| The early Piast kings | |
| The division and reunification of Poland under the later Piasts | |
| The Jagiellon dynasty of Poland-Lithuania | |
| The Vasa kings of Poland |
Polish words may look complicated, but pronunciation is at least consistent. All vowels are simple and of even length, as in Italian, and their sound is best rendered by the English words ‘sum’ (a), ‘ten’ (e), ‘ease’ (i), ‘lot’ (o), ‘book’ (u), ‘sit’ (y).
Most of the consonants behave in the same way as in English, except for c, which is pronounced ‘ts’; j, which is soft, as in ‘yes’; and w, which is equivalent to English v. As in German, some con—sonants are softened when they fall at the end of a word, and b, d, g, w, z become p, t, k, f, s, respectively.
There are also a number of accented letters and combinations peculiar to Polish, of which the following is a rough list:
ó = u, hence Kraków is pronounced ‘krakooff ‘.
ą = nasal a, hence sąd is pronounced ‘sont’.
ę = nasal e, hence Łęczyca is pronounced ‘wenchytsa’.
ć = ch as in ‘cheese’.
cz = ch as in ‘catch’.
ch = guttural h as in ‘loch’.
ł = English w, hence Bolesław becomes ‘Boleswaf, Łódz ‘Wootj’.
ń = soft n as in Spanish ‘mañana’.
rz = French j as in ‘je’.
ś = sh as in ‘sheer’.
sz = sh as in ‘bush’.
?? = as rz (—?? is the accented capital).
ź = A similar sound, but sharper as in French ‘gigot’.
The stress in Polish is consistent, and always falls on the pen—ultimate syllable.
The idea that a historian should radically alter his view of the past over the space of a couple of decades is, on the face of it, preposterous. But when I reread my history of Poland, The Polish Way, first published in 1987, which I meant to revise and update for a new edition, I became convinced of the contrary. History did not, as some have argued, come to an end in the intervening two decades, but they have completely changed the perspective.
When I sat down to write that book, few people in western Europe, let alone further afield, had any idea of where Poland lay, and fewer still had any sense of its having a past worth dwelling on. Given that history is made up of an intricate interaction of land, people and culture, Poland presented unique problems. How was the historian to approach a country whose territory had expanded and contracted, shifted and vanished so dramatically, which currently existed as an almost random compromise resulting from the Second World War, and which lay within the imperial frontiers of another power? How was he to treat a people which, from ethnic, cultural and religious diversity had been purged by genocide and ethnic cleansing into a homogeneous society? How to represent a culture which had been largely obliterated, whose remains survived only underground or in exile?
Matters were made no easier by the fact that the entire geo—political space in which Poland existed was also in an unnatural state of suspension, with Germany divided, Russia a bureaucratic totalitarian monstrosity, and the areas inhabited by the Lithuanians, Belorussians and Ukrainians a kind of limbo.
Although the election of a Pole, Karol Wojtyła, to the Holy See as Pope John Paul II, the dramatic rise of Solidarność and a number of books and articles published in the West, along with increased travel, had recently brought Poland into the consciousness of greater numbers of people, it was not until the collapse of the Soviet project in 1989 that the situation began to alter significantly. It was only then that Poland and the other countries of the region came back to life as political entities. And that fundamentally altered the way in which they are perceived.
The concurrent process of globalisation and the huge shifts in economic and military power taking place around the world have also made it easier for the historian to represent a foreign country to his readers. The fact that what were then viewed as ‘developing countries’ (with all the condescension