sporting clothing and is to open this spring According to the "Quo Vadis E-commerce" report released by Cushman & Wakefield the online commerce continues to be a growth driver for the industrial & logistics real estate sector generating significant opportunities for developers and investors the investor behind the Projekt Góraszka shopping and entertainment complex in Wiązowna on Warsaw’s eastern outskirts has obtained a building permit for a mixed-use development Poznan-based company Scallier is opening another facility under the Funshop Park brand in Romania According to the latest report “At a Glance: Modern Retail Market in Poland Q4 2024” from BNP Paribas Real Estate Poland Poland’s retail market experienced record growth in 2024 Cushman &Wakefield has summarised the situation on the Polish retail market Over half a mln sqm of new retail space came on stream last year marking the highest new supply level in Poland since 2015 This robust development activity occurred amid rising demand from new retailers and improving consumer sentiment which boosted retail sales A new retail park with a total area of 24,000 sqm is set to be developed in Otwock under the name Świderek The investment will be led by Redkom Development Empik has opened a flagship store in the revitalised former Cepelia pavilion in the centre of Warsaw the modernist building has regained its former glory and once again impresses with its original appearance and modern interior Trei Real Estate Poland has opened its 40th Vendo Park The investment was created in Wrocław and has 5,000 sqm Vendo Park Wrocław is the first facility under this banner in the capital of Lower Silesia The retail park was built on a plot of approx An 800 sqm Biedronka grocery store is to open on the ground floor of the Moje Bielany residential complex which is being developed by CeMat A/S at ul Wólczyńska 121 in Warsaw’s Bielany district Spring has very much sprung and everywhere is bathed in the first warm sunshine of the year I have in the back of my mind the terrifying fo .. The Polish warehouse market has finally stabilised after the post-pandemic boom but new challenges and opportunities are on the horizon for the sector UBM Development has been given the go-ahead for the first wooden office building in Poland: Timber Park in Poleczki Business Park in Warsaw The office market in Warsaw is currently experiencing a period of stability in terms of supply and take-up Recent data on overall tenant activity indicates that clients in the cap .. Receive all the latest information from the world of real estate by e-mail the construction of the Aura residential building designed by Robert Konieczny's office KWK Promes According to a report by research company Spectis “Construction companies in Poland 2025-2030” the total revenues of the 300 leading construction gro .. The Globalworth Foundation has provided the authorities in Bucharest with office space for a Covid vaccination centre Panattoni BTS and Commercecon together support the establishment of the second Centaurus Foundation centre in Poland to help horses and other animals intends to focus on operations in other reg .. Six class A office buildings in the PRO Portfolio which is jointly owned by PineBridge Benson Elliot and Sharow Capital have been granted BREEAM In-U .. Who won this year's 14th edition of the Eurobuild Awards The jury and guests gathered at the Double Tree by Hilton hotel in Warsaw chose this year's .. Enjoy the last set of recordings with comments straight from this year's MIPIM we asked experts from our home country for their input will take place on 9-10 April 2025 at the Norblin Factory Event Hall in W .. we invite you to hot episode of the "Eye to eye" podcast The UN Nansen Refugee Award award will go to Poland for the first time According to the office of the UNHCR High Commissioner this year's regional wi .. Czech developer CTP has been granted a EUR 200 mln loan from the European Investment Bank for the roll-out of its large-scale solar panel installation .. while the ADR has finally surpassed the milestone .. Jarosław Szanajca plans to resign from the position of president of the management board of Dom Development at the end of the year and join the superv .. The Polish and Danish governments have entered preliminary discussions for the construction of a tunnel between Szczecin and Copenhagen underneath the .. Viterra has moved into its ​​new 1,500 sqm offices in Olivia Prime part of the Olivia Centre business complex in Gdańsk Panattoni has acquired two properties near Gothenburg The brownfield sites will be replaced by a modern 43,000 sqm facility Contemporary cities are grappling with the challenge of fostering dynamic growth while alleviating environmental pressures Colliers has taken over the management of the Studio B office building located in the Warsaw Wola district The property is owned by Stena Real Estate .. The University of Warsaw has signed a contract with the general contractor for a project at ul The new building will house the faculti .. Velis Real Estate Tech is officially changing its name to Singu adopting the title of its property management product the