Poland

Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, runs from the Baltic to the Sudetes and Carpathians between Lithuania, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Slovakia, Czechia and Germany, sixteen voivodeships, thirty-eight million people, the fifth country of the European Union by people and by land, with Warsaw its capital and Kraków, Wrocław, Łódź, Poznań and Gdańsk its pride. West Slavic Polans gave the land its name, baptism in 966 made it Christian, a kingdom stood in 1025, and the 1569 union with Lithuania raised the Commonwealth to a great power of elective kings and liberum veto, passing Europe's first modern constitution in 1791. The Golden Age spent, three neighbours partitioned the realm out of existence at the century's end. The guns of 1918 restored it: the Second Republic won its border wars, built Gdynia, schools and a voted Sejm. September 1939 brought Germany from the west and Russia from the east, the Holocaust, millions of Polish dead, shifted borders and forty years behind the Iron Curtain.