Origins of the Polish culture

The Polish culture is the fruit of a mixture of Latin heritages, but also byzantins and all the other cultures and Nations which overtook Poland. Thus the traditional clothes of the Polish nobility in XVIth and XVIIth centuries come from the ornaments of Eastern, and in particular Islamic art. In the same way, the germanisation, russianization and the communist time had an impact on the Polish culture. However, this one always knew to assimilate the exogenic elements to strengthen its unity and its specific cultural inheritance.

The Polish culture is clearly European, like are its great figures: Copernic the astronomist, Chopin the musician, Marie Curie the physician, and the Pope Jean Paul II...In spite of the forty years of Communism, the Poles are distinguished clearly from the Russians and the other Slavics from the East, topic that Czech Milan Kundera highlighted in his thesis of the kidnapped West.

Architecture and popular art

The architectural heritage and a popular art of Poland are sources of pride of the Polish people. All the great European architectural styles are found in the Polish cities and their castles, churches and palaces: Romanic, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Classicism. In the campaigns, medieval castles and manors strew the landscape. The small medieval city of Kazimierz on the Vistula and the Gothic monuments of Cracow constitute real open museums. Much building had to be restored or even rebuilt, often in a way identical at the origin, like the old city and the Royal Castle of Warsaw, and the old cities of Gdansk and Wroclaw. A number of Polish cities were indeed heavily bombarded during the Second World war and in particular Warsaw, destroyed to 90 %.

The country counts a number of skansens and museums in the open air, where the country life is formerly restored. Painting, sculpture, woodcarving, weaving, embroidery, cuttings of paper and pottery constitute the principal representations of the popular art, of which most known woodcarvings from the XIVth century of Wit Stwosz in Notre-Dame in Cracow.

Main manifestations of the Polish art > >