Poland's language and faith: how fast they are changing

Why Poland speaks one language almost everywhere

Nearly 97% of Polish citizens give Polish as their mother tongue. The uniformity is recent, and the twentieth century produced it.

Polish belongs to the Lechitic branch of the West Slavic languages, alongside Kashubian, Silesian and the extinct Slovincian and Polabian. It is the largest West Slavic language by speakers. Only Russian has more across the Slavic family, after Russian. It is written in the Latin alphabet with additional letters, which distinguishes it from most of the Slavic world and follows from a thousand years of western rather than eastern Christianity.

The interwar republic was roughly a third non-Polish by language and confession, with large Jewish, Ukrainian, Belarusian and German populations. The Holocaust, the wartime deportations, the westward shift of the borders in 1945 and the population transfers that followed it removed almost all of that plurality within a decade. The homogeneous country of today is a product of those events and not of any long continuity.

How a nation without a state kept its literature

Polish literature carries a peculiarity that follows directly from the political history: its central period was written by people whose country did not exist.

The partitions of 1772, 1793 and 1795 removed Poland from the map for one hundred and twenty-three years. The Romantic literature of the nineteenth century was produced in that gap, much of it in exile, and its three leading poets came to be treated as national spokesmen rather than as writers, prophesying a revival the state itself could not organise. That the poetry took on a political office is the reason Polish literature is difficult to read without the history beside it.

The record afterwards is unusually decorated for a country of this size. A novelist took the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905 and another in 1924, and two poets took it later in the twentieth century. The eastern borderlands, with Wilno and Lwów at their centre, produced much of the early twentieth-century avant-garde and were also the heartland of Hasidism, a cultural intersection that ended with the war and the border change.

The Renaissance foundation sits underneath all of it: a sixteenth-century poet established Polish as a literary language capable of what Latin was doing, at a moment when most of Europe was making the same transition.

The twentieth century produced two further specialisms that travelled well. Polish reportage became a distinct form, practised at book length on Africa, Latin America and the Soviet periphery, and read as literature rather than as journalism. And Polish science fiction produced a writer whose work is philosophical rather than technological, concerned with the limits of communication between minds that do not share a biology, and translated into more languages than any Polish author before or since.

Underneath both sits a habit the partitions created and the communist period reinforced: writing that says what it means indirectly. A literature produced for a century under one censor and then for four decades under another develops allegory, historical setting and the joke that carries a second reading, and Polish readers are practised at the decoding that requires.

What happened to Polish Catholicism

Poland has been among the most religious societies in Europe and it is changing faster than almost any of them. The state research agency has tracked belief and practice since 1992, and the two have moved apart.

Belief has fallen a little. Practice has collapsed among the young, from almost seven in ten in the early 1990s to fewer than one in four. The steepest declines in belief itself are among the highly educated and in the largest cities.

The report attributes the acceleration to two things arriving together: the pandemic's interruption of attendance, and revelations of child sexual abuse within the Catholic church. The research agency also notes that the educational advancement of women and the protests against the tightening of abortion law did not produce a faster fall in women's faith than in men's, which is the finding most often assumed the other way round.

What that leaves is a country where roughly seven people in ten say God plays an important part in their life, and where the institution that organised that belief for a millennium is losing its hold on the generation now reaching adulthood.

What Polish cooking is built on

Polish food is built on what grows and keeps in a continental climate: root vegetables, cabbage, grain, pork, freshwater and salt fish, mushrooms and dairy, preserved by souring, smoking and pickling because the growing season is short and the winter is long.

The dishes that carry the cuisine abroad are the filled ones and the soups. Dumplings filled with meat, potato, cabbage, cheese or fruit; cabbage rolls stuffed with meat and rice; a hunter's stew of sauerkraut and several meats cooked for days; sausage in many regional forms; and a sheep's-milk cheese smoked in the southern mountains. The soup repertoire is unusually large and includes a sour rye soup, a sour cucumber soup, a mushroom soup, a tripe soup and a clear broth, traditionally cooked in quantities that required stirring with something closer to an oar than a spoon.

The scale is the point. Polish cooking assumes a table rather than a plate, and the hospitality convention attached to it is strong enough to be a documented feature of the culture rather than a stereotype about it.

