On a beautiful, sunny Friday, July 17, 1959, at 11:45 AM, an Il-18 landed at the airport near Szczecin in Goleniów, carrying the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union and First Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Nikita Khrushchev. This visit—one of three, alongside the city’s visits by John Paul II in 1987…
The slogan ‘We hold watch over the Oder’ returns every few or dozen years, and although the political and social contexts change, it still evokes emotions. Their scale is no longer what it was when it was conceived—during the initial postwar period—yet it remains fraught with references that trigger broad historical connotations. The most important…
The beginning of Polish literary life in Szczecin was marked by the campaign of “cultural repolonization of the Recovered Territories,” also known as “literary settlement.” Prof. Erazm Kuźma, an eminent literary theorist and historian, considered this project to be “an artificial creation that disintegrated as quickly as it arose.” At the same time, he pointed…
The political and systemic transformations that occurred in Poland after 1989 manifested themselves in all major spheres of state functioning, including education. They concerned, among other things, the reorganization of the school management system, the development of institutional autonomy, the emergence of proprietary curricula, as well as new forms of general and vocational education. These…
Kazimierz Majdański was born on March 1, 1916, in Małgów near Kalisz, as the youngest of thirteen children of Rozalia and Józef Majdański. His family was deeply religious, so it came as no surprise to anyone that after graduating from the Pius X Gimnazjum (secondary school) in Włocławek and passing his matura (high school exit…
Demographic and cultural transformations that took place in West Pomerania after 1945 constitute one of the most dramatic and complex chapters of Poland’s post-war history. Immediately after the war, the region became a melting pot where the remaining German population encountered Polish settlers. Alongside Poles, representatives of various national and ethnic minorities also arrived or…
Oto tłumaczenie na język angielski: The driving force behind the urban economy at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries was international trade and the development of banking operations, which allowed the wealthiest burghers to dynamically multiply their fortunes. The patricians held both economic and political power in the cities, serving as councillors, bankers,…
The idea of establishing euroregions in Europe emerged in the second half of the 1950s. The underlying basis for such cross-border agreements was the economic devastation of borderlands following World War II, as well as a lack of mutual understanding among people resulting from war trauma and language barriers. The first euroregion was established on…
Western Pomerania before 1945 Before the Second World War, Western Pomerania occupied a marginal position in the economic life of Germany. The most important branch of the economy was agriculture, while major state investments and the involvement of large capital were limited to Szczecin and were mainly connected with the maritime economy. However, the economic…
Szczecin and the Peaceful Dismantling of Communist Rule, 1988–1989 In 1988, the process of a gradual and peaceful dismantling of the communist dictatorship in Poland began. Szczecin and the Western Pomerania region played an important role in this transformation. From the mid-1980s, Poland experienced a kind of stalemate in relations between the authorities and the…
