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John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla (1920-2005) - Pope from 1978 to 2005. He studied Polish philology, later preparing for work in the church and was ordained in 1946. In 1946-48 he studied at the Papal University in Rome. He was a lecturer at the Theological Department of the Jagiellonian University and from 1956 a professor and head of department of the Ethics Faculty at the Catholic University in Lublin. In 1958 he became a bishop, five years later the archbishop of Cracow and in 1967 a cardinal. The pontificate of John Paul II was characterised by an openness to dialogue with the world and active spiritual work. He was the first in the history of the Church to hold prayer meetings with all religions. He opened up dialogue with the Jews. He was on more than 200 foreign trips, several times to Poland. Reform of canonical law, developing a new ‘Catechism for the Roman Catholic Church’ (1992), reorganisation of the Roman Catholic curia, countless encyclicals, canonisations and beautifications - these are the important achievements of the Catholic Church under the leadership of the Polish Pope. The important message of the pontificate of John Paul II were: respect for human rights and the right to work, struggle for peace, opposition to totalitarianism, and also new evangelism. |
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Lech Walesa (born 1943) - trade union activist, politician, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1983. He holds honorary degrees from several universities, including Harvard, Columbia and Gdansk. In 1980 he headed the strike at the Gdansk Shipyards, and later became head of the Inter-factory Strike Committee. From 1980 to 1981 he was head of the Solidarity National Committee. He took part in negotiations with the communist authorities, the outcome of which was the agreement reached at the Round Table talks. In 1990 he was elected leader of the Solidarity trade union. Polish president 1990-95. He is the author of books including: ‘The Path of Hope’ (1987), and ‘The Path of Freedom’ (1991). |
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Adam Malysz (born 1977) - ski jumper. In the 2000/2001 season he had a wide array of astounding victories, for example at the Four Hills tournament, and World Cup eliminations in Harrachov, Salt Lake City, Sapporo, etc. In 2001 during the World Championship in classical ski jumping in Lahti he won a silver medal in the big jump competition and gold in the medium jump competition. In Predazzo in 2003 he won both gold medals. He won the World Cup in 2000/2001, 2001/2002, and 2002/2003. He brought back two medals from the Olympics in Salt Lake City: a silver and a bronze. |
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Magdalena Abakanowicz (born 1930) - sculptor, professor at the College of Fine Arts in Poznan, lecturer at the University of California. She has some 100 one-woman exhibitions to her name. Her career started with ‘Abakans’, three-dimensional tapestries with unusual textures, for which she won an award at the 1965 Biennale in Sao Paulo. Her work is displayed in many museums, including the Ludwig Museum in Cologne and the National Museum in Madrid, as well as in private collections. She also creates free-standing sculptures for open spaces, for example ‘Dragon’s space’ in the Olympic Park in Seoul. She has received many awards, including the Grand Culture Foundation Prize in 2001. |
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Agnieszka Holland (born 1948) - film, theatre and television director. Since 1981 she has been living and working abroad. She is a member of the European Film Academy and was nominated for an Oscar for ‘Bitter harvest’ (1985). Her best known films are: “The provincial actors’ (1978, won the FIPRESCI at the Cannes film festival), ‘Temperature’ (1980, won the Silver Bear award at the Berlin International Film Festival), ‘Lonely Woman’ (1981), ‘To Kill a Priest’ (1988), ‘Europa, Europa’ (1990, Golden Globe), ‘The Secret Garden’ (1994), ‘Total Eclipse’ (1995) and ‘Washington Square’ (1997). |
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Andrzej Wajda (born 1926) - director, member of the ‘Immortal Circle’ of the French Academy of Fine Arts. He was honoured with the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1998 for his contributions to cinema. He also won a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 2000. He has served a wide range of social and political functions. He was for many years the president of the Association of Polish Film-makers (1978-83) and a senator in the Polish Senate (1989-1991). He is the main representative of the so-called Polish film school. He best films are: ‘Generation’ (1955), ‘Canal’ (1957, won the Silver Palm award at Cannes), ‘Man of Marble’ (1977), ‘Promised land’ (1974, nominated for an Oscar, won awards in Gdansk and Moscow) and ‘Man of Iron’ (1981, Golden Palm at Cannes), ‘Danton’ (1985, won Prix Delluc) and ‘Pan Tadeusz’ (1999). He has also director plays based on works by Slawomir Mrozek, Dostoyevsky, Witkacy and Shakespeare. He has been awarded the French Legion of Honour and Japanese Order of the Rising Sun. In 1996 he was awarded the Silver Bear award in Berlin. In 2001 the German president awarded him the Great Cross of Merit. |
