- Government and society
- Cultural life
Warsaw is the largest city in Poland, with a population twice that of Łódź, the next most populous city. Warsaw consists of a small historic core on the west bank of the Vistula River. Virtually destroyed by German Nazis during the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, it was largely restored. This area comprises both the medieval town—Old Town (Stare Miasto)—and its 18th-century suburbs—New Town (Nowe Miasto) to the north and Krakowskie Przedmieście to the south. About 85 percent of the city’s buildings, including many of those in the core, were left in ruins during World War II; much of the city therefore dates from the period since 1950. The Palace of Culture and Science, a skyscraper built in the Soviet style in the 1950s, still dominates the skyline. Many of Warsaw’s inhabitants live in large unattractive blocks of flats that were built around the edge of the city in the 1960s and ’70s. In the 1990s downtown Warsaw experienced a construction boom as several high-rise hotels and office buildings were added to its skyline at the same time that many single-family houses and villas were erected in the suburbs.
Kraków (the original capital of Poland), Gdańsk, Poznań, and Wrocław (German: Breslau) share many characteristics with Warsaw, all having more or less extensive medieval and early modern cores surrounded by 19th- and, especially, 20th-century suburbs containing a mixture of manufacturing complexes and poor-quality apartment-style housing, as well as newer (post-1990) subdivisions of single-family dwellings. The historic medieval-era city centres of both Warsaw and Kraków have been designated World Heritage sites by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In contrast, Łódź, Poland’s second largest city, dates from the 19th century, when it grew rapidly to become one of the most important centres of the textile industry in the Russian Empire. The other major urban area is that of southern Upper Silesia, a conurbation of mining and industrial settlements stretching some 30 miles (48 km) from Dąbrowa Górnicza to Gliwice.
The population of Poland was transformed during and immediately after World War II. Nearly 35 million people lived within the Polish frontiers in 1939, but by 1946 only about 24 million resided within the country’s new borders. The decrease of some 11 million can be accounted for mainly by war losses but also in part by changes in frontiers.
Polish war losses are the subject of some controversy. The official figure, issued in 1947, was 6,028,000 (some 3,000,000 of them Polish Jews), although it referred exclusively to losses within the postwar frontiers. As a result of the changes in frontiers, millions of Germans were forcibly expelled from 1946 to 1947. On the other hand, millions of Poles were transferred from former Polish homelands that were incorporated into the Soviet Union during the same period. An estimated 500,000 Ukrainians and Belarusians also were transferred into the Soviet Union. At the same time, there were vast internal movements into the new northern and western territories annexed from Germany.
Population losses and movements on this scale introduced long-term distortions into demographic structures and trends. At the end of the war, there were huge deficiencies in certain categories, especially males, urban dwellers, and the educated as a whole. However, the immediate postwar generation had an unprecedented birth rate, and the population grew rapidly again, especially in the northern and western portions of the country, returning to its prewar level in 1977. The birth rate fell sharply after the early 1980s, and population growth slowed, though the death rate approximated the world average. By the early 21st century, the natural increase rate (balance of births against deaths) was virtually nil.
Emigration was a permanent feature of Polish life for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, and roughly one Pole in three lives abroad. Wave after wave of political émigrés has left Poland since the mid-18th century. By far the greatest numbers of people left, however, for economic reasons. Starting in the mid-19th century, Polish emigrants moved into the new industrial areas of Europe and later to the United States and Canada.
1Roman Catholicism has special recognition per 1997 concordat with Vatican City.
|Official name||Rzeczpospolita Polska (Republic of Poland)|
|Form of government||unitary multiparty republic with two legislative houses (Senate ; Sejm )|
|Head of state||President: Bronislaw Komorowski|
|Head of government||Prime Minister: Ewa Kopacz|
|Monetary unit||złoty (zł)|
|Population||(2013 est.) 38,542,000|
|Total area (sq mi)||120,726|
|Total area (sq km)||312,679|
|Urban-rural population||Urban: (2013) 60.6%|
Rural: (2013) 39.4%
|Life expectancy at birth||Male: (2012) 72.7 years|
Female: (2012) 81 years
|Literacy: percentage of population age 15 and over literate||Male: not available|
Female: not available
|GNI per capita (U.S.$)||(2012) 12,670|