Polish ethnicity comprises the people who live in Poland [1], adjoining countries, and amongst the Polish diaspora further abroad. This involves nearly 40 million people in Poland itself. Poland is one of the most ethnically homogenous countries in Europe, with the overwhelming majority of people in the country being of West Slavic descent. The Polish diaspora was very limited until the late nineteenth century when a considerable number of Poles immigrated to the United States, establishing significant Polish American communities on the East Coast but particularly so in the Great Lakes region, in the city of Chicago and other states adjoining Illinois. Following Poland’s entry into the European Union in 2004, many Poles left home to seek higher wages in countries like Britain, Germany, and Ireland. As a result, there are now significant Polish communities in these countries. For instance, the Polish community in Ireland exceeds 120,000 people and constitutes 2.5% of the country’s population.[2]
Research your ancestors on MyHeritage
Polish history
While Poland has been settled for thousands of years, it lies away from the advanced Bronze Age and Iron Age cultures of the Mediterranean, and there is limited documentary evidence concerning life here in ancient times. Archaeological evidence indicates that the region was settled by Celts in the early Iron Age (c. 700 BCE). The region, known as Polonia to the Romans, became a center of Asiatic and Germanic migrations during the great wandering of people from Scandinavia, the Urals, and the Asian Steppe westwards towards the borders of the Roman Empire from the second century CE onwards. Thus, Poland was an ethnically diverse county in late antiquity with Celts, Macromanni, Goths, Franks, Huns, and many others residing there.
The real origins of Polish history are found around the fifth and sixth centuries CE when West Slavic and Lechitic Slavs began settling here in large numbers during a period of new migration that changed the demographic landscape of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The first Polish state was created in the middle of the tenth century when Duke Mieszko I united the disparate Slavic tribes in the region under his rule and established the Piast dynasty which ruled Poland down to the thirteenth century. He also became the first Polish Slavic ruler to convert to Christianity, beginning the process whereby Poland became a part of medieval Christendom.
Poland entered a period of great wealth, power, and culture in the sixteenth as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth under the Jagiellonian Dynasty. During this Polish Golden Age, the Polish state ruled not just the region comprising modern-day Poland but also extensive parts of Western Ukraine, Belarussia, and adjoining territories. During the reigns of King Sigismund I and King Sigismund II cities like Warsaw, Krakow, and Gdansk became major centers of learning, publishing, and culture in Eastern Europe, with the country's literature and architecture being of a significant enough quality to speak of a Polish Renaissance. The greatest figure within this was undoubtedly Nicolaus Copernicus, whose On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, published in 1543, established the heliocentric model of the universe, i.e. that the earth orbited the sun. His work was the major progenitor of the subsequent astronomical and scientific work of figures like Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton and was of pivotal significance in the early Scientific Revolution.[3]
The seventeenth century saw the emergence of a period of rapid political and social decline in Poland. The country’s governmental system and economy failed to develop at the same pace of the other major European powers and in the course of the Northern Wars of the seventeenth century it lost considerable territory to Russia and Sweden. Nevertheless, it remained a major state in Eastern Europe and it was a Polish army in 1683 which relieved the Ottoman siege of Vienna and stopped the Turkish advance into Central Europe. The Austrians, though, did not return the favor and in the second half of the eighteenth century, Austria, Russia and Prussia, Poland’s three powerful neighbors, interfered in Polish affairs and effectively carved up the country between their three nations in a series of Three Partitions which occurred in 1772, 1792/3 and 1795. Thus, five years before the end of the eighteenth century the Polish state effectively ceased to exist.[4]
There were numerous efforts to resurrect the Polish state following its dismemberment in the 1790s. For instance, Napoleon Bonaparte created a Duchy of Warsaw in 1806 after crushing Prussia during the War of the Fourth Coalition. It was dissolved following Napoleon's downfall in 1815 and it was not until after the First World War that Poland was ultimately reconstituted as a country. The Second Polish Republic only lasted twenty years until it was conquered by Nazi Germany in the autumn of 1939, an invasion that triggered the outbreak of the Second World War. The conflict made Poland the center of one of the great tragedies of modern history as the Holocaust of six million of Europe's Jews was largely carried out on Polish soil, with death camps such as Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz-Birkenau all being located in the country. Poland had been a haven for Europe's Jews fleeing persecution in countries like England and France since medieval times and the Ashkenazi Jewish community of Poland was the global center of the Jewish diaspora prior to the Second World War and the subsequent establishment of the state of Israel.[5]
Poland was liberated at the end of the Second World War and theoretically became an independent state, but it was dominated by the Soviet Union as a communist satellite state between 1945 and 1989. Independence and the Third Polish Republic came in 1989. In 1999 the country joined NATO and its entry into the European Union in 2004 ushered in a period of rapid modernization and economic growth. Today, Poland is a modern Western nation, and it is expected to be richer than the UK in 2030.[6]
Polish culture
Poland has excelled in many cultural spheres over the centuries. The Polish Golden Age of the sixteenth century saw Warsaw, Krakow and other cities become major centers of learning in Europe, while the huge Jewish population led Poland to become an epicenter of Jewish culture worldwide between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries. Polish cuisine is famed for pierogi, a Polish-style dumpling filled with a range of ingredients.[7]
However, the country is perhaps most acclaimed today for its contributions to classical music, notably in the nineteenth century when Poles like Stanislaw Moniuszko, Karol Szymanowski, and Frederic Chopin were at the forefront of Western music.[8]
Polish languages
Polish is the official language of Poland. It is a West Slavic language and is entirely dominant in the country, spoken as the primary tongue by 38 million of Poland's 40 million inhabitants as of 2023. The only other significant language is Silesian, a Czech-Slovak dialect spoken by just over half a million in the Silesia region in the southwest of Poland. Beyond this, there are approximately 100,000 Poles whose primary spoken language is Kashubian or German. Minority languages, spoken by roughly 25,000 each, include Hungarian, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian. However, a great number of Poles speak a second or even third language, with upwards of 35% of the population being conversant in English, and 20% of people having either German or Russian as a second or third language. Thus Poles are among some of the most multilingual European peoples.[9]
Explore more about Polish ethnicity
- MyHeritage DNA
- Ethnicities around the world at MyHeritage
- Researching your Polish Family History at MyHeritage Blog
- Polish record collection on MyHeritage
References
- ↑ Poland - top ethnicities. MyHeritage DNA
- ↑ Polish people. Encyclopedia Britannica
- ↑ Nicolaus Copernicus. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- ↑ Partitions of Poland Partitions of Poland. Encyclopedia Britannica
- ↑ POLISH VICTIMS. United States Holocaust Museum
- ↑ Poland will be wealthier than Britain by 2030 – it’s time we took notice. The Guardian
- ↑ The dumpling that comforts Poland. BBC Travel
- ↑ Greatest Polish composers and how they influenced Polish music through the turmoil of the 20th century
- ↑ Which Languages Are Spoken In Poland?. WorldAtlas