The calendar shapes the menu more than in most European cuisines, because the fasting rules of the Catholic year were observed strictly for a very long time. Christmas Eve is a meatless meal of twelve dishes built around fish, mushrooms and dried fruit, and it is the most important meal of the Polish year by a wide margin. Easter runs the other way, opening with a table of cured meats and eggs after a long fast, and the food itself is taken to church to be blessed the day before.

Vodka is the traditional spirit and its production is old enough to be contested with neighbouring countries; beer overtook it in consumption within the past few decades. What has changed most in the past twenty years is the restaurant sector in the cities, which has moved from a thin post-communist inheritance to a serious one, largely by reworking the regional and estate cooking that the twentieth century interrupted.

How Polish music divided into three traditions

Three distinct musical lines run through the country and only one of them is widely exported.

Art music arrived early. Two ensembles based in Kraków, attached to the royal court and to the archbishop, drove rapid innovation through the sixteenth century, and an Italian-born lutenist at the court blended southern European style with local folk material. The nineteenth century produced the composer whose piano writing is the single most recognisable Polish cultural export anywhere, and the twentieth produced a body of orchestral work of comparable seriousness and much lower recognition.

Folk music remained regional rather than national and stayed in use rather than being preserved. The mountain traditions of the south and the traditions of the eastern borderlands are separate repertoires with separate instruments, and both fed the art music above them.

The third line is contemporary and specific to the country: sung poetry, a genre in which literary texts are performed to music and which is recognised as a category in its own right, alongside the electronic and metal scenes that arrived with everyone else's.

What the folk tradition actually preserved

Polish folk culture survived into the twentieth century in usable form because the country spent the nineteenth without a state, and a nation denied political institutions invests in the ones it is allowed to keep.

Regional dress, dance and music were documented and taught as national property during the partitions, and the collecting work of that period is why the traditions of specific districts are still distinguishable rather than merged into one generic repertoire. The mountain culture of the south, with its own dialect, building style, cheese and string band, is the strongest of them and is the one most visible to a visitor.

The paper-cut, the painted chest, the roadside shrine and the woven belt are all regional forms, and a specialist can place any of them within a county or two by its grammar alone. The museums that hold them were built on one nineteenth-century assumption. A people without a parliament had better look after its material culture.

What kept the tradition alive afterwards was, unexpectedly, the post-war state. Folk ensembles were funded on a large scale as a politically safe expression of national feeling, which professionalised the repertoire, standardised parts of it and preserved a great deal that would otherwise have gone.

Where the country's heritage sites are

Poland's listed heritage clusters around three things: the medieval royal capitals, the industrial and engineering monuments, and the sites of the twentieth century.

Kraków's old town survived the war largely intact and was among the first sites listed anywhere. A salt mine worked continuously from the thirteenth century sits nearby, with chapels carved into the rock by miners. Warsaw's old town is on the list for the opposite reason: it was rebuilt from paintings and drawings after being deliberately destroyed, and the listing recognises the reconstruction itself.

The eastern forest on the Belarusian border is the last substantial remnant of the primeval lowland forest that once covered the European plain, and it is a natural site rather than a cultural one.

The German Nazi concentration and extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau is also listed, and its listing states the case in those terms. It draws a substantial share of the country's foreign visitors, and it is one reason the memory politics of the twentieth century remains a live and contested subject in Polish public life.

The dispute inside that memory is worth stating plainly, because it is the Polish argument most often misread abroad. One reading holds that Poland was the principal victim of both totalitarian occupations, that Polish citizens were murdered in the millions and that describing the camps built by the German occupier as Polish is a factual error with real consequences. Another holds that a national account centred on victimhood makes it harder to examine the participation of some Poles in the persecution of their Jewish neighbours, which is documented and which historians have continued to publish on. Both readings rest on evidence and the argument between them has reached the courts and the statute book more than once.

The country also carries a Jewish heritage that was central to it for eight centuries and was almost entirely destroyed in five years. The synagogues, cemeteries and small-town remnants across the east, and the museum of the history of Polish Jews in Warsaw, are the surviving record of a community that numbered in the millions before 1939.