Poland

Poland: capital Warsaw, population 36.4M, area 312,679 km². The 44th most populous country, in Europe. Facts, map, neighbours and more.

Poland lies on the North European Plain between the Baltic and the Carpathians, with Białowieża Forest and its bison on the eastern border. Mieszko I was baptised in 966, Kraków's university opened in 1364, and the Sejm passed Europe's first codified constitution on 3 May 1791. Copernicus, Skłodowska-Curie, Chopin and the cryptologists who reconstructed Enigma all worked out of that same plain, and Kraków szopki, twelve-dish Wigilia suppers and Easter Monday dousings still mark its calendar.

• Mieszko I and much of his court were baptised on 14 April 966, bringing the emerging Polish state into Latin Christendom; historians still argue whether it happened at Poznań or Gniezno.
• Casimir III issued the founding charter of the university at Kraków on 12 May 1364, making it the oldest in Poland and one of the oldest anywhere still in continuous operation.
• The Warsaw Confederation, promulgated on 28 January 1573, guaranteed religious tolerance in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by putting dissenters on a legal footing with Catholics.
• The Constitution of 3 May 1791, drafted by the Great Sejm that sat from 1788 to 1792, was the first codified modern constitution in Europe and the second in the world.

• Nicolaus Copernicus, a cathedral canon at Frombork, published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543, the year he died, placing the Sun rather than the Earth at the centre of his model.
• Maria Skłodowska-Curie trained at Warsaw's clandestine Flying University, took Nobel Prizes in physics in 1903 and chemistry in 1911, and named the element polonium after her homeland.
• Frédéric Chopin left Warsaw at 20, less than a month before the November 1830 uprising, settled in Paris at 21, and made the instrumental ballade a genre of its own.
• Marian Rejewski reconstructed the German military Enigma machine in late 1932 without ever seeing one; five weeks before the war the Polish Cipher Bureau passed its methods to France and Britain.

• The Wieliczka salt mine, worked from the 13th century until 1996, reaches 327 metres down and runs 287 kilometres of passages past chapels and statues that miners carved from rock salt.
• Malbork Castle, raised by the Teutonic Order between 1274 and 1406, is the largest castle in the world by land area and was the largest brick castle anywhere when it was finished.
• Białowieża Forest, shared with Belarus, is the largest surviving stretch of the primeval woodland that once covered the European Plain and holds more than 800 European bison.
• Warsaw's Old Town was almost entirely destroyed in the Second World War and rebuilt from archives and drawings; the first restoration of a whole historic core, it joined the World Heritage list in 1980.

• Kraków szopki set the Nativity inside models of the city's own historic buildings; the competition has been held on the first Thursday of December since 1937, and UNESCO listed it in 2018.
• Wigilia, the Christmas Eve supper, is meatless and runs to twelve dishes for the twelve Apostles, with hay under the tablecloth and a wafer, the opłatek, broken and shared before eating.
• On Śmigus-dyngus, the Monday after Easter, people douse each other with water; Hungary keeps a sprinkling version called locsolkodás and Slovakia one called oblievačka.
• Pierogi are unleavened dumplings boiled with fillings of potato and twaróg cheese, sauerkraut or fruit; the recipe appears in Compendium ferculorum, the first Polish cookbook, in 1682.

What is the capital of Poland?

The capital of Poland is Warsaw.

What is the population of Poland?

Poland has about 36.4M people — the 44th most populous country in the world.

How big is Poland?

Poland covers 312,679 km², making it the 70th largest country by area.

Which region is Poland in?

Poland is in Central Europe, Europe.