Post Grid Series

2023 marks the 160th anniversary of the January Uprising. Despite the passage of years, the echoes of this uprising are still present in public debate. An important, albeit challenging, question ‘to fight (for one’s country’s freedom) or not to fight?’ is still being asked in Central Europe. To understand the meaning and significance of the […]

Poles have always refused to their fate being decided by others. The nineteenth-century January Uprising – a heroic guerrilla war against the Russian occupier – fits in this attitude. On Thursday evening, August 4, 1864, the churches in Warsaw’s Old Town were bursting at the seams. It wasn’t a holiday, and the heedful tsarist police […]

“[…] there are no more occupiers. We’re our own masters and hosts,” rejoiced Warsaw politician and columnist Ignacy Baliński in November 1918. But Poland’s newly regained freedom still had to be defended against Russia – just as Ukraine does today. “Life goes on with astonishing haste. […] Something is happening every hour,” noted Maria Dąbrowska […]

Freedom and independence seem synonymous, except that the former is more readily associated with personal freedom, the latter with states or nations. The fundamental question we are faced with today is whether the two represent a good in itself or a means to an end. But to understand freedom correctly, we must first differentiate between […]