construction of the Panattoni Park Unterfranken has officially started Professional Jeweller British jewellery brand Henryka has unveiled a new sterling silver jewellery collection adorned with rare and unusual striped flint sometimes known as banded flint or cappuccino flint is a rare variety of chalcedony with distinctive dark and pale stripes that ripple across its surface The unique gem can only be found in one location on earth: The Lesser Poland region of Poland This world-renowned deposit produces what is often nicknamed the ‘Polish Diamond’ The history of striped flint dates back 150-million years with ancient European and Asian cultures celebrating striped flint as a talisman of protection restful sleep and resistance to nightmares Described by some as the ‘stone of optimism’ striped flint is said to increase positive energy Other tales say striped flint has the power to bring out the personality and rid the mind of the fear of meeting new people Every piece of striped flint used in Henryka’s jewellery has been hand-chosen by the brand for its colour before being paired with its ideal sterling silver setting to create a one-of-a-kind design Highlights in the range include a striking pendant sharess: “We are excited to expand our range to include more rare and unusual gemstones that appeal to our loyal customers and our retail partners these gemstones and gem materials will be hand-selected by our team to ensure quality and consistency We are proud to share stories of these natural treasures with our customers!” Prices in the Striped Flint collection start from RRP £140 The PERUN system is a network of lightning detection and location sensors distributed throughout Poland It was established 20 years ago as a response to the needs of the modern economy for which information on the occurrence of lightning based on observations made by observers at meteorological stations The possibility of obtaining instrumental data from a uniform nationwide system ensuring full automatization marked a new era IMGW-PIB/Hydrological and Meteorological Measurement and Observation Network Centre/Ground Based Remote Sensing DepartmentZdzisław Dziewit IMGW-PIB/Hydrological and Meteorological Measurement and Observation Network Centre/Ground Based Remote Sensing Department Lightning data is gaining popularity and is widely available on the Internet Users’ expectations continue to grow which were installed when the system was established are still operating in the PERUN network They are end-of-life and more modern solutions have appeared on the market lightning is detected by precise measurement of incoming electromagnetic radiation and some station locations are no longer free of noise Hence the decision on another modernization of the PERUN system four stations will change their location and a new grid point will be created in the Bieszczady Mountains the lightning detection and location system consists of 12 operational detection stations located in Poland one SAFIR 3000 test detection station is located in Warsaw The entire system is operated by the TLP (Total Lightning Processor) central unit The PERUN system is being modernized as part of the Odra-Vistula River Basins Flood Protection Project funded by the World Bank loan. The scope of the planned works includes: All of the above actions will improve the efficiency and accuracy of lightning location and standardize the system by decommissioning old SAFIR 3000 stations, which are not currently supported the producer. Lightning data is used by various institutions, including crisis management teams, military and civil aviation (both state and commercial services and aeroclubs), as well as fire, mountain, and water rescue services. They are also a valuable source of information in sectors such as the maritime industry, construction and energy, insurance, and sewage treatment plants for large urban agglomerations. Media, research, and scientific institutions also use them. Main photo: Krzysztof Kotkowicz | Unsplash. then you haven’t heard Poland’s side of the story The earliest document that mentions vodka was written in the Polish town of Sandomierz back in 1404 Vodka is widely available in shops and bars all over Poland If you’re keen to learn about the importance of vodka to Polish people here are a few recommended activities for curious vodka enthusiasts © Jakub Hałun / WikiCommons For a real treat, take yourself to the relatively unknown town of Sandomierz in south-eastern Poland. Back in 1404, the word ‘vodka’ was mentioned for the first time to describe the name of this clear alcoholic spirit It was mentioned in the court documents in the Palatinate of Sandomierz it’s a stunning city for the intrepid tourist a well-preserved town hall and a pretty old town square Inside Sandomierz’s museums you can see the document which Polish people believe proves that vodka began in Poland You can also see the court buildings where the document was created and signed © StockSnap/Pixabay | © StockSnap / Pixabay Although consuming vodka is one of the most popular pastimes for Polish people the impressive Vodka Museum still remains an off-the-beaten path gem Housed in a former Koneser Vodka Distillery it’s one of the few vodka museums around the world which occupies a space that used to make vodka in large quantities What’s even more intriguing is that it is in a less well-known part of Warsaw — the trendy up-and-coming Praga neighbourhood The museum’s elaborate exhibition takes you on a journey through the 600-year history of vodka production in Poland The museum was the brainchild of the Pernod Ricard Group who have similar museums in other countries which now houses some very cool cafés and bars © Northern Irishman in Poland The cool bar zone Pawilony is situated down a poky alleyway off the famous Nowy Świat (New World) street in central Warsaw This area has about 15 bars tightly packed into a cosy little enclosure It’s a great place to drink vodka shots with locals The bars have their own theme; from Manhattan with its New York skyline to Komix which has superheroes plastered on the wall to the cheap Pijalnia Wodki i Piwa which offers shots for 4 zlotych (€1) which works in almost every bar – including some of the basements Find the cheapest shots at Pijalnia Wódki i Piwa Bar © Northern Irishman in Poland Poland’s popular cheap-PRL style pub chain, Pijalnia Wódki i Piwa occupies a prominent spot in Toruń’s old town square This is an absolute gem for budget backpackers nostalgic tourists and bargain hunting locals Cheap beer and vodka from 4.5 złotych (£1) and bar snacks like toast and sausages from 9 złotych (£2) are part of the budget menu This is one of the cheapest places to drink vodka in the entire country The chain’s trademark shot menu such as Chupa Chups (homemade lemon drink with ginger and pepper) and the Kokosanka (coconut flavour) won’t break the bank either These venues are all over Poland and they also have late opening hours © Northern Irishman in Poland Vodka lovers will love the thrill of visiting a distillery that was once part owned by Bruce Willis. Poland’s Kociewie region is home to one of the country’s most famous vodka distilleries – the Sobieski Vodka Distillery. This distillery is located in the regional capital Starogard Gdański and is a huge complex The original Sobieski vodka remains the purest and the most popular and here you can see how it is made and drink it at the source Fruity flavoured vodkas are a lot more popular now and Sobieski offers a lemon and a cherry flavour Sign up to our newsletter to save up to $800 on our unique trips See privacy policy © Czupito Czupito is a cheap and cheerful shot bar situated near the old town in Poznań The venue specialises in cheap vodka shots with a huge range of varieties crazy shots in a friendly and fun environment the venue has different shot styles for every competing team revellers make a beeline to Czupito to drink a selection of shots together and enjoy the nightlife that Poznań has to offer Polish weddings are famous for being two to three days affairs involving what is known as ‘the after party’ (poprawiny) you will notice the copious amounts of vodka that is consumed Almost every table will have a bucket filled with ice cold vodka bottles each person will have a shot glass in front of them There will be many raised ‘toasts’ to the new bride and groom and as a foreigner you will be expected to down your shots in style Attend a Polish wedding | © adevcv / pixabay Do a Vodka drinking tour in Gdańsk There is no shortage of options these days for attending a vodka drinking course. Companies such as Polish Your Cooking and Eat Polska organise tours which involve sampling many different types of vodka whilst also eating some truly authentic Polish food. Head to the Polish seaside city of Gdańsk, and embark on Eat Polska’s Vodka Drinking Tour Your expert guide will take you on a tour of the city’s bars ensuring you get a good understanding of the vodka culture The tour involves 6-7 vodka tastings and 5-6 food pairings Vodka shots | © Resto Pub Okrąglak About the author Jonny Blair A travel writer Jonny grew up in Northern Ireland but his global adventures have seen him live in Australia Jonny is a veteran writer with a taste for the unusual and quirky Jonny's 150 country journey around the world saw him feed hyenas in Ethiopia hitch-hike in Iraq and visit disputed regions unrecognised by the UN Jonny is usually based in Poland but is never far away from another adventure and runs travel blogs in several niches Guides & Tips The Best Places to Travel in August See & Do The Best European Cities to Visit in Autumn Guides & Tips The Best European Cities to Visit in November Guides & Tips Beat the Crowds with these Alternative Summer Destinations Guides & Tips This Is Europe's Ultimate Road Trip Guides & Tips The Best European Cities to Visit in December See & Do The Best European Cities to Visit in October Sports A Hiker's Guide to the Tatra Mountains See & Do The Best European Cities to Visit in Summer See & Do The Best European Cities to Visit in July See & Do The Best European Cities to Visit in September See & Do Lesser-Known Summer Destinations to Visit in Europe US: +1 (678) 967 4965 | UK: +44 (0)1630 35000 tripssupport@theculturetrip.com © Copyright 2025 The Culture Trip Ltd