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Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) - poet, prose writer, essayist, translator. Nobel Prize-winner in 1980 and Polish Nike Prize-winner in 1998 for ‘The little wayside dog’. Has been awarded many honorary degrees, including from Harvard University and the Jagiellonian University. After 1951 he has lived outside Poland. In the 1990s he returned permanently to Poland, to Cracow. He was professor at the Department of Slavic Literature and Languages at the University of California at Berkeley, later a professor at Harvard University. His most important collections of poetry are: ‘Rescue’ (1945), ‘Daylight’ (1953), ‘A Treatise on Poetry,’ (1957), ‘The City Without a Name’ (1969) and ‘That’ (2000). Author of wonderful essays, journalism and prose, for example ‘The Captive Mind’ (1953), ‘Family Europe’, ‘The Land of Ulro’ (1977), ‘A history of Polish literature’ (1969) and ‘Second space’. |
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Frederic Chopin (1810-1849) - pianist and the greatest Polish composer. Born in Zelazowa Wola near Warsaw. Spent most of his life abroad, amongst other places, in France. He wrote his works especially for the piano, including concerts, sonatas, etudes, preludes, polonaises, mazurkas and waltzes. His works had an enormous influence on the music of the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. |
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Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) - renowned astronomer. He studied in Torun, Cracow and then in Bologna, Padova and Ferrara, where he earned a doctorate in canonical law. As the first in modern times he developed a heliocentric theory of the Solar System. He published his discoveries in the year of his death in the work ‘On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres’ (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium). |
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Krzysztof Penderecki (born 1933) - composer and conductor. Professor at the Cracow Music Academy, lecturer at the universities of Essen and Yale. His career began in 1959 at the Young Polish Composers Competition, where he won three top awards for ‘Emanations’, ‘David’s Psalms’ and ‘Stanzas’. Other works include: ‘Lament to the victims of Hiroshima’ (1960), ‘The passions according to Saint Luke’ (1965), ‘Magnificent’ (1974), ‘The second symphony of the birth of Christ’ (1980), ‘The viola concert’ (1983), ‘Seven brothers of Jerusalem’ (1996), ‘Mass’ (1998) and ‘Credo’ (2000). He has received honorary degrees from many European centres of learning. He has been awarded many prestigious awards, including the prestigious Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 2001. |
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Krzysztof Kieslowski (1941-1996) - film director and script writer. His career started in 1966 with short films, for example ‘Workers ‘71’ (1972) and ‘Resume’ (1975). His subsequent films brought him his first film festival awards, such as ‘The Scar’ (1976) from the Gdansk festival and ‘Camera Buff’ (1979) awarded in Moscow and Chicago. However, the ‘Ten Commandments I - X’ made in 1988-89 marked his permanent position in the film world (FIPRESCI award). He had similar successes with ‘The double life of Veronique’ (1991), ‘Three Colours: Blue’ (won the Golden Lion in Venice), ‘Three Colours: White’ (Silver Bear in Berlin) and ‘Three Colours: Red’ (nominated for an Oscar), made in 1993-94 with Polish-French collaboration. He won dozens of awards and distinctions for his work in film, for example the ‘Felix’ from the European Film Academy. |
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Marek Kaminski (born 1964) - traveller, in 1995 he was the first person to reach both poles: the North Pole on 23rd May 1995 and the South Pole on 27 Dec. 1995. Earlier, preparing for this feat he walked to Spitsbergen (400 km) and Greenland’s glaciers (600 km). |
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Maria Sklodowska-Curie (1867-1934), renowned Polish physicist and chemist, who lived and worked in France. She was the first female professor at the Sorbonne. Together with her husband Pierre Curie she discovered polonium and radium in 1898. She was twice awarded the Nobel Prize: in 1903 in physics (jointly with her husband) for research in the area of natural radiation, and in 1911 in chemistry for extracting pure radium. |
