Poland

  • Poland,  Warsaw

    Poland at Christmas: A White Warsaw with a Red History

    Arriving in Warsaw was to have my emotions assaulted unlike any other part of my week in Poland. No longer was the skyline the preserve of the rustic and endearing buildings of yesteryear. Rather, as I peered outside from the train station, towering skyscrapers crooned over the skyline like cranes above a construction site, dominating all around them. I was in a very different place, perhaps even a different century. Even in this company, The Palace of Culture and Science stands out, known colloquially as ‘Stalin’s Penis’. Soaring into the sky at 237 metres it was constructed in 1955 and remains the tallest building in Poland. Its construction was ordered…

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  • Lodz,  Poland,  Wroclaw

    Poland at Christmas: Walking in a Wroclaw Wonderland

    Timothy Snyder’s ‘Bloodlands’ details the barbaric brutality imposed on Eastern Europe from the Second World War through to the end of the Cold War in 1989. Encompassing the entirely avoidable and heart-achingly tragic famine in the Ukraine and the nadir of Western Civilisation that was the Holocaust, it is a painful but necessary read for anyone intent on travelling between the Baltics and the Balkans.  Poland is afforded more attention than anywhere else and having read it one would be forgiven for assuming it to be a country shrouded in its history’s shadow for eternity. Mercifully, this is not the case. My sojourn through Poland would last a week and…

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