Era of Polish Partitions & Rebellions

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 155-157:

But after the Second Partition, Poland’s last king – Stanisław August – and his advisers suddenly launched a dazzling programme of political and social reform, based on the principles of the American Revolution and the European Enlightenment. Poland set up the first ministry of education in Europe, and in 1791 adopted the Constitution of the Third of May, modernising the whole state structure and introducing a limited version of civil rights.

It was far too late. The Constitution enraged Catherine II, the Russian empress; she saw it as a deliberate provocation which would bring the democratic principles of the French Revolution up to her own borders. The armies tramped forward again, and the Third Partition of 1795 finally wiped what was left of Poland off the map. The eastern regions, later including Warsaw, went to Russia. The Prussian kings took what remained of western Poland, while the Habsburg Empire held southern Poland and the province of Galicia, including the city of Kraków.

There followed 123 years in which Poland did not officially exist. The three partitioning powers agreed that the very name should never be used again. Especially in the Russian area, there was a sustained effort to abolish Polish identity by suppressing the language, discriminating against the Catholic faith and criminalising those who tried to celebrate Poland’s rich culture or tell the truth about its history.

This policy was an almost total failure. Polish national identity retreated into a continuous national conspiracy against the foreign occupants, which preserved culture and tradition and often erupted into armed insurrections. The first of these took place in 1795, as the Third Partition closed over the country. Led by Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Wallace-like popular hero, peasant armies won early victories until they were overwhelmed by Russian numbers. A few years later, in 1812, Napoleon promised to restore Polish independence as he invaded Russia. Tens of thousands of Poles joined his armies, fighting not only in Russia but in Austria, Italy, Spain and even in Haiti. They shed their blood in vain, but the memory of Napoleonic reforms to Poland’s legal and administrative system was preserved, and revived when Poland regained its independence a century later.

In 1830, another insurrection – the November Uprising – broke out in Warsaw and rapidly spread. It took the Russians a year of hard fighting to defeat the rebels. Fierce repression followed, and almost the whole intellectual elite of Poland, most of whom had fought in or helped to organise the rising, went into exile in western Europe. The Great Emigration in effect made Paris the political capital of Poland for the next 80 years. And for the rest of the century Poland’s literary and musical culture – now reaching its dazzling zenith in the work of the poets Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki and Cyprian Kamil Norwid, and the composer Frédéric Chopin – was almost entirely created in France.

There were other, lesser, insurrections and a network of Polish patriotic conspiracies spread over Europe. But the next full-scale rebellion – the January Uprising – did not take place until 1863. Once again, the Poles fought in their streets and in their forests, and held out for over a year. Once again, the collapse of the rising was followed by hangings and police terror, and by the familiar sight of columns of chained men and women being marched away across the snow to Siberian captivity.

But the disaster of the January Uprising led to a change of mood in Poland. There was a feeling that the time for ‘romantic’, sacrificial rebellions was over. Instead, Poland should concentrate on patient, ‘positivist’ campaigns to build up the nation’s economic strength and modernise its social structures. In the Prussian partition, which after 1871 became part of a united German Empire, Polish farmers fought a long and successful struggle by legal and peaceful means to defend their land against Bismarck’s policy of German colonisation.

When Scots Profited in Poland

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 152-154:

But Poland was not always a victim nation. In the early Middle Ages, the Christian kingdom of Poland united with the pagan Grand Duchy of Lithuania to form the ‘Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth’, and for several centuries the Commonwealth dominated east-central Europe. It was a strange, ramshackle structure, in many ways archaic but in other ways curiously appealing to the political ideals of our own democracy. The Commonwealth, ruled by an elected king, was multi-ethnic and in general tolerant of differences. Ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Tatars, Ruthenians, Germans, Lithuanians, Belorussians, Armenians and Jews managed to live together, culturally distinct but united in loyalty to the Polish Crown. The diversity of faiths – Catholic Christian, Orthodox, Uniate, Lutheran and Calvinist, Islamic and Judaic – caused no serious problems until the Counter-Reformation began to impose a dominant Catholic identity upon Poland.

And Poland became rich. From the fifteenth century on, the demand for Polish wheat to feed the rapidly-growing populations of the Netherlands, northern France and England began to make profits for Polish landowners. It was now that the Polish connection with Scotland began. From the early sixteenth century, carefully recruited groups of Scottish settlers sailed across the North Sea and the Baltic to Danzig (Gdańsk) and fanned out across the basin of the Vistula river. Along its tributaries, they founded small, tightly structured colonies which organised and financed the transport of grain down to the Baltic. Their numbers are disputed, but the Scots who joined these colonies over their two centuries of peak prosperity, most of them from the east and north-east coast of Scotland, must have been counted in the tens of thousands.

It was Scotland’s first planned stride into the outside world. And yet this episode was until recently almost completely forgotten by Scottish historians – although well remembered by the Poles. Scots enjoying the Crown’s protection became generals, bankers and even potentates – Alexander Chalmers from Dyce, near Aberdeen, was several times mayor of Warsaw. The traveller William Lithgow, from Lanark, who walked through Poland in the early seventeenth century, wrote that ‘for auspiciousness, I may rather tearme [Poland] to be a Mother or Nurse, for the youth and younglings of Scotland who are yearly sent hither in great numbers . . . And certainely Polland may be tearmed in this kind to be the mother of our Commons and the first commencement of all our best Merchants’ wealth, or at least most part of them.’

But by the early eighteenth century, the Commonwealth was growing weaker. On either flank of Poland, new and hostile states were emerging. The duchy of Muscovy expanded to become Russia of the Tsars, consolidating central power over what is now European Russia and pushing eastwards to grasp the infinite wealth of Siberia. To the west, small and backward German princedoms along the Baltic coast now merged under the new and formidable kingdom of Prussia.

The Polish Commonwealth was really a ‘pre-modern’ state. Central authority was weak, regional diversity was wide and political influence lay in the hands of the nobility. The new Russia and Prussia, by contrast, represented a very different and ‘modern’ model of power. These were grimly centralised and authoritarian states, intolerant of ethnic or religious diversity and – above all – obsessed with the training and equipping of large professional armies.

Culturally, the Polish Commonwealth considered itself more civilised than its big neighbours, whom Poles regarded as primitive. In return, the despots of Prussia and Russia loathed the relative freedom of Polish society, regarding it as a threat to their own strictly controlled systems of government. In addition, both had historical reasons to resent Poland. On the Prussian side, the Teutonic Knights had been defeated by the Poles in the fifteenth century, frustrating their drive to conquer the whole Baltic region. The Russians had suffered repeated Polish invasions and political interference in earlier centuries, in the times of Muscovy’s weakness, and saw Poland as a deadly rival for control over Ukraine and Russia’s western borderlands.

Food Rationing in Scotland, 1945

From Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 61-62:

In Scotland the food allowance each person had to get by on at that time included the following: 2 ounces of bacon or ham, a finger of cheese (1.5 ounces), 7 ounces of butter or margarine, 2 ounces of cooking fats, 8 ounces of sugar, 2 ounces of tea (about 20 teabags), 4 ounces of sweets and 1 shilling’s-worth (5p) of meat. It doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Except this wasn’t a day’s ration – it was for one full week. Except for the bacon. That was two weeks’ allowance. Other staples such as bread, bananas and even potatoes (throughout 1947) were also rationed. As for fresh eggs, you could have one a fortnight – if you could lay your hands on one. Most urban families made do with the vile-tasting powdered version for the skimpy amounts of baking they could eke out of their precious rations of flour and sugar. On the plus side, people were allowed three pints of milk a week.

In fact, milk was just about the only commodity with which the Attlee government was generous; as part of its drive to maintain the nutritional health of the country’s children, in 1946 free school milk was introduced for all pupils up to the age of 18. This was later reduced to primary schools only. A quarter of a century later, free school milk was finally phased out by Margaret Thatcher. She was dubbed Thatcher the Milk Snatcher by her political opponents.

Those of us of a certain age well remember the crates of one-third-of-a-pint bottles which had to be humped in from the playground into the classrooms. For some unfathomable reason, once indoors, the crates always seemed to be stacked next to the school radiators, ensuring the milk was lukewarm by the time it was dispensed. It is one of life’s ironies that, despite food shortages and rationing, the children of postwar Scotland were better fed than many of their modern counterparts. That, in large part, was down to the free milk ration and free school meals (about half the UK’s pupils qualified for them), plus daily doses of free cod liver oil and concentrated orange juice which mothers determinedly rammed down the throats of protesting offspring.

Polish General Maczek in Scotland

From Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 22-24:

Younger generations have little notion of the huge number of people that moved in great waves through Scotland during and immediately after the war. Many were military personnel sent to the oddest corners of the country in strategic deployments against the German juggernaut. Tens of thousands of soldiers were bivouacked in normally sparsely populated areas of countryside. The military equivalent of fully fledged townships would spring up in fields virtually overnight, like mushrooms. It meant a tremendous influx of people into rural areas, and the Borders was no exception.

During the war years a large contingent of Polish soldiers lived in camps in nearby Symington and Douglas. They were under the charge of General Stanisław Maczek who was impressed by the warm reception from local communities. But then news of the Poles’ courage and tenacity in battle had reached Scotland long before the men, so the Scots already knew the value of those soldiers as allies.

A legendary commander, respected by friend and foe alike, General Maczek led the only Polish units not to lose a single battle after Poland was invaded by the Germans in 1939. Under blitzkreig attack, his forces made a dogged defence but their efforts were eclipsed when Russia invaded from the rear and they were forced to withdraw. Maczek was loved by his soldiers, who called him Baca, a Galician name for a shepherd, not dissimilar from the Scottish Gaelic word, Buachaille.

When Germany finally capitulated, General Maczek went on to become commanding officer of all Polish forces in the United Kingdom until their demobilisation in 1947. After the war he chose to remain in Scotland, a de Gaulle-like figure who epitomised the struggle for a free Poland. Like many other Polish soldiers, he felt unable to return to Poland under the Soviet regime.

The thousands of Polish servicemen left their mark on the Scottish Borders in many ways. Some stayed and created new lives and new families. One of their most enduring gifts was the open air map of Scotland they built in the grounds of what is now the Barony Castle Hotel in Eddleston, Peebleshire. While fighting in Holland, General Maczek once had been shown an impressive outdoor map of land and water in the Netherlands, demonstrating the working of the waterways which had proved such an obstacle to the Polish forces’ progress in 1944. At Eddleston the general and his fellow exiles decided to replicate the Love at First Sight 19 map; they conceived the Great Polish Map of Scotland as a permanent, open-air, three-dimensional reminder of Scotland’s hospitality to their compatriots. In 1975 the coastline and relief map of Scotland were laid out precisely by Kazimierz Trafas, a young geography student from the Jagiellonian University of Kraków. An infrastructure was built to surround it with a ‘sea’ of water and, at the general’s request, a number of Scotland’s main rivers on the map were even arranged to flow from headwaters pumped into the interiors of its mountains. It was, and still is, an amazing feat of engineering and design.

Sadly, it was allowed to fall into disrepair. After long years of dereliction, the first steps are now being taken towards its restoration. One day soon people will again marvel at General Maczek’s Great Polish Map of Scotland in the grounds of Barony Castle, once the home of the Murrays of Elibank, and later the Black Barony Hotel. In the war years the house and grounds seem to have been in use by Polish forces, and even then an outdoor outline map was one of the features used to help plan the defence of the Scottish coastline which was under threat of invasion after the fall of Norway. Whether this was really the case, I have not been able to ascertain. Returned to commercial use in the late 1940s, years later the hotel came into the possession of a member of the Polish community who had been billeted there in wartime. He was a great friend of the general, and gave him permanent use of a suite in the hotel.

General Maczek never did return to live in his beloved Poland; by the time it achieved genuine freedom, age and infirmity had taken their toll. In his later years he lived in Edinburgh. He died in 1994 at the age of 102, his name still synonymous with the history of World War II.

King's Own Scottish Borderers

From Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 21-22:

In passing, it should be said that all Borderers have an abiding affection for the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. Raised in 1689 to defend Edinburgh against the Jacobites, the Kosbies, as the regiment is often called by the general public (but never by the soldiers themselves), has a long and illustrious history. Still traditionally recruiting from Dumfries and Galloway, Lanarkshire and the Borders, it has served in many campaigns including the Napoleonic Wars, both World Wars and the Gulf War. There are six Victoria Crosses among its soldiers. In August 2006, despite a groundswell of protest, the regiment was amalgamated with the Royal Scots to form the Royal Scots Borderers and became the 1st Battalion Royal Regiment of Scotland.

In the KOSB my grandfather achieved the rank of colour sergeant and was a strict disciplinarian with his men. When his regiment was back in Scotland and the men were returning to their barracks in Berwick upon Tweed after being out on military manoeuvres, he would first have them run up Halidon Hill and then double-time them across to Winfield Camp at Sunwick to have a brew with Wojtek. It was a social cuppa that both the squaddies and the bear enjoyed greatly. There can’t have been many farms in Scotland where you would come across a man talking over the fence to a bear which appeared to be hanging on his every word. But Sunwick was one of them.

Well before Wojtek’s arrival in Berwickshire, Polish soldiers had arrived in large numbers in many of the towns and villages along the Scottish Borders. In 1942 they came to the pleasant and peaceful town of Duns. Whereas some troops had received a lukewarm welcome when passing through, Duns did the Polish troops proud. The cheers of the townsfolk were tinged with more than a little relief. Earlier, when the Poles’ tanks and heavy artillery were first seen on the horizon, there had been a local scare that Duns was being invaded by enemy forces. When it was discovered the new troops were Poles, the flags on the street came out in earnest. Younger generations have little notion of the huge number of people that moved in great waves through Scotland during and immediately after the war. Many were military personnel sent to the oddest corners of the country in strategic deployments against the German juggernaut. Tens of thousands of soldiers were bivouacked in normally sparsely populated areas of countryside. The military equivalent of fully fledged townships would spring up in fields virtually overnight, like mushrooms. It meant a tremendous influx of people into rural areas, and the Borders was no exception.

Polish Easter Foods

My latest compilation from Culture.pl includes an article by Mai Jones listing 10 Traditional Dishes of Polish Easter. "White sausage, rye soup, cakes with poppy seed or cottage cheese... The numerous traditional Easter delicacies in Poland are surprising, sophisticated and inspired by spring."

Here is an abbreviated list of the dishes.

Biała kiełbasa: "This white sausage is made of unsmoked minced pork, with the addition of beef and veal, covered in a thin layer of pork casings and seasoned with salt, pepper, garlic and marjoram."

Żurek or żur: "a soup made of homemade or store-bought sourdough from rye flour. It's garnished with boiled white sausage and boiled egg halves."

Eggs: "Whether served boiled, stuffed, fried or with mayo, there's no getting away from them. The decorative devilled egg is a hard-boiled egg, halved and filled with a mixture of the yolks, mayonnaise, mustard, onion and horseradish cream."

Śledź: Herring "is served gutted and filleted, in pieces that have been marinated in vinegar and oil, with or without vegetable. It's typically smothered with chopped, raw onion."

Chrzan: "produces pungent vapours and makes the eyes water, but white or red horseradish relish pairs well with the variety of cold cuts. The fiery relish draws out more of the meat flavour. The red type is called ćwikła and its colour is due to the addition of beetroot."

Mazurek: "The flat shortbread can be made of different kinds of dough and toppings – for example, marmalade, chocolate glazing, dried fruit or nuts."

Sernik: "a rich creamy baked cheesecake that differs from its American counterpart in cheese. You could try to replace the exclusively Polish cheese called twaróg with country, cottage, quark, curd or ricotta cheese, but it won't do the trick. Twaróg is more dense, sweeter, and less wet than those cheeses and less smooth than ricotta.... The Eastern Orthodox Church has a twaróg-based equivalent – the truncated, pyramid-shaped paskha."

Babka: "The tall, airy Easter babka is a no-knead yeast cake baked in a Bundt pan. It can be laced with rum syrup and drizzled with icing, but custom dictates that it has no filling."

Makowiec: " a poppy seed roll spun like a strudel. With poppy seeds as the main ingredient, it uses the same type of dough as the babka."

Easter lamb: "Made entirely of sugar and shaped like a lamb, this is the traditional centrepiece of the Polish Easter table and Easter basket. It often has a miniature red flag with a cross."

Polish Realia: On the Farm

Vocabulary from Muzeum Wsi Radomskiej 'Village Museum of Radom'

dom wiejski 'farmhouse, country house'
dom ludowy 'people's house' (community center?)
dworek 'manor house'
chlew 'pigsty'
kurnik 'henhouse'
obora 'cattle barn'
stajnia 'stable (for horses)'
stodoła 'barn'
strzecha 'thatch (roof)'
sławojka 'outhouse privy' (named after 1928 PM Felicjan Sławojka Składowski)

ciągnik rolniczy 'farm tractor' (cf. ciągnąć 'pull', pociąg 'locomotive')
brona 'harrow' (and 'portcullis'!)
grabie 'rake'
kosa 'sickle'
kosiarka konna 'horse-drawn mower'
pług konny 'horse-drawn plow'
sierp 'scythe' (cf. Sierpień 'August')
widły 'pitchfork' (cf. widelec 'food fork')
zgrabiarka konna do siana 'horse-drawn hay rake'
żniwiarka konna 'horse-drawn harvester'

pszczoła 'bee'
pszczelarstwo 'beekeeping in apiaries'
pszczelarka 'beekeeper' (pszczelarze 'beekeepers')
bartnistwo 'beekeeping in wild beehives'
bartnistka 'beekeeper'
pasieka 'apiary'
ul 'beehive'
ule rozbieralne 'movable beehives'

wiatrak koźlak 'post windmill' (which swivels on a post)
łopata wiatraka 'windmill blade'
wał wiatraka 'windmill shaft' (blade axle)
wiatr 'wind'
młyn wodny 'watermill'
koło wodne 'waterwheel'
koryto 'trough, chute'
żuraw studzienny 'crane well, shadoof' (cf. żuraw ptak 'crane bird')

Polish Realia: Forest Layers

Warstwe Lasu i Ich Mieszkańcy Forest Layers and Their Inhabitants

Las to ekosystem, którym szata roślinna powiązana jest ze światem zwierżąt i nieżywionymy tworami przyrody. We wszystkich biocenozach leśnich rośliny konkurują między sobą o światło. Rezultatem tego jest warstwowa budowa lasu. Prowadzi ona do odpowiedniego wykorzystania przestrzeni lasu przez rośliny, tworzać sprzyjające warunki do życia dla różnych zwierżat.
A forest is an ecosystem through which the vegetation is connected to the world of animals and not nourished by the creations of nature. In all forest biocenoses [= life assemblages], plants compete with each other for light. The result is a layered forest structure. It leads to the proper use of the forest space by plants, creating favorable living conditions for various animals.

Korony Drzew Tree Crowns

Najwyższą warstwę lasu stanowią drzewa. Ich korony zamieszkują niektóre zwierżeta np. [= na przykład (e.g.)] owady, wiewiórki, kuny, i liczne gatunki ptaków.
The highest layer of the forest is made up of trees. Their crowns are inhabited by some animals, e.g., insects, squirrels, martens, and numerous species of birds.

Pictured and named: buk pospolity 'common beech', świerk pospolity 'Norway spruce', sosna zwyczajna 'Scotch pine'; zawisak borowiec 'hawk moth', brudnica mniszka 'nun moth'; wiewiórka 'squirrel'; dzięcioł duży 'great spotted woodpecker', puchacz 'eagle owl', wilga 'oriole'

Podszyt Undergrowth

Poniżej do wysokości około 5 m jest podszyt. Warstwa, którą tworzą niskie drzewa i krzewa dobrze znoszące zacienienie tj. [= to jest (i.e.)] głóg, tarnina, dereń, czeremka, kalina, kruszyna, jałowiec, leszczyna. W podszyciu żerują m. in. [między innymi (among others)]: sarna, dzik, jeleń, zając, lis.
Below to a height of about 5 m is the undergrowth. A layer formed by low trees and shrubs that tolerate shade well, i.e. hawthorn, blackthorn, dogwood, cherry, viburnum, buckthorn, juniper, hazel. In the undergrowth feed, among others: roe deer, wild boar, deer, hare, fox.

Pictured and named: kalina koralowa 'coral virburnum'; kruszyna pospolita 'common buckthorn', leszczyna pospolita 'common hazel'; modraszek 'blue butterfly'; paż królowe 'queen's swallowtail'; orzesznica 'dormouse'; sikora bogatka 'great tit'; sikora modra 'blue tit'

Runo Leśne Forest Floor

Runo to warstwa do której dociera mało światła i jest wilgotno. Porastają ją drobne krzewinki - borówki, jagody, liczne zioła, trawy, mchy, porosty, paprocie, oraz grzyby. W tym piętrze lasu schronienie znajdują liczne owady, pająki, ropuchy, żaby, jaszczurki, węże, jeże, i myszy leśne.
The floor is a layer that receives little light and is damp. It is overgrown with small shrubs - blueberries, berries, numerous herbs, grasses, mosses, lichens, ferns, and mushrooms. This floor of the forest is shelter to numerous insects, spiders, toads, frogs, lizards, snakes, hedgehogs, and forest mice.

Pictured and named: borowik szlachetny 'boletus mushroom', muchomor czerwony 'red toadstool'; konwalia majowa 'mayflower', pióropusznik strusi 'ostrich fern'; jeż europejski 'western hedgehog', ropucha szara 'common toad', padalec zwychajna 'common slowworm'

Ściółka Mulch

Ściółka to warstwa, która leźy bezpośrednio na glebie. Tworzą ją opadłe liście, szyszki, owoce, nasiona oraz martwe szczątki roślin i zwierząt. Występują tu drobne organizmy, odźywiające się szczątkami organicznymi tj. bakterie, grzyby, glony, pajęczaki, wije.
Mulch is a layer that lies directly on top of the soil. It consists of fallen leaves, cones, fruits, seeds and dead remains of plants and animals. There are small organisms that feed on organic remains, such as bacteria, fungi, algae, arachnids, and myriapods.

Pictured and named: mrówka rudnica 'red ant', żuki leśne 'dung beetle', ślimak winniczek 'vine snail', skulica i krocionóg 'types of millipedes'

images here