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Robert Korzeniowski (born 1968) - athlete. Twice Olympic 50 km walking champion, in 1996 and 2000, and 20 km champion in 2000. Twice world 50 km walking champion (1997, 2001). A Council of Europe ambassador for tolerance and fair play. |
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Roman Polanski (born 1935) - actor, director, script writer, graduate of the Lodz Film School. He has made films in England, USA, France and Poland. His career began at film school, during which time he won many international awards, including: ‘Two people ina cupboard’ (1957, won the EXPO-58 International Film Festival in Brussels, the Grand Prix in experimental film in San Fransisco and an award at Oberhausen), ‘Fat and thin’ (1961, won an award at Oberhausen) and ‘Mammals’ (1961, Grand Prix in Tours and Oberhausen). He has also made, amongst others: ‘Knife in Water’ (1962, Oscar nomination, FIPRESCI at Venice, Grand Prix at Prades), ‘Disgust’ (1965, Silver Bear at Berlin), ‘Cul-de-sac’ (1966, winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin), ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ (1968, Oscar nomination), ‘Chinatown’ (1974, Golden Globe in Hollywood), ‘The Tenant’ (1976), ‘Tess’ (1980, Caesar Award for film and director), ‘Pirates’ (1986), ‘Frantic’ (1988), and ‘The Pianist’ (2001, Golden Palm at Cannes). He has been a member of the French Academy of Fine Arts since 1999. |
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Tomasz Stanko (born 1942) - the most renowned Polish jazz trumpet player, a pioneer of the jazz avant-garde. In the 1960s he was the leader of the quartet Jazz Darings, and later played in Trzaskowski’s and Komeda’s bands. In the period 1967-1973 he had his own quartet, one of the most renowned Polish modern jazz bands. Later he played with various musicians, and increasingly solo. In the 1990s he recorded on the prestigious Munich label ECM Rekords. Of Stanko’s work an important place is held by music composed for films and theatre. Selected works: ‘Jazz Jamboree’61’, ‘Astigmatic’ (1965), ‘Music for K’ (1970), ‘Balladyna’ (1975), ‘Grand Standard Orchestra’ (1982), ‘Tomasz Stanko: Polish Jazz’ (1989), Goodbye Maria’ (1993), ‘Mother Joanna’ (1995), ‘From the Green Hill’ (1999). |
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Tadeusz Kantor (1915 - 1990) - painter, graphic artist, director, scenographer. Professor at Cracow’s Academy of Fine Arts, a director of experimental theatre in Cracow in the years 1942-1944. After the war he set up his own avant-garde theatre, Cricot 2, where, amongst others, the works of Witkacy were presented: ‘The Cuttlefish, or the Hyrcanian World View’, ‘In the Small Mansion ’, ‘The Madman and the Nun’ and ‘The Water Hen’. His most important works are ‘Death of a class’ (1975), ‘Wielopole, wielopole’ (1980), ‘You will never return here’ (1985). While, his best known paintings are: ‘Man with Umbrella’ (1949), the ‘Industrial bags’ series (1964), ‘Emballage’ (1964 - 1975), the ‘Nothing any more’ series (1986 - 1990) and ‘September Defeat’ (1990). |
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Wislawa Szymborska (born 1923) - poet and literary critic. Awarded Nobel Prize for literature in 1996, after other Poles Henryk Sienkiewicz, Wladyslaw Reymont and Czeslaw Milosz. In 2001 she became an honorary member of the American Academy of Fine Arts and Literature, the most important American distinction awarded to renowned artists. Her most important collections of verses are: ‘Why We Live’ (1952), ‘Questions Asked of Oneself’ (1993), ‘Calling the Yeti’ (1957), ‘A Hundred Joys’ (1967), ‘People on the Bridge’ (1986), ‘Optional lectures’ (1996), ‘View of a Grain of Sand’ (1996), ‘Beginning and End’ (1993) and ‘A Hundred Verses, a Hundred Joys’ (1997). |
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Aleksander Wolszczan (born 1946) - astronomer. Since 1982 he has worked in the USA. He is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Torun University. In 1990 he was the first to prove the existence of a planetary system in the Universe outside of our solar system. |
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Tadeusz Mazowiecki (born 1927) - politician and journalist, lawyer by training. One of the advisors to the ‘Soldarity’ trade union in 1980, later editor of the weekly ‘Solidarnosc’. An active participant in the Round Table talks of 1989. First prime minister of the 3rd Republic in 1989-90. Co-founder and one time leader of the Democratic Union party, which later became the Freedom Union. He was the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights’ Special Envoy to the former Yugoslavia in 1992-1995. In 1998 he was awarded the French Legion of Honour. |
