Poland

A country that was erased from the map for 123 years and came back twice. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was the largest state in Europe in the sixteenth century, a noble republic with an elected monarch, a parliament in which one member could veto everything, and religious toleration written into law at Warsaw in 1573 while western Europe was killing over it. That veto and elective throne eventually paralysed it, and Russia, Prussia and Austria partitioned the country out of existence between 1772 and 1795. Poles kept the nation alive through language, church and repeated risings, and independence returned in 1918 - then was destroyed again in 1939 by Germany and the Soviet Union acting together. Six million Polish citizens died in the war, half of them Jews, and the extermination camps were built on Polish soil. The country was moved bodily westward in 1945, losing its east to the Soviet Union and gaining German territory. Solidarity, a trade union that became a mass movement, forced the first partly free elections in the bloc in 1989. Poland joined NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004. Warsaw was rebuilt from photographs and paintings. The country has about thirty-seven million people and is the fifth largest in the European Union. Polish is spoken by nearly the whole population, which was not true before 1939. Bialowieza on the Belarusian border is the last large primeval lowland forest in Europe. Copernicus, Curie and Chopin were all Polish. Krakow escaped the destruction that flattened Warsaw.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history