Poland

Poland is mostly plain, as its name, from a word for open fields, suggests. From the sandy Baltic coast, with its moving dunes at Łeba, the land rolls south across the lake districts of Masuria and Pomerania and the central lowlands to the uplands of Lesser Poland, ending in the Sudetes and the Carpathians, where the Tatras rise above Zakopane. The Vistula and the Oder drain almost the whole country, and the Białowieża Forest preserves primeval woodland where European bison roam.

The baptism of Mieszko I in 966 is taken as the birth of the Polish state. Union with Lithuania from 1386, later the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, created one of Europe’s largest states, with an elected king and a parliament of nobles. Russia, Prussia and Austria then partitioned it out of existence for more than a century until 1918. Germany’s invasion in 1939 began the Second World War; the Nazis built their death camps on occupied Polish soil. The Solidarity movement, born in the Gdańsk shipyard in 1980, helped end communist rule in 1989.

Catholic feasts mark the calendar, and Chopin’s mazurkas, Marie Curie’s two Nobel Prizes and the poems of Wisława Szymborska belong to the national story. Pierogi, żurek soup and poppy-seed cake fill the holiday table. Since 1989 factories have assembled cars, buses, furniture and household appliances for European buyers, coal from Silesia long powered the country, and farms raise apples, poultry and dairy